Read 4 minutesUpdated: June 24, 2026 07:40 PM IST
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 their arrival, his father died in a car accident. His mother raised him alone in a country that was not their own.
He doesn’t remember any of it. He remembers what happened next.
Being ten years old and visiting his grandmother in Bosnia for the first time since the war. Looking at 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 years old and you visit your two grandmothers in Bosnia, and you see so many houses destroyed by the attacks, you realize that something serious has happened. Once something is destroyed, it’s hard to rebuild. There are places that haven’t been touched, there are places where it feels like time has stood still after the war. It’s still a very beautiful country, I’m very beautiful and rich.
In Toronto on Wednesday, Budimir came off the bench in the 54th minute to score the goal that kept Croatia alive at the 2026 World Cup. At the age of 34 years and 336 days, he became the oldest Croatian scorer in World Cup history, breaking the record set by Ivica Olli against Cameroon in 2014.
Velika Gorica had a stadium. The Radnik Stadium, home of the club in Croatia’s First Division, was 500 meters from where the family lived. “When I was seven years old, I told my mother that I wanted to go there for training,” Budimir told Ara. “She took me there and since then I haven’t stopped playing football. I still have the passion, feeling and love for football from my childhood. Earlier, 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_) 24 June 2026
He spent years bouncing around the lower leagues in Croatia, Germany and Italy before finding his footing at Mallorca in Spain in 2019, scoring the goal that sealed promotion to La Liga in the play-off final comeback. Osasuna signed him in 2020 for a reported €8 million, the club’s most expensive signing at the time. He has since scored 95 goals for the club, overtaking Hammer of San Juan Sabino Andonegui as the club’s top La Liga scorer.
He is pursuing graduation in Economics from 2019. His older sisters encouraged him. “They were studying it and told me they would help me,” he told Mallorca’s official website. “It gave me the confidence to do it and honestly, I’m enjoying it. I passed two exams the next day.”
One afternoon in Pamplona, Osasuna supporter Mari Carmen, 78, needed to go to hospital. She had a tumor. Budimir drove her away. “I’d like to think that if my mother or grandmother needed help on the street, people would be there,” he said parents.
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Osasuna goalkeeper Sergio Herrera said: “He demands so much of himself and of us that we have to be patient. He knows how to make the most of his qualities and work on his weaknesses. We are proud of him.”
After the war ended, Budimir went back to Bosnia and saw what he had left behind. “I never want to see something like this happen again in the Balkans,” he told Ara. “We are a people with very similar traditions and customs and we need to respect each other.”
He scored on Wednesday in Toronto. Croatia is still in the World Cup. Bosnia still has houses with holes in the walls.