Performing Sovereignty Through Sport: The Kosovo National Team as a Symbolic Repertoire of Nationhood

Since Kosovo’s admission into UEFA and FIFA in 2016, its national football team has become one of the most visible arenas in which national identity, legitimacy, and sovereignty are symbolically performed and contested. This paper conceptualizes the team as a symbolic repertoire, a socially recognized platform where narratives, images, and emotional attachments to nationhood are constructed and negotiated under conditions of partial international recognition. Drawing from scholarship on symbolic politics, nationalism, and performative statehood, the paper demonstrates how football can serve not merely as a reflection of identity but as an active instrument of state-building and international legitimation. The Kosovo national team operates across two intertwined domains: international symbolic recognition and intra-ethnic identity differentiation. Internationally, the act of competing under a Kosovo flag, anthem, and governing association constitutes a performative assertion of sovereignty. Yet this claim encounters resistance from non-recognizing states such as Serbia, Spain, and Romania, which challenge match arrangements, suppress Kosovo’s national symbols, and publicly frame the team as illegitimate. These actions highlight how sport functions as a diplomatic battlefield in which recognition, rather than athletic competition, becomes the core struggle. Regionally, Kosovo’s team disrupts long-standing symbolic identification with Albania’s national team, historically embraced by Kosovar Albanians as the embodiment of shared ethnonational identity. The Albanian Football Federation’s continued recruitment of Kosovar players—particularly from Kosovo’s U21 system, has been perceived by portions of the Kosovar public as undermining Kosovo’s sovereign identity project and reinforcing a pan-Albanian narrative. This dynamic exposes layered, overlapping, and competing understandings of nationhood within the same linguistic-ethnic community. Domestically, Kosovo faces challenges in cultivating emotional resonance around newly created state symbols. The non-lyrical anthem and non-traditional color scheme of the national flag have generated ambivalence and boycotts among fan groups aligned with Albanian identity symbolism. However, strong performances and the rise of internationally recognized Kosovar players have begun to shift perceptions, illustrating how symbolic legitimacy can be built through affective success rather than historical depth. Through critical discourse analysis of media texts, fan narratives, and institutional statements, this paper shows that Kosovo’s national football team functions as a dynamic site of symbolic negotiation, revealing how contested states mobilize sport to construct meaning, assert differentiation, and seek legitimacy at home and abroad.