The 21-year-old Napoli midfielder is an integral part of the North Macedonia side playing in their first major tournament
This article is part of the Guardian’s Euro 2020 Experts’ Network, a cooperation between some of the best media organisations from the 24 countries who qualified. theguardian.com is running previews from two countries each day in the run-up to the tournament kicking off on 11 June.
At the turn of this century Macedonia entered a newly turbulent era. A small country in the heart of the Balkans, it had been a target of various outside interests throughout history, and now the war in Kosovo, its northern neighbour, spread into the north of Macedonia. As tensions grew between Macedonians and Albanians, few people in the country would have had time to think about football, and few would have guessed that those years of war would see the birth of the nation’s first
Football “diamond”, Elif Elmas.