The player who bridges two clubs

When Liverpool travel to Austria to face LASK in the Champions League, there is a name worth pausing on before a ball is kicked. Besian Idrizaj spent three years at Anfield without ever making a senior competitive appearance for the club, and yet his story is one that cuts deeper than most. He arrived from LASK in 2005, full of ambition and a self-confessed lifelong love of Liverpool. He left in 2008. Two years after that, he was gone at just 22 years old, his career having been complicated by health issues in the years following his departure.

Idrizaj had joined from LASK Linz after a successful trial, signing a two-year deal with the option of a third, and he wore his feelings about the move plainly on his sleeve from the start. "I have always been a Liverpool fan and it is a dream come true to play for them," he said on arrival during those heady post-Istanbul weeks. "If you get a chance to go to Liverpool on trial then you have to take it. You cannot ignore a trial with the reigning Champions League winners. I would even have swum across the channel just to take part." Words that belong to a teenager, but also words that carry real weight when you know how the story ends.

A hat-trick, a homepage, and a phone call home

His Liverpool career was largely played out in the reserve ranks and on pre-season pitches, but one afternoon in north Wales gave his family and anyone watching a genuine glimpse of what might have been. On 7 July 2007 at Wrexham's Racecourse Ground, the tall Austrian forward of Kosovan descent scored three goals in the first 26 minutes of a 3-2 win, all of them set up by Jermaine Pennant, with the third finished with a powerful header that drew comparisons to his hero Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The 6ft 2ins forward had been likened to the Swede in playing style and personality, and for a brief, brilliant spell that morning, you could see why.

His brother Qerim recalled the moment with real warmth in an interview with The Athletic in 2020. "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?'" That image of a young man ringing home on a prepaid card to tell his family to check a football website says everything about who he was.

His route to Wrexham had begun a couple of years earlier, when scouts from across the continent had spotted him at the 2004 European Under-17 Championships in France. He had featured 28 times for LASK in 2004-05, made a name for himself on the European stage, and accepted Liverpool's invitation to trial without a second thought. He was never going to walk straight into first-team contention at 17, and frustrating early injuries complicated his first season, but by 2006-07 he had settled into the reserve side and was growing into the player the club hoped he might become.

A goal at Southend and a career cut cruelly short

His only English league goal came during a loan spell at Luton towards the end of that 2006-07 season. He played seven times for a Hatters side bottom of the Championship, and scored once in a 3-1 win at Southend, racing onto a ball over the top and finishing calmly with his left foot. It was composed, it was clinical, and it was, as it turned out, the only time he would find the net in a competitive league match in England.

Liverpool exercised their option to extend his contract for a third year, but the summer of 2007 was the one that brought Fernando Torres to Anfield, with Andriy Voronin also arriving and Peter Crouch still in the building. The opportunities for a young forward without a senior competitive appearance to his name were not going to multiply. He left the club in 2008 having never broken through, spent time at Swansea City, where he is still fondly remembered, and died in 2010 at the age of 22 after a career shaped and ultimately ended by health problems. His shirt number at Swansea was retired in his memory.

When Liverpool walk out in Austria, the connection between these two clubs is not just geography or competition draws. It is the story of a teenager who swam no channels but crossed a continent for a dream, scored three goals in 26 minutes, rang his brother on a prepaid card, and deserves to be remembered for far more than a footnote.