Albanian national football team will now have their own house, a long-awaited facility now housed at the Dinamo stadium in Tirana.

Prime Minister Edi Rama attended the inauguration ceremony together with the visiting FIFA President Gianni Infantino, whom he received earlier at a meeting at the Prime Minister’s office on Thursday.

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“Dear Giani, I speak the second official language in Albania, namely Italian, seeking to avoid translation mistakes, which are quite common whenever I deliver a speech. Albanian is not a second official language in Switzerland, for the sake of truth, yet it is the first official language within the Swiss national team, as most of the players speak Albanian. And if the Swiss federation happens to launch an investigation into this, you would help me by employing the tools you possess to influence justice.

Giani,

Dear friends, 

Dear Juri,

This is not to commit blasphemy, but you are the second most important official of “a religion” like football. We are very pleased and it is an honour to welcome you to tiny Albania. It is not a superpower, it is neither a football superpower, yet it is a great superpower of hospitality, brotherhood and the passion for this sport that we definitely want to further support and develop, just like the museum, the previous government that the current Soccer Federation President has voted for and many others attending this event continue to vote, hoping that it would return again, has actually done nothing for football. It is this government that has done everything that has been done for football in Albania; the new stadiums, the football’s house. However, they still don’t vote for this government, but this is not a big deal. We are strong enough to go on working with them and witness the fact that the common wish and common goal to develop this sport is most important thing to us and this sport, as you said in our previous meeting is not a it is not a tool itself and it is not only what we all watch on the TV screens or the one that generates wealth and brings so many people to the stadiums, but it is what brings children together in the football pitches that you are right enough to remind us that are not sufficient in Albania vis-à-vis the population. This is still a shared objective with the Soccer Federation, because, yes we have built new stadiums, but we still need to build more football pitches.

I know you face re-election and pledges are always made ahead of polls. You will win the April elections and I very much hope you will allocate the pledged funding for the football pitches in Albania and I and the Minister of Education and Sports, who, if I have to trust the President’s words, is strangely more familiarized with the problems and the discussions with the Federation, we will immediately act. You deliver on your pledge and allocate millions, while we will allocate hundreds of thousands of euros, whereas the President will invest in passion and therefore we all move forward. We plan to build football pitches in all cities across the country. Parents need them, children need them and we need support to enhance basic training level, given that a large number of trainers are needed to coach all these children teams, but I am sure we will deliver on this aspect too.

I would like to thank you for your readiness to help us in our efforts to finalize this last legal act on online sports betting, as you know and precisely noted, we share a sad story with gambling previously out of control, with earnings out of control, and certain individuals involved. We shut down gambling, we cleaned the house if you will, but we have also learned it is impossible to shut down everything amid the new digital world. There will always exist individuals who would commit bad things and therefore we realized that we need to regulate and formalize it and make everything transparent by resorting to the best international expertise and experience, which is the best way to combat illegitimacy in this field.

I am sure such a pledge cost you nothing and it would take just making your experts available to help us with these final steps of this legal act, Prime Minister Rama said at the inauguration ceremony.