The coach of the Kosovo national team has often felt the world outside of football impinging on his work.

Teams would abruptly cancel matches after discovering their government doesn't recognise Kosovo, for instance. But at least Albert Bunjaki roughly knew what team he would pick if he'd had the chance to play them.

A week before kick-off against Finland, the opposite was true. Bunjaki knew the match would go ahead, but he had no idea who would actually play.

"I know better the Finland team than my own team. It is true!" said the 45-year-old coach, sitting in a hotel lobby on the outskirts of Pristina. It was the day before he was due to give his press conference to the local media announcing his first squad.

The biggest issue was with his captain and goalkeeper, Samir Ujkani. It is the position where Kosovo is most threadbare. Without the former Palermo player, now with Pisa in Italy's Serie B, what little chance Kosovo had of competing would disappear.

"We will be 50 per cent, it will not be a strong team," said Bunjaki. "He has been with me since 2014. I can't imagine if they say no. I can't."

Bunjaki has been the coach of the Kosovo national team since 2009. For most of that time it had been virtually impossible to organise any games at all, save a friendly against Albania in 2010. But in 2014, after a long battle in FIFA and UEFA, and two years after Blatter began supporting Kosovo publicly, Kosovo were finally cleared to play friendly matches.

Kosovo hosted Haiti in the northern city of Mitrovica, at the Olympic Stadium Adem Jashari. The game caused an outcry in Serbia, and not just for its partial recognition of Kosovo. Mitrovica remains a divided city, split by the Ibar River. The south is overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian and controlled by the Kosovan authorities. The north is Serbian, who refer to the territory as Kosovska Mitrovica.

Bunjaki (second from left) on the Kosovo bench alongside Tord Grip (far left). Photo by James Montague.

Although the stadium was the only one in Kosovo capable of hosting an international match, the Serbs saw it as a provocation. The stadium's namesake was the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, considered a hero by Kosovans and a terrorist by Serbian authorities. The Kosovo flag was not permitted to be flown, but the 17,000 fans who arrived at the match filled the stands with yellow and blue, alongside the black and red of the Albanian flag. In freezing, driving rain, and on an atrocious, muddy pitch, the match finished 0-0.

Yet, even under the new dawn of FIFA membership, games have not been easy to come by. "In 2016 we only have had one game," Bunjaki said, referring to Kosovo's 2-0 victory against the Faroe Islands in June. "Finland have seven games."

He pointed out that Finland had been testing themselves against the best and managed a draw against Belgium. The day after the press conference, he would fly to Finland's final warm-up game, against world champions Germany.

"We meet next week," he said. "I'm thinking all the time, we know how they are playing. The problem is our team. I am thinking in a positive way. It will be good. But don't ask me today."

Bunjaki was born and raised in Pristina, and like Vokrri, he played for FC Pristina. But when he was 20 years old, in 1991, he received a letter from the Yugoslav army. The war had begun, and Bunjaki had been called up to the military.

"I said no," Bunjaki recalls. "I decided to leave everything and move. I felt I'll be back in a month as Europe would not accept the war happening. It was not so."

He landed in Sweden and was granted asylum. "If I count all my family, 36 people were killed," Bunjaki said. "Everyone has someone who was killed in the war."

Kosovo goalkeeper Samir Ujkani (left) alongside his team-mate Milot Rashica. Photo by James Montague.

Unable to return home, he built his career in Sweden. "It was a hard life," he said. "I knew no one in Sweden, nine years without seeing my parents. You feel alone." He took his exams so that he could coach and was hired as an assistant coach at Swedish first-division side Kalmar. It was in Sweden that he met Tord Grip, Sven-Goran Eriksson's longtime assistant coach.

Now 78 years old, Grip has become something of a mentor to Bunjaki. He sat on the bench next to him in Mitrovica during Kosovo's first official game, the friendly against Haiti. And he would be there too in Finland, in an unofficial capacity.

Bunjaki said he took the Kosovo job because "I want to know my family better and I want to know my people better." But that turned out to be a complex business too.

While Kosovo's refugee diaspora have got behind the team, support at home has been harder to build. Many people remain ambivalent toward the team and, more importantly, its flag.

A few days before I met Bunjaki, I had travelled down to the southern city of Prizren with the ultras group of FC Pristina, the Plisat. On the recommendation of Vokrri, I had come to see FC Pristina play Liria. Prizren is famous for being the birthplace of modern Albanian nationalism.

Many believe in the idea of an ethnic Albania, uniting Albanian populations in Macedonia, Kosovo, southern Serbia and Montenegro under the black eagle of the Albanian flag. Travelling around Kosovo, you will rarely see the Kosovo flag flown, while the Albanian flag is everywhere.

"We call it the 'petrol station flag.' It is not our flag," said Korab, a 23-year-old member of the Plisat, of the Kosovo flag as 30 or so fans drove down in a fleet of minibuses.

FC Pristina ultras watch their team. Photo by James Montague.

The Kosovo government held a an international design competition for a new flag in 2008. They received over a thousand entries, including seven from Serbia. Parliament voted for the winning design from a shortlist of three, shorn of any nationalist symbols that might antagonise its neighbours.

The six stars represent Kosovo's six ethnic groups, including Albanian and Serbian, but the flag remains wildly unpopular. Most Plisat members say they want to see a united Albanian team, under the red and black flag, and would not be watching the Kosovo game. Instead they would be travelling to watch Albania host Macedonia, another complex local derby.

Nor will they support Kosovo at this week's "home" game against Croatia in Albania. "We believe in a united Albania," said Atdhe, a 19-year-old student. "There is no 'greater Albania,' only ethnic Albania. The KLA didn't fight for an independent Kosovo, but to unite all Albanians." One fan joked: "We will go but we'll wear Croatian T-shirts!"

The disillusionment with even partial independence has been heightened by the perception of political corruption and a deteriorating quality of life. Youth unemployment stands at 60 per cent. The situation was so bad that when the Serbian authorities liberalised travel restrictions on Kosovans wishing to travel to Serbia in 2014, tens of thousands left in a mass exodus as they sought a better life in the European Union. Whole villages were emptied.

But for Bunjaki, Kosovo has come a long way from when he lived there. "Kosovo has never been as free as it is now," he said. "When I moved in 1991, they banned the Albanian language at my university and I couldn't study." Bunjaki was hoping to become a doctor at the time.

The Plisat flag is displayed by FC Pristina fans. Photo by James Montague.

"People ask me all the time, Albania or Kosovo national team?" he said. "They have a different feeling. In the heart of every Albanian is the Albanian flag. Of course, it is my flag too. I can't hate the Albanian flag. But it is time to work for the Kosovo flag. It is the symbol of this country. Some people are not understanding that. You cannot unite two football teams."

The Finland game was shown on a big screen in Mother Teresa Square in the centre of Pristina. But there were two screens. One showed Finland-Kosovo, the other showed the Albania-Macedonia match.

For Bunjaki, qualification for Russia 2018 is out of the question. "That isn't realistic at all," he said. “The most important thing is for the players to understand: Win or we lose, you give everything, people will accept it."

The next day, at his press conference in Pristina, Bunjaki announced Kosovo's first squad for a competitive game. As expected, the likes of Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri were not on the list. Xhaka even released a statement saying he would have considered the switch but had been given no clarifications. He claimed that FIFA had sent him an official document stating that if he represented Switzerland at Euro 2016, he would not be allowed to make the switch.

(Bleacher Report contacted FIFA, which denied the claim: "No communication was exchanged with individual players," they said in a statement.)

Instead, among the squad of 23, 10 players had an asterisk next to their name as they waited for FIFA clearance. "It was history when we played against Haiti and the Faroe Islands. And now against Finland. I'm happy to be part of history. But now I'm tired of talking about history," Bunjaki said. "I'm thinking about the future."