When Morina saw the draw for the 2016 tournament, and that the first Albania-Serbia game would be in Belgrade, he decided the setting would be “perfect.” After seeing a drone in a Milanese shop window, he bought several and began to practice flying them, destroying one in the process.

“I got used to it quickly because it was like when I drive my crane; I had a joystick,” he said.

A reconnaissance trip to Belgrade was wasted because he believed — incorrectly — that the game would take place at the home to Red Star Belgrade, known as Marakana stadium. When Morina realized his error, he used Google Maps to choose five or six new sites. In the end, he decided on the Church of the Holy Archangel Gabriel, which was across the street from Partizan Stadium.

“It was easy,” he said. “Quiet, with a park all around. There was no one to stop me.”

After his drone was pulled from the sky, Morina made his escape on foot, trying to get back to the car he had parked almost a mile away. When he saw two policemen, he said, he rolled under a parked car and waited for them to pass. Soon he was on the highway south, and a few hours later he had crossed into the safety of Kosovo.

“I still thought I had failed at this point,” he said. “Then I got a call from a friend in Italy. He told me, ‘Man, you’re famous.’ ”

Morina’s mission, he said, had been to send a message. The flag he attached to the drone bore the double-headed black Albanian eagle, a map of Greater Albania — a nationalistic concept that also includes territory in Macedonia, Greece and Serbia — and the date Albania won independence from the Ottomans in 1912. At the bottom was the word Autochthonous, an obscure English word that means indigenous, or native.

“I am a patriot, not a nationalist, and I chose it to say to the Serbs that it is the Albanians that are native to the Balkans,” he said last week, sitting in a cafe in the Albanian capital, Tirana. “That is not to say the Serbs can’t live here,” he added. “But they have to respect our flag.”

In Albania, the drone has made Ismail Morina a national hero. On any given day, dozens of people — students, war veterans, even the police — stop him to pose for pictures. His actions are still discussed on Albanian television regularly, although not always favorably. “One analyst on TV said I was both from ISIS, because the flag was black, and that I was paid by the Serbian secret service!” he said.