Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko kept football dream alive while dodging bombs in Bosnia

Like the rest of the city, the building has been patched up bit by bit, year by year, but there remains the odd ancient scar imprinted in the brickwork from the bullets and the shrapnel.

“See over there,” he says, looking a few hundred yards past the flats. “That was the war’s front line. Right next to our school.”

Armin takes me to the small patch of grass where he, Dzeko and their pals would dare to have a kickaround when they thought it safe. Look up and it chills to see its perilous proximity to the Serb forces’ firing line high above the playground. It never was safe.

“Parents were afraid to let you out but we did play. We’d play for 15 minutes, then hear the sound of the shell, shwoooo, and everyone runs as fast as hell back to the blocks. This didn’t happen once or twice,” recalls Armin. “It was our way of life.”

For nine-year-old Edin, that meant back to his gran’s place, holed up in the basement of the 'safe house’ to which he and so many of his family and friends would retreat at various points of the conflict.

Sometimes a dozen, sometimes more, depending on who needed refuge. Safe house? Well, safer than the Dzeko family home in the western suburbs of Brijesce from which they had had to flee. In time, it was practically destroyed like 35,000 others.

This is a poignant day for Armin. It is his 25th birthday and he is being asked to summon locked memories. “My older brother died during the war; he was 16, a boy not a soldier, captured by the enemy and never found.” One of the 12,000 who were killed or went missing during the four-year siege.

“There were people very close to Edin’s family who died too. Nobody wants to talk about it now. You would hear your friend or family had died or was lost. Sometimes really it felt the only thing that saved us was the ball.”

Football made everyone soar. Like the miracle day when, marooned in a world with no water, food, gas or electricity, the power inexplicably came on 15 minutes into the World Cup final, allowing Edin and the gang to watch Brazil beat Italy.

And this day, a new lifetime later, it makes him soar again. “My friend is playing for Manchester City. Can you believe? It’s funny; Edin knows I hate Manchester City and love Man United!

"But when I see this game against Wolverhampton on TV, it will make me happiest person in the world. Because he’s my friend, because he’s good man and because he represents my country so proudly.”

Dzeko has moved on but, somehow, his presence remains everywhere here.

Throughout the city bars, they will watch the match. A child of the war who has risen to unprecedented fame. The name is a passport to the warmest of welcomes. Hey, he wants to talk about the Diamant, the Diamond! Come in, sit down!

Problems still abound in Sarajevo. Fifty per cent unemployment, child poverty, economic stagnation. Little improvements take an age.

Yet amid decay, the city, with haphazard building projects sprouting and the only bullets now being the spent ones decorated as ornaments in the rejuvenated old town, feels and looks a picture of triumphant optimism compared to the darkest days.

And that sense that something better is always around the corner is embodied here by Dzeko. “His story is like Bosnia’s. His way had been a hard one but he has made it through, always positive, never looking back,” says his pal Muhamed “Big Mo” Konjic, Bosnia’s former captain still beloved by all Coventry City fans.

“People love Dzeko here, not just because of his success but his heart. People see honesty in him, a man who can empathise with them because he has lived through what they have. And is still a great guy who doesn’t change.”

Konjic remembers touting Dzeko’s name to his agent in England a few years back. Not that he thought the teenager from FK Zeljeznicar Sarejevo would be great but that, at £36,000, he would at least be cheap and reasonable value.

There were no takers, though, and Czech side Teplice landed the bargain. “We laugh about it now,” smiles Konjic. Twenty seven million laughs.

Whether that fortune buys you, as Konjic fancies will be proved over the next five years, the most complete striker in Europe or just another disposable Eastlands misfit, no one yet knows.

But a visit here quickly persuades that even if Dzeko is not yet the best, he is surely one of the world’s most important footballers. As Didier Drogba is to Cote d’Ivoire or Michael Essien to Ghana, Dzeko is to Bosnia Hercegovina.

At their HQ in the city, Unicef representative Florence Bauer raves about how a 24 year-old can be so charismatic and influential as an ambassador.

In a country riven with nationalistic and ethnic divisions, it is manna to have this national hero preaching his message of tolerance and inclusion to kids: “It doesn’t matter to me if somebody is Serb, Croat or Muslim. What matters is to be a good person.”

Tales abound of Dzeko’s generosity here. It’s not just Unicef; visiting sick kids, offering financial help for struggling friends and charity ventures.

“He never says no,” says Bauer. There’s even one persistent legend that he bought a taxi to reward the man who drove him to training in a battered car. If it’s true, Dzeko would want it kept hushed anyway. He doesn’t do it for visibility; he does it because he believes.”

He is not Mother Teresa, though. There is a fierce, short temper — “Balotelli should watch out,” says Armin, roaring with laughter — which erupted when he had a much-publicised slanging match, captured by TV cameras, with a bloke who, it turned out, was not happy with the size of the charitable handout Dzeko had given him and so started screaming insults about the player’s mother.

Dzeko made a public apology but did not need to; the nation was already backing him.

The level of reverence staggers the Unicef team. “Physically, we had a hard time getting him out of a school at one village because there was such an excited crush to be close to him,” recalls Bauer.

Perhaps the increasing fame may have got to Dzeko’s family a bit too. “I normally play football with his dad Mido every week but I think he’s gone into hiding!” says Armin.

“Talent and luck isn’t enough; it takes a lot of work and learning and belief that if you make the effort, you can make it,” Dzeko likes to tell the kids.

He knows because this is his story too. For nobody ever really took him seriously as a player, except a couple of wise heads like his last coach at Zeljeznicar, Jiri Plisek, and his first, Jusuf Sehovic.

In 1995, Sehovic was charged with taking the best football kids from the bomb sites, including Armin and Dzeko, and creating a new post-war youth team, FK Zeljeznicar’s 'Pioneers’.

The old coach shows a picture of Dzeko standing alongside his 10-year-old team-mates against the backdrop of the blitzed stands of the Grbavica stadium which had stopped being a battleground, standing directly between the Bosnian and Serb forces, and was now a boy’s charred theatre of hope.

“He had extraordinary determination, never stopped working,” Sehovic recalls, while Armin jokes how when he and his other mates found girls, Dzeko remained so hopelessly devoted to the ball so that at 17 he was ready for Zeljeznicar’s first team.

He was nothing special, though. Some fans on Grbavica’s crumbling terraces started taunted him as 'Cloc’. “Like a big wooden stick — a very disparaging, cruel expression,” the translator explains.

“What they didn’t understand,” says Sehovic “was he had had a growth spurt, 14cm in one year, and his co-ordination suffered. I told him not to worry, it would return.”

It did and was allied to new strength and aerial prowess. The rest? Goals, goals, goals.

Before the trip is over, Sehovic’s family gives me bottles of their mind-blowing home-made plum brandy while Konjic comes to Grabavica to present me with one of his most prized national team shirts.

Everyone’s generosity is as humbling and inspiring as the message they ask me to take back to Manchester.

“Tell them they haven’t just got a special player from Bosnia,” smiles Big Mo. “They have a special man too.”

Stopping off points for City’s £27 million striker

Zeljeznicar 2003-05
(40 games, 5 goals)
Dzeko started life as a midfielder at his home-town club, but was not a great success. His size was seen as a disadvantage; he was regarded as clumsy and technically deficient. When Czech club Teplice offered £21,000 for him, a club director confessed: “We thought we’d won the lottery.”

Teplice 2005-07
(43 games, 16 goals)
Teplice coach Jiri Plisek switched Dzeko to a target-man role, and the goals began to flow. In 2006-07, his first full season at the club, he scored 13 goals in 30 games, and was top scorer in the Czech league. Shortly after making his international debut against Turkey Wolfsburg snapped him up for £3.4 million.

Wolfsburg 2007-11
(111 games, 66 goals)
Before Dzeko’s arrival, Wolfsburg had traditionally oscillated between mid-table mediocrity and grim survival. In his first season, they finished fifth and qualified for Europe; the next, incredibly, they won the Bundesliga title, with Dzeko forming a fearsome partnership with the Brazilian striker Grafite.