Besian Idrizaj, the footballer who never woke up

“He was not playing football. He was sleeping. There was no training. He was on his break. That’s what I can’t believe — you go to sleep at 22 years of age and you don’t wake up any more.

“Why do you pass away in your sleep? You are a professional footballer. You are fit. You eat well. You don’t smoke. You don’t drink alcohol in big amounts. It’s not fair. If there is a God, why does he take a guy who is full of joy and still has his whole life to live?”

Qerim Idrizaj is talking through tears at his home in the city of Linz, in Austria, unable to find the answers to the questions that will never go away. Besian, his younger brother, passed away on May 15, 2010. “I know that it’s 10 years now. But for me it’s like yesterday,” Qerim says. “My pain is still here. He was my best friend. My soulmate. We shared everything. And I miss him.”

Signed by Liverpool at the age of 17, just after they had won their fifth European Cup in the summer of 2005, Besian was one of Austrian football’s brightest young prospects. Strong, 6ft 2in and skilful, he liked to model himself on Zlatan Ibrahimovic and had some of the Swede’s confidence too. Not many players could say they nutmegged an opponent with their second touch in professional football.

Everything, however, came to an abrupt halt in 2008 after two health scares. Besian collapsed twice, first during a game in the Austrian Bundesliga and later at the end of a training session. He underwent just about every test imaginable, but no evidence of any underlying medical condition was found. The earlier incident was put down to a virus. As for the second, there was a feeling that Besian had overdone things in his first session back after a long lay-off.

After taking another break from football, Besian signed a two-year contract with Swansea in 2009 and set about rebuilding his career. Still only 21, he had plenty of time on his side. The first season, when he made four appearances for the Championship club, was about feeling his way back into football. The second season was when everybody — Besian included — hoped that he would kick on. Tragically, that second season never happened.

Qerim was sleeping alongside Besian at the time his brother suffered a cardiac arrest and it is harrowing listening to his account of what happened when he woke up in the middle of the night at his apartment.

The evening before they had been to the cinema together with their girlfriends. By 6am the following day, Besian had gone.

It was one of the final days of the season in Austria’s second tier and LASK Linz decided to give a couple of youngsters a game. Besian Idrizaj was one of them. Aged 16, he knew only one way to play.

“My brother was on the left side of the pitch,” Qerim says. “His first contact was to take the ball and the second was not a safe pass to a team-mate; he put it between a player’s legs! The crowd were going crazy. That was his debut. His academy coach came to us after the game and said to my father, ‘Normally, players who make a debut at his age, they’re a little bit scared. Your boy is different’.”

Born in Austria and raised by Kosovan parents, Besian was one of four children. He had a younger sister, Besiana, and two older brothers, Qerim and Arlind. All three boys were talented footballers but Besian, says Qerim, was especially gifted and wanted it that little bit more. “He had something extra. And he gave everything to make it,” explains Qerim, who is 34 and still plays semi-professionally in Austria.

Besian’s career started to take off around about the time he represented Austria in the Under-17 European Championship finals in France in 2004. By the end of the following season, he had been named Austria’s Young Player of the Year and the Idrizaj family were being peppered with calls from agents from all over Europe. “It was not only Liverpool. There were many big clubs looking at him and trying to sign him, like Borussia Dortmund and Inter Milan,” Qerim says.

Liverpool’s interest was hard to ignore. Their remarkable Champions League triumph over AC Milan was fresh in the mind and the Premier League felt like the place to be. Besian accepted an opportunity to train with Liverpool for a week during pre-season in the summer of 2005. Liverpool invited him back for a second week and within a couple of days offered him a contract — two years, plus a 12-month extension.

Besian returned to Linz giddy with excitement. “We were like a small family from Austria and he came home and told us these stories about Steven Gerrard, Milan Baros, Djibril Cisse — we loved those players and wanted to be like them. And then you have your own brother there… wow, it was crazy,” Qerim says. “For me and my older brother it was clear, ‘Go, go, you have to do it! And if you do it, we will always help you’.”

Besian’s family were initially concerned about him moving to the UK to join Liverpool

For Sadik, Besian’s father, and Xhemile, his mother, the decision wasn’t so straightforward. “My father would say, ‘Besian is only 17. In Austria we have a good life, he should play in the Bundesliga here. He is so young. Let him be 18 and then he should choose.’ But my brother was like, ‘I have this opportunity, I want to take it. I want to show everybody how good I am’. So my father said, ‘OK, if you say that and you mean that, I will follow your dream’.”

Liverpool agreed a £190,000 compensation fee with LASK Linz and Besian settled into life on Merseyside without any problems. He quickly became good friends with Godwin Antwi, who went on to play for Spain at youth level. Antwi had signed from Real Zaragoza that summer and ended up living with the same guest family as Besian. Lee Peltier, another young Liverpool reserve player, grew up around the corner and the three of them were soon inseparable. “We became like brothers, me and Bes with Lee Peltier, we were very, very close,” Antwi explains.

Asked about Besian, Antwi smiles. “Bes was amazing. He was not just a guy; he was like an angel to everybody. His football talent… he was good. When he came, everybody was thinking, ‘He will make it’. He loved himself, don’t get me wrong. And he would let you know, ‘I am here!’ He loved his fashion, he loved his shoes. If you went to Bes’ room, you were never going to find any rubbish on the floor. Everything was clean. Even his boxer shorts he folded. Because of that, I am that person now — he changed me!”

Antwi laughs as he thinks about Besian’s maverick streak. “I remember only he would come with (low-cut) socks to training. Steve Heighway (the youth coach) told him, ‘My friend, you’re not going to train with those’. He said, ‘I’ll train’. He said, ‘You’re not’. Because of that we stopped the training for him to go in and change. That’s Bes. ‘If I want to do it, I’ll do it’.”

As soon as we finish talking, Antwi sends through more than a dozen photographs, showing him, Besian and Peltier together in various places in Liverpool. They are fantastic pictures and it is easy to see what Peltier means when he talks about the three of them “living in each other’s pockets”.

Antwi, Peltier and Besian became close friends at Liverpool

“Bes was a real funny guy and fitted right into Liverpool straight away,” says Peltier, who is now playing for West Brom. “My mates, who are from Liverpool, he used to go out with all of them, and we still talk about him to this day. Everyone used to love him and Godwin, the pair of them.

“On the pitch, Bes had something about him — an aura. He was a flair player and you knew something could happen if you got the ball to him. He played off the left, up front and as a No 10. He was a confident guy and believed in himself a lot.

“He used to love Zlatan, so I used to always think he was like Zlatan because of the way he used to act and even the way he used to play to an extent because he was tall. He used to have that stick-your-chest-out sort of thing. That’s how he came across on the pitch.”

Although Besian was well-liked at Liverpool and an extremely popular figure in the changing room, some wondered whether he could be too self-assured. “If you are like everybody, you won’t make it. You have to be something different. And he was like this,” Qerim says. “Maybe in Liverpool that was what some people didn’t understand. Maybe he was his own enemy at times.”

Nobody doubted Besian’s potential. The bigger question was whether he could perform consistently. “We used to say if the right key ever goes in the lock, what a player he’ll be,” says one of Rafael Benitez’s former staff. “Sometimes as a player you’re looking at people to tell you what the missing link is. Besian had the missing link, he just couldn’t put it together. At times he did. Maybe that day at Wrexham he did. There were a lot of clubs interested on the back of that game.”

That day at Wrexham was in July 2007 and came on the back of a six-week loan spell at Luton Town at the end of the previous season. Although Steve Finnan, Jermaine Pennant, Alvaro Arbeloa and Mohamed Sissoko all featured in the pre-season friendly at the Racecourse Ground, it was essentially a Liverpool reserve side. In front of 11,000 people, a 19-year-old Austrian stole the show with a terrific first-half hat-trick in a 3-2 win.

“I still remember the day,” Qerim says. “At the time, the internet was not like now and if we called Besian we had to have a prepaid card. He called home afterwards and he said, ‘Did you check the Liverpool website?’ I said, ‘No. Why? What happened?’ He said, ‘Just check it’. He was really proud.

“And it was something to be proud of. So I typed in Liverpool FC and went onto the homepage, and the first story was Besian Idrizaj scores a 23-minute hat-trick. I said, ‘Wow, man. This is amazing? How did you do that?’”

Benitez, typically, was not quite so excited and chose his words carefully afterwards. “Idrizaj is a player with great talent, we know that,” the Liverpool manager said. “He scored three but knows it should have been four. He needs to mature in some aspects of his game, but we are happy with him and hope he continues to progress. He could be a first-team player of the future, but it depends on him.”

With no realistic opportunity to breakthrough at Liverpool — Peter Crouch, Ryan Babel, Andriy Voronin, Dirk Kuyt and Fernando Torres were all vying for the attacking positions — and the prospect of more reserve football holding little appeal, Besian started the new season on loan at Crystal Palace.

It didn’t go well. Peter Taylor, who signed Besian for Palace, was sacked after only 10 league games. Besian featured in half of those matches but made only two more appearances for Palace after Neil Warnock took over. He was frustrated, his loan was terminated early and Besian, now in the final year of his Liverpool contract, knew that his time at Anfield was coming to an end.

Looking back, Qerim realises it was almost impossible for a 17-year-old from Austria to take in the enormity of joining a club like Liverpool when he had so little life experience to draw upon. Not that Besian ever had any regrets about his decision. “In every single way Liverpool was amazing,” Qerim says. “The people there were really good and Besian loved everything about it. He had two years there, but for his development it was like four, five, six years.”

In normal circumstances, Besian would probably have joined another English club after his spell at Palace but that summer in Austria was unlike any other and influenced his decision to return home. “In 2008 it was the European Championship in Austria and that’s why my brother moved to Wacker Innsbruck,” Qerim says. “His agent said, ‘If you play a good role in Austria, if you score some goals, you could jump on the train for the Euros.’ At that point the coach of the Austria national team wanted to try things out. So it was a good opportunity. But then things came differently.”

Differently and worryingly. In February 2008, in the first game after the winter break, Wacker Innsbruck were at home against Sturm Graz and Besian was among the substitutes. “He came on in the 60th minute,” Qerim recalls. “I think he made two or three passes. Then I watched him and the ball was 50-60 metres away, he was running back to the middle of the field. He had his hands on his knees.

“I thought, ‘What’s wrong, man? You came on right now’. He fell down on his knees, then on his chest. I had goosebumps. My father looked at me. We were like paralysed. The doctors came on, they talked to him but he was not hearing for the first two or three seconds. But afterwards he was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ He knew where he was.”

Besian later talked about the incident at Swansea. “It was just a virus,” he explained. “It infected me badly, but thankfully it wasn’t my heart. After that I didn’t want to start playing again straight away because it was a really difficult time for my family. I just wanted to have a break from football, to think about everything that had happened and to appreciate that I was still alive.

“It was a difficult time because I was out of contract that summer and people didn’t want to take me. They thought there was some problem with my heart and they didn’t want to take a risk.’’

Qerim listens to that interview Besian did with the club and says “that’s exactly how it was”. Yet there was another problem later that same year. “I was also there. I was always there,” Qerim says, shaking his head.

“He had no club, he took a break and he was not ready to play again. But by November it was half a year. He had the option to keep himself fit with LASK, where he started his career. At the first training session, he was not 100 per cent fit but my brother trained like he was there from the beginning.

“He was like from zero to 100. I was watching from a stand. It was one minute before the training was over, right at the end. I went down and said to my brother, ‘What’s wrong, Bes?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I felt not good. The intensity was too much’. I said, ‘OK, another minute and then it’s finished, and then we go and have a shower and we go home’. And exactly this minute it happened, he collapsed.

“Then he went to the hospital again, and they didn’t find anything again. I say to you, they didn’t find nothing. In Innsbruck, the doctors tested him on everything. Everything. They said he had a virus that he took with him from London. In Linz, he’s at home, he goes to training for LASK, then this happens and they don’t find nothing.

“People said bad things (in Austria) after my brother died, they said he had a heart problem and that he should have known that he was sick. But, listen, if he was sick, if there was something, and if you are a footballer, they will find out. It happened twice, that’s 100 per cent correct. But if you are that sick and if you had a heart problem, how can you make it to Swansea City?”

Besian accepted he had to take an extended break from football after the second incident, and some deep and heartfelt conversations took place at home during the weeks and months that followed. His family knew how passionate their son and brother was about football and how talented he was too. But, as Qerim explains, it wasn’t about football anymore.

“We said, ‘We as a family are extremely proud of what you achieved until now. We don’t need nothing more. We need you as a human being in our family. You are not better if you are a footballer, or if you are a Premier League player, or if you have £20 million in your account. You the person is important to us.’ He listened to us, he knew what responsibility he had. It was hard for him because he knew if it happens one more time, ‘I’m done’. Not ‘I’m dead’. But ‘I’m done with football’.”

By the time clubs were preparing to go back for pre-season training in 2009, Besian felt good and was ready to give football another go. He had trained with Yeovil, where he was briefly reunited with Peltier, and at one stage had a trial with Nottingham Forest. Then an offer came from Paulo Sousa, Swansea’s manager.

“We all knew who he was,” Qerim says. “We were like, ‘Wow, man, if this guy wants you, you have to go there’. He went on trial and was like, ‘Let’s do this’. The agent and my brother said one year, but Paulo said he wanted him to sign for two years — one year to bring him back and the second year to smash everything.”

Besian went onto make four appearances in that 2009-10 season, the last of them in a 1-0 win over Plymouth in December. He never felt that he did himself justice that day — he was substituted at half-time — and later said that he was still getting up to speed.

Qerim, who visited Besian in Swansea on many occasions, sensed that there was a psychological problem. “At that time in Swansea I could see his fear on the pitch. I could see his fear in training. It was like, ‘If I put too much into this challenge, if I make one sprint too much, maybe I collapse again’. He never said that to me. But I had this feeling.

“I said, ‘Hey, Bes, are you maybe a little bit scared?’ He said to me, ‘If I watch Gorka Pintado (Swansea’s Spanish striker), I fall down because it’s crazy how much he runs. I’m wondering how he can run so much and not collapse’. I said, ‘Listen, Bes, don’t think about that too much’.”

Swansea brought in another attacking player in January, which on the face of it wasn’t good news for Besian. In reality, though, it turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened. Shefki Kuqi, who was born in Kosovo, hit it off with Besian immediately.

A bear of a man and an imposing figure on the pitch, Kuqi has the warmest of hearts and developed a bond with Besian that went way beyond being team-mates. “He became very quickly… brother is not enough,” says Kuqi, who was 11 years older than Besian. “He was almost like my kid.”

Kuqi (second from right) with Besian (right) at a Swansea end-of-season function

Kuqi had an apartment on the marina in Swansea, where he lived with Julietta, his wife, who was pregnant with their first child. Besian had his own flat but he spent almost every spare moment with Kuqi. “He was just the most calm and charming guy you ever could come across,” Kuqi says. “I never saw him being angry or saying bad words about people. Every time I remember him I just see him smiling.”

Kuqi chuckles. “He would stay over until 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock at night. And if he didn’t come one day, we would be surprised. I used to say sometimes, ‘Come on, mate, I’m sorry to say but you’ve got to go home, man!’”

It doesn’t take long to realise that Kuqi thought the world of Besian. He remembers everything about the time they spent together and could tell stories for hours. Some of those tales make him cry. Others make him laugh.

“I used to do core work every night at home — press-ups, all different stuff,” he says. “I used to sweat because the front of the flat was all glass, so it used to be really hot. So I’d be sweating doing my work and he’d be lying on his back on the floor, texting his mates and his family on the mobile.

“He was a fit lad — you could see his six-pack — and he used to say to my missus, ‘Oh, look at Shef! He’s mad, he’s crazy, he doesn’t know when to rest. Look at him sweating’. Then he’d go, ‘Look at me, I’m just naturally fit. I don’t have to do that!’ We would laugh a lot with my missus when he used to say that.”

Besian didn’t have Kuqi’s work ethic — not many did — but his ability was never in doubt. Kuqi saw it on the training ground every day. But he could also see something else — the same mental barrier that Qerim spoke about.

“Bes was a great talent — he had great feet and vision. You could see he could play. But he was a little bit scared,” Kuqi says.

“I remember loads of times during the training session, because he always wore the heart-rate monitor, as soon as his heart started beeping higher, he used to stop. And I used to say, ‘Come on, keep going, man, the doctor gave you the all-clear. Now you need to push yourself a little bit. You can’t just stop every time your heart starts beating (faster); you need to get over that line’. He would say, ‘Yes, Shef. Yes’.”

According to Qerim, Besian was winning that battle in his mind and had “left the fear behind” come the end of that first season at Swansea. He was enjoying training, desperate to be playing regularly for the first team and, Qerim says, one of the best performers in the end-of-season fitness tests.

Kuqi says Besian was “almost like my kid” (Photo: Stephen Pond – PA Images via Getty Images)

Before the players departed for their summer holidays, Kuqi made a little deal with Besian. “We had a four-week break and the last two weeks I always started preparing for pre-season,” he explains. “I found a place past the Mumbles where there was some soft sand and a little bit of a hill. I used to sometimes do some running there. So I said to Bes — God bless him — ‘Listen, man. Before pre-season starts, me and you are going to come 10 days before, and I’ve got a place where we can go and train’. But I said, ‘Before we start to do that, we have to agree something’.

“He said: ‘OK, Shef’. He never ever said ‘no’ to me about anything. He said, ‘Go on, what is it?’

“I said, ‘I need to take your phone away from you. I’ll let you know when you can have it. But you spend too much time on your phone’.”

“Yes, Shef. OK, I’ll agree. I’ll sign the deal. No problem’.”

Kuqi’s voice is cracking with emotion as he tries to finish this story. The words stop now and again, but the tears don’t. “I did come back early,” Kuqi says. “And I did go to that place and I did that training. And I must say… I used to go and do the training and think about Bes. I used to do some extra for him…. he was supposed to be next to me.”

Linz, 14 May 2010. Besian has been in Austria for a week, after driving back from Swansea with one of his friends in the Audi A5 that he had recently bought and his brother still has to this day. It is a Friday evening and Besian is spending it with Qerim and their girlfriends. The four of them go to the cinema. “We watched a romantic movie, about love and everything. Everybody was happy,” Qerim says, smiling for a moment as he pictures that scene.

“After the movie I said to my brother, ‘Hey, Bes, you stay with your girlfriend, I’m going home, I want to take a tablet because my leg is hurting me’. I had a game the week before but still had this injury. He said, ‘OK, I’ll see you at home’.

“I had a new apartment at that time. I only had one bed and so both of us slept there together. He had the key, I drove my girlfriend home, went back to the apartment, took the tablet and I fell asleep.

“The next thing I can remember is my brother next to me in the bed fighting for breath. I woke up, I looked at him and I thought I was dreaming. Then I realised I wasn’t. I pushed him. I was like, ‘Hey…’ thinking maybe he had a nightmare. He didn’t respond.

“I was like, ‘Hey, come on’. Then he took a last breath, and then nothing. I jumped on him and did CPR. I went outside — it was 1am and I asked my neighbour to come and help me, one of us was doing the chest and the other doing mouth to mouth. I called the ambulance. I tried everything. But I had a feeling, the third time, I knew…”

Qerim breaks down and we pause for a moment.

“I can say I was there for him, that’s the main thing,” he adds. “That’s nothing to be proud of. But I gave everything for him.”

Besian had suffered a cardiac arrest, “like almost the same as a heart attack,” Qerim says. “The ambulance came and they fought for my brother. The doctor said that we had to go to the hospital and look after him there.

“We called my big brother because he was not at home and we called my little sister, so we came together at the hospital. Besian was fighting for his life until 6am. Then, it was like a movie — you know when you watch when a doctor comes and says, ‘I’m sorry. We’ve lost Besian’.

“You just stand there, or sit there, or fall down. You don’t know nothing any more. You are lost in the room.”

Kuqi was in Kosovo in a meeting with a couple of other people, including his father-in-law, discussing some properties he was building. His mobile went off a few times but he ignored it. He could see that it was Dorus de Vries, the Swansea goalkeeper, and assumed that it would be about something trivial that could wait. But the phone kept ringing. Again and again.

“I said, ‘Bloody hell, I’m sorry, I’ve got to answer this’. So I pick up the phone and Dorus says, ‘Shefki, how are you?’
“I said, ‘I’m OK, man. What’s up?’
“He said, ‘Have you heard anything?’
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
“He said, ‘Listen, I need to know because I hope what I’m hearing is not true. So I just wanted to ask you’.
“I said, ‘What do you mean? Tell me — what is going on? You’re worrying me’.
“He said, ‘Besian’s girlfriend told my missus that Besian has died’.
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
“He said, ‘Shefki, please can you find out’.

“Firstly, I didn’t want to believe what he was saying. Secondly, even if it was true, I couldn’t believe it. I tried to phone Besian. His phone was ringing and there was no answer. I tried to phone all the numbers I had, I just couldn’t get hold of anybody.

“I said to my father-in-law, ‘I need to ring Julietta’.
“He said, ‘No, I don’t think you should’.
“But I knew she kept contact with Besian’s mum.
“Her father said, ‘How are you going to tell Julietta?’
“I said, ‘If not today, she is going to know anyway’. Of course, I was scared because she was pregnant. How would she react?
“I called and said, ‘Listen can you do me a favour. First and foremost, I ask you to hold yourself. I have some really bad news that I don’t want to be true but…’
Kuqi struggles to get the words out and is upset again. “… I just need to find out.”
“She said, ‘What do you mean?’
“I said, ‘I have the news that Besian died’.

“She dropped her phone. Her mum came to the phone. I said, ‘Please can you calm her down’. I explained that I couldn’t get hold of anyone and asked if Julietta could call Besian’s mum. So then she called and obviously found out it was true.

“She called me. I’ve never ever felt so bad in my life. I just didn’t know how to react. I looked at the time and thought I need to catch a plane somehow to get to Linz. I called a friend who worked in the airport in Pristina. I said, ‘I have really bad news, I need to go to Austria, I need to catch a flight to get there today’.

“The flight was going in an hour. But it takes me an hour to get home to get my passport and back to the airport — I had nothing with me. I said to my friend, ‘Mate, do something. Please delay the flight and don’t let me miss it. I have to make it’.

“He did that for me. I don’t know how I drove home. I could see my missus was in bits. I got my passport and drove as fast as I could to the airport. I caught the flight and I remember his brother picking me up. I think his girlfriend was there as well. I was numb. I didn’t know what to say. I was so sad.”

By then Kuqi had confirmed the awful news to De Vries and word started to spread among players and staff at Swansea. Speak to anybody who was at the club at that time and they can tell you exactly where they were when they found out. Those who knew Besian well at Liverpool say the same.

Peltier played in a play-off semi-final for Huddersfield against Millwall that Saturday. “Afterwards I looked at my phone and I had so many missed calls and messages. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, something has happened here’. I rang Qerim straight away and he told me. I was devastated. For a few days I locked myself away. I didn’t speak to anyone.”

Antwi was preparing for a match in Denmark. “I was in the changing room ready to play for a team called Vejle Boldklub when Lee Peltier called. I went outside to take the call. And then that’s it. That was me done. I told the manager I couldn’t play. He said, ‘Godwin, we need you’. I said, ‘I can’t’. He said, ‘You need to play’. We won the game, but I was not there at all. My mind was with Bes and his family.”

While Kuqi and his wife attended the funeral in Kosovo the following week, Swansea held a memorial service outside the Liberty Stadium. Players and staff gathered next to the gates where fans had tied scarves and shirts and placed flowers.

“It was some prayers, some words, a reading, just for everyone to get together to express their grief because it happened so suddenly,” says Kev Johns, the club chaplain and matchday announcer. “There were a lot of tears and a lot of hugs because they couldn’t get to the funeral.”

It says everything about Qerim, who comes across as such a lovely man, that when he returned to Swansea a couple of months later to collect Besian’s belongings from his apartment, he went to the Liberty Stadium, accompanied by Kuqi, to say goodbye to the staff and to thank them for giving his brother the opportunity to play for the club.

Swansea retired Besian’s No 40 shirt and held a minute’s silence in their first Championship home game of the 2010-11 season, against Preston North End. The scoreline that day — Swansea won 4-0 — could not have been more fitting.

It was the last game of that season, though, when Swansea paid the best possible tribute to Besian. They were up against Reading in the Championship play-off final at Wembley and Garry Monk, Swansea’s captain, made up his mind that if they won promotion to the Premier League, they would do something that would make Besian’s family proud.

“I went down to Dorian Heel Bar in town, it’s famous in Swansea,” Monk says. “All the players over the years, he gets all their boots and puts them up in there. They do everything so I got him to print out 50 T-shirts (with a photo of Besian on) for the play-off final. And I thought if we win, we’ll put them on.

“It was one of the best things about that day. The full-time whistle went and I can remember celebrating and then instantly saying to Sue (Eames, the kit lady): ‘Where’s the T-shirts?’ Then all the lads put them on. I just thought it was really nice for his family to see that.”

Brendan Rodgers and the Swansea team celebrate promotion wearing the T-shirts that paid tribute to Besian (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

Those images went all around the world as Swansea’s players walked up the Wembley steps to collect the trophy wearing their T-shirts. Afterwards, Brendan Rodgers, Swansea’s manager, dedicated promotion to Besian. “The journey was a great remembrance to him all the way through the season. I felt that he was really in the heart of the players and the people,” Rodgers said.

The fact that Swansea scored in the 40th minute that day, just when their fans had planned to applaud Besian, added to the feeling that it was meant to be. Even Besian’s family felt that way. “We followed Swansea all the time and watched the play-off final,” Qerim says. “OK, Bes was not there but it was like he is helping them, that he is with them.

“But I didn’t expect that with the T-shirts. I thought, ‘Wow. The spectators in the stadium, they see this, and all the people in the UK and around the world now know who Besian Idrizaj is’. It is a big thing and I’m very honoured that they did that. If you Google it today, ‘Play-off final 2011’, you find it.”

Although there was no medical evidence that Besian had any sort of heart problem previously, I ask Qerim whether he ever thinks that what happened in his apartment that night could have been related in some way to the two earlier incidents.

“I don’t know what to say,” he replies. “I can’t answer that question. I think there is something above us. Some things happen. Also, if you watch football the last years, the captain from Fiorentina, (Davide) Astori, he was in a hotel, he fell asleep, the next day he didn’t wake up. Nobody knows what happened to him, nobody knows what was wrong with him. There are so many examples.

“It’s a fact in the case of my brother, everybody checked him. He was in Innsbruck, he was in Linz, he was in Swansea. He signed a two-year contract for Swansea, getting a lot of money, and if there was a problem, they would not sign him. And if you fall asleep and don’t wake up, it makes no sense.”

Besian’s story feels like a sobering reminder of how fragile life can be — something that his former Liverpool team-mates already know far too much about. Peltier realises what I am going to say before I even have chance to finish the sentence. “You don’t even need to tell me,” he interjects. “That team… ah, mate. Miki Roque died of cancer. Gary Ablett, our manager, the same. And Besi. It’s crazy.”

Life has to go on but that is far easier said than done. Listening to Qerim, it is clear that time has not been much of a healer for his family, and he knows that this year will be more difficult than any other to pay respect to Besian on the anniversary of his passing.

“Normally we meet up in Kosovo on 15 May, we go to the grave, we talk to Bes, we pray for Bes, we put flowers there. We put something in the newspapers down there too, like a poem, just to remember him,” he says.

“Usually I would have booked a flight two or three months ago, but for the first time now I could not make it because of the coronavirus. Ten years. I am really pissed off. But what should I do? It is what it is. I have to do something here. Think about him. Talk about him. Cry about him.”

A long and deeply moving video call with Qerim is coming to an end. We have been speaking for more than two hours and, as well as thanking him for being so generous with his time, I apologise for going back over all the memories that evoke so many difficult emotions.

Besian and his brother, Qerim

Qerim shakes his head. “I love to talk about Bes because I loved him,” he says. “And I’m really looking forward to seeing him if there is something after our life. I am really proud that he is, or that he was, my brother. Everything that I do in my life is for him, or with him. And I know that he is here for me every single day of my life.”

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