A fan of the Albanian soccer team KF Skenderbeu Korcë poses outside the Elbasan Arena, on August 5th, ahead of the team's tie against a Moldovan team. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY SEAN WILLIAMS

On August 5th, in the ancient city of Elbasan, KF Skënderbeu Korçë became Albania’s first soccer club to reach the group stages of European competition since Communism fell, in 1991. The Albanian national side, too, having collected players from a huge diaspora, now finds itself above France, Mexico, and the U.S.A. in FIFA’s global rankings—it stands a fair chance of qualifying for next year’s European Championships. It would be the first major international success for Albania since it won the Balkan Cup, in 1946. Locals are beginning to hail a soccer renaissance.

Before Skënderbeu’s decisive match, I met up with Frederick “Alfredo” Ruco, a stocky septuagenarian, for a stroll along the Rruga E Kavajës, a scrum of shop fronts and busy cafés in Tirana’s city center. Alfredo was once hailed as the future of Albanian soccer, but he was forced out of the game by the Party of Labour of Albania (P.L.A.), the Marxist-Leninist regime of dictator Enver Hoxha, in 1959, when he was just twenty-one. Alfredo was excited for Skënderbeu’s game and its implications for Albania. “I couldn’t ﬁght the regime,” he said, but the new players, he feels, are his “colleagues.” “I had a dream and never fulfilled it. I’m very happy about now.”

After Hoxha’s partisans routed Italy’s Fascists, and then the occupying Nazis, at the tail end of the Second World War, Hoxha began installing a government that turned Albania into a something like a Balkan North Korea. Beards were banned, as was religion. Seven hundred thousand bunkers were erected across the country. A network of gulags held thousands of political prisoners, many of them passing through the hands of the Sigurimi, a secret-police force that numbered some thirty thousand officers within a population that grew from 1.1 million to 3.1 million during the era.

Alfredo’s father, Tuqo Ruco, a veteran of anti-Fascist wars, was imprisoned. It was 1946, the year of Albania’s Balkan Cup victory. Tuqo’s brothers were both killed—one ambushed and shot, the other drowned. He was detained and interrogated for nine months.

Alfredo, then eight and the middle child of five, recalled the day that, at a detention center, he saw his father for the first time since the arrest. “He had been tall, very handsome, a good-looking man. He was forced to sleep standing up, in shackles, hands and feet.” Rawboned and hollow-eyed from months of torture, his father was barely recognizable. Alfredo stretched out a hand to touch him, but couldn’t reach. They would barely see each other again. Tuqo died in 1966, after twenty years in detention.

As we walked, Alfredo, pug-nosed and Popeye-armed, shook hands with friends and former soccer players, greeting them with hugs and traditional two-kiss welcomes. He showed me the home where his mother, Elpiniqi, provided shelter and clothing to those on the run from the P.L.A. After Tuqo’s capture, the family began pasting anti-Communist flyers around town. The kids were given poor marks at school. Alfredo was thrown out of a college engineering course. “The Party of Labour of Albania does not need students with a bad biography,” a tutor told him, he recalls.

Soccer became Alfredo’s means for escaping his apparent destiny. He was good, too: ambidextrous, with a fearsome aerial presence. He took his team’s penalty kicks, and says he scored every one. “Even now, if I’m playing,” he told me, “I won’t miss.” In 1953, at the age of fifteen, Alfredo was scouted by local giants KF 17 Nëntori Tirana. (Hoxha had renamed the team in honor of November 17th, the date that Hitler’s men were forced out of the capital.) He made his début soon after, scoring in a 3–1 victory in Elbasan, an hour’s drive away.

But Hoxha controlled every aspect of Albanian life, including sport. The following year, he ordered that the best players be sent to play for his newly founded clubs, Dinamo and Partizani Tirana. A friend of Alfredo’s brother, who served as party secretary at a local souvenir factory, grew worried. “Tell Fredi not to play football,” he warned. “I didn’t believe him,” Alfredo told me. “I was young.”

Alfredo was a gifted goal scorer, but he was a marked man. Teammates would speak about the Sigurimi in the dressing room. Some even suggested he should join. He would always demure, thinking back to his father’s ordeal. In 1959, after he’d been playing for Dinamo for three years, a member of the coaching staff approached him. “Don’t come here any more,” Alfredo recalls being told. “The Party of Labor doesn’t want you to play again.”

Alfredo wasn’t the only player to suffer a fate like this. The four Starostin brothers, who played for Spartak Moscow, were sent to Siberia in 1942, charged, first, with attempting to kill Joseph Stalin, then with “lauding bourgeois sports.” Georgian star Mikheil Meskhi was repeatedly denied transfers to western clubs, including Real Madrid, by a Kremlin scared of promoting “lesser” nationalities within the U.S.S.R. Lutz Eigendorf, an East German who fled to the West in 1979, was killed in a 1983 car crash later revealed to be a Stasi assassination plot.

And there were other Albanian players who fell afoul of Hoxha. Alfredo took me to a small, backstreet café to meet some of the old soccer friends he still spends days with. Nuri Bylyku, a wide-eyed raconteur, played with Alfredo at 17 Nëntori. He was forced off two flights to East Germany and the Netherlands, in 1958 and ’59. “I was on the plane,” he said, voice raised in anger. A stranger had approached him that day and asked, “Where are you going?” “With all the others,” Nuri replied. “If you play with Tirana,” he was told, “I will take your eyes out of your sockets.”

But Bylyku, despite having to stay home, forged a successful career. Alfredo, he said, “was stopped dead by political ignorance. We played together once in Elbasan. He scored two and I got one. Fredi was a very good player, with a flawless physique and enough intelligence to play modern soccer. He was a model.”

After the country cut ties with the Soviet Union, in 1961, and China, in 1978, its economy was devastated. Foreign travel was banned for all but a select few politburo members. Not surprisingly, the soccer teams had few successes then. Matches were rare, and when they did occur they were only against other communist states: China, Vietnam, East Germany. Albania is the only country to have boycotted four Olympic Games. It has never won an Olympic medal.

The Sigurimi would accompany players who did get the chance to travel abroad. Even so, some of those players managed to escape. In 1950, after an international match versus Hungary, defender Bahri Kavajës swam the length of Istanbul’s Bosporus strait to get away. He eventually settled in New Zealand. In 1987, Arvid Hoxha (no relation to Enver Hoxha) and Lulzim Bersheni escaped from an Athens hotel, en route home from a game in Finland. Bersheni’s family was banished to the mountainous northern region of Dukagjin. His team would not play in Europe again until the fall of Communism. Bersheni now coaches young players in Athens. “At every point we endured punishment,” he told me.