Malisheva

Cup football has become the one stage where Malisheva draws blood against the Kosovo Superliga's established names, and it keeps ending the same way. In 2023-24 the club pushed Ballkani to the quarter-final wire before falling short, and in the 2025-26 campaign it was Llapi standing in the way at the same stage, this time on home ground at Liman Gegaj. No trophy has come of any of it yet, but a club that spent its first two seasons in Kosovo's third tier measuring itself against the country's stronger sides in a cup quarter-final is not a small thing.

That climb happened fast. Malisheva moved up from the Third League to the Second League in 2018-19, then reached the First League the following season, and in 2020-21 won it outright to earn a place in the Superliga for 2021-22. A club that started in Malisheva's third tier in 2016 was playing top-flight football five years later.

The player most tied to that rise is Drilon Hazrolaj, who came through the club's youth academy before 2014, left, and returned to the first team in 2022. Over three Superliga seasons he scored 44 goals in 87 appearances, was named the league's best player in 2024, and earned senior caps for Kosovo before moving to Rapid Bucharest in 2025. It was that run of form, as much as anything, that carried Malisheva into a European qualifying tie against Montenegro's Buducnost Podgorica in the 2024-25 UEFA Conference League.

Before any of that, there was no professional club at all — just a football school set up in Malisheva to train young players from the town. Demand from local youth grew enough that the school was turned into a full club capable of competing at senior level, and that school is where the whole story starts.