Esmir Bajraktarević is on the biggest stage in soccer now, playing for Bosnia & Herzegovina at the FIFA World Cup 2026. The 21-year-old from Wisconsin, who grew up playing in Appleton, has gone from local youth fields to PSV and into a tournament that puts him in front of the entire sport.
That is why his name is being searched now: a player who once needed rides to practice in Wisconsin is wearing the colors of his parents' home nation at the World Cup. Liam Wasco, who became close friends with Bajraktarević after their fathers met through a men's recreational soccer league in northeast Wisconsin, said they spent nearly every day together. “Genuinely, we hung out every day. My house, his house. Like, I guess we were at the time each other’s only friends, like that close, it felt like we were family,” Wasco said.
The path was not a straight line, but the pieces fit. Kevin drove the boys 90 minutes south to practice three times a week with SC Waukesha, which is now SC Wave, and Shan Amini coached both of them there. Amini remembered a kid who was already separate from the pack. “His work ethic, he always had a ball at his feet. He wanted to win,” he said. Even then, at 11 years old, Bajraktarević was talking about becoming a professional soccer player, and Amini said the club’s job was mostly to stay out of the way and help him reach that level.
That is also where the friction in his story lives. Amini said the club did not create Bajraktarević, and the results backed him up. Wasco recalled being told, “There’s this really good Bosnian kid,” then assuming it was just another promising youth player until the boys faced him. “And we played against him — he killed our whole team. He dribbled past everyone. We still won that game — I’ll still brag about that — but he was by far better than everyone,” Wasco said.
The next step came when The New England Revolution noticed him as a prospect in Wisconsin, and the club’s recently developed player pathways program gave that interest a clearer route. From there, his rise kept moving beyond the Milwaukee area and into the professional game, where he now plays for PSV. What began as a local youth story in Appleton and Milwaukee is now unfolding in the World Cup, and Bajraktarević will keep carrying that Wisconsin background as Bosnia & Herzegovina continues its run.
