Asmir Begovic Sees Canada’s Football Rise Before Bosnia’s Return
Asmir Begovic said Canada’s football landscape is “completely different now” from the country he knew as a child. He was talking ahead of the World Cup’s third game in Toronto on Friday, with Bosnia and Herzegovina preparing for only its second World Cup and Canada heading toward its third.
Begovic and Canada
Begovic spent part of his childhood in Canada after the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s forced his family to flee the region. He moved first to Germany as a young child, learned goalkeeping from his father there, and then moved to Edmonton when he was ten years old.
“At that time, 25-plus years ago now, football was a sport people in Canada played for fun, but in terms of professionalism and opportunities, there was very, very little,” he said. “Ice hockey is a religion in Canada. There’s a rink on every corner. Whereas football was not developed at all. It’s completely different now. It’s a night and day transformation.”
He left Canada as a 16-year-old to join Portsmouth, but said he still follows the sport there. “I haven’t been to Canada much since I left (as a 16-year-old to join Portsmouth) but I keep in touch with what’s going on, and you can see it’s really a very different landscape now compared to what it used to be. The opportunities for kids, the more organised coaching, the number of coaches, professional teams in MLS and the professional Canadian Premier League – everything has shot up.”
Bosnia’s 2014 breakthrough
Born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Begovic said the national team carried a different weight for him and his family. Football is the number one sport in Bosnia, and he said relatives including aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents “live and breathe for the national team.”
He also pointed to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s qualifying win in 2013, a 1-0 away victory over Lithuania that sent the country to the 2014 World Cup. Begovic played in each of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three games in Brazil, and described that run as the country’s first ever major tournament.
“Qualifying for any World Cup is incredible, but when you take into consideration it was Bosnia's first ever major tournament, and that all us displaced players - kids at those times [during the wars] - came together for this one common goal, to get Bosnia to a major tournament, it's an incredibly special feeling. The reaction in Sarajevo when we came back after the game was priceless,” he said.
Family pull to Bosnia
Begovic said his family had a major influence on his decision to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina. The family pride was not abstract; he said they were “incredibly proud” to watch him play for the national team.
That path ran alongside a club career that took him to Chelsea, Stoke, Bournemouth, QPR and now Leicester City. He played 31 times for Chelsea between 2015 and 2017 and won the title in his second season there, but his international story has remained tied to Bosnia’s first tournament appearance and Canada’s late push into the football mainstream.
Friday’s match in Toronto adds a new layer to that history. Canada enters its third World Cup after previous appearances in 1986 and 2022, while Begovic can look at the country that shaped part of his childhood and the one he chose to represent and see how far both have come.
