Ante Budimir: Croatia’s saviour this World Cup, who once fled Bosnia with family

4 min readUpdated: Jun 24, 2026 07:40 PM IST

Ante Budimir's goal helped Croatia beat Panama in the FIFA World Cup 2026. (AP)

Ante Budimir was six months old when his family fled Ozimica. The Croat-Bosniak war had reached the village and they moved to Velika Gorica, near Zagreb, with what they could carry. Shortly after they arrived, his father died in a car accident. His mother raised him alone in a country that was not quite their own.

He does not remember any of it. He remembers what came after.

Being ten years old and visiting his grandmother’s in Bosnia for the first time since the war. Looking at the houses. “When you’re young, you don’t understand it, but you accept it as normal,” he told the Spanish newspaper Ara. “But when you’re ten and go to visit your two grandmothers back in Bosnia, and you see so many houses riddled with holes from attacks, you realise something serious happened there. Once something is destroyed, it’s hard to rebuild. There are places that haven’t been touched, areas where it feels like time stood still after the war. Yet it is a beautiful country, rich in nature, and I hold it very dear.”

On Wednesday in Toronto, Budimir came off the bench in the 54th minute and scored the goal that kept Croatia alive at the 2026 World Cup. At 34 years and 336 days, he became the oldest Croatian scorer in World Cup history, breaking the record set by Ivica Olić against Cameroon in 2014.

Velika Gorica had a stadium. Radnik Stadium, home to a club in Croatia’s first division, was 500 metres from where the family lived. “When I was seven years old, I told my mother that I wanted to go there to train,” Budimir told Ara. “She took me there and I haven’t stopped playing football since then. I still have the same passion, feeling and love for football that I had when I was a child. Before, it was a game I shared with my friends, and now, it’s my profession. I feel privileged.”

🚨🌎 | GOAL: ANTE BUDIMIR OPENS THE SCORING FOR CROATIA!

🇵🇦 Panama 0-1 Croatia 🇭🇷 pic.twitter.com/2YMhOGvHHu

— CEe (@CEeBaz_) June 24, 2026

He spent years moving through the lower leagues in Croatia, Germany and Italy before finding his level at Mallorca in Spain in 2019, scoring the goal that won them promotion to La Liga in a play-off final comeback. Osasuna signed him for a reported €8 million in 2020, the club’s most expensive signing at the time. He has scored 95 goals for them since, surpassing Sabino Andonegui, known as the Hammer of San Juan, as the club’s highest La Liga scorer.

He has been studying for a degree in economics since 2019. His older sisters encouraged him. “They were studying it and told me they would help me,” he told Mallorca’s official website. “That gave me the confidence to do it and honestly, I’m really enjoying it. The other day I passed two exams.”

One afternoon in Pamplona, Osasuna supporter Mari Carmen, 78, needed to get to hospital. She had a tumour. Budimir drove her. “I’d like to think if my mum or grandmother needed help in the street, people would be there,” he told the Guardian.

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Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera said: “He’s so demanding of himself and us that we have to be patient. He knows how to make the most of his qualities and work on his weaknesses. We’re proud to have him.”

After the war ended, Budimir went back to Bosnia and saw what it had left behind. “I never want to see anything like that happen in the Balkans again,” he told Ara. “We are peoples with very similar traditions and customs, and we need to respect one another.”

On Wednesday in Toronto, he scored. Croatia are still in the World Cup. In Bosnia, there are still houses with holes in the walls.

Nitin Sharma is an Assistant Editor with the sports team of The Indian Express. Based out of Chandigarh, Nitin works with the print sports desk while also breaking news stories for the online sports team. A Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award recipient for the year 2017 for his story ‘Harmans of Moga’, Nitin has also been a three-time recipient of the UNFPA-supported Laadli Media Awards for Gender Sensitivity for the years 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively. His latest Laadli Award, in November 2025, came for an article on Deepthi Jeevanji, who won India’s first gold medal at the World Athletics Para Championship and was taunted for her unusual features as a child.

Nitin mainly covers Olympics sports disciplines with his main interests in shooting, boxing, wrestling, athletics and much more. The last 17 years with The Indian Express has seen him unearthing stories across India from as far as Andaman and Nicobar to the North East. Nitin also covers cricket apart from women’s cricket with a keen interest. Nitin has covered events like the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the 2011 ODI World Cup, 2016 T20 World Cup and the 2017 AIBA World Youth Boxing Championships.

An alumnus of School of Communication Studies, Panjab University, from where he completed his Masters in Mass Communications degree, Nitin has been an avid quizzer too. A Guru Nanak Dev University Colour holder, Nitin’s interest in quizzing began in the town of Talwara Township, a small town near the Punjab-Himachal Pradesh border. When not reporting, Nitin's interests lie in discovering new treks in the mountains or spending time near the river Beas at his hometown. ... Read More

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