With a return to the pitch on the horizon, Vlora are ramping up for the spring of 2025. Founder Adi Bilani recently sat down with new team content writer Dominic Jose Bisogno for a long-form interview that digs into the history of Vlora, exploring how the club came to be, what it means to Bilani, and what lies ahead.
The Philosophy
Vlora has many goals and missions, but one major ambition of the team is to be a place that welcomes players with open arms. Bilani explained that looking back, he sees that the founding of Vlora was rooted in his own mental health journey as a player. Bilani arrived in the US at 15 years old from Vlorë, Albania, going on to attend Southwest High School and Dakota County Technical College.
“When I was young, living here and unable to go back home for a while, it was tough for me as a young man. I was all about soccer when I came to the States, I was on the U18 team of Flamurtari when I left Albania,” Bilani said. “I went through what I know now was depression. I didn’t know what it was at the time. I felt this emptiness in my chest. I felt like I didn’t have a purpose here. Creating Vlora, the journey we’ve been on, helped me belong to something and gave me purpose. I wanted to do for others what I had done for myself. … That’s why cutting a player is the hardest thing to do and we wanted multiple levels to play. You see how much it means to them. I know what soccer means to me, I know what it means to them.”
Vlora gave Bilani a new chapter in his life, a chapter that connects to his history and also has helped him go down new paths as an owner and administrator at Vlora.
“I say that Vlora gave me my freedom in 2012. That was 100 years after Albania got its freedom from the Ottoman Empire with the leadership of Ismail Qemali, who was a freedom fighter. That’s why he’s on our badge, our flag,” he added. “The experience working with managing the club is different from playing but it’s also very strong. The excitement of scoring a goal has been replaced by the opportunities to work with players and develop them as young men, helping players with job opportunities and other parts of their lives. … Vlora is my baby.”
The club and Bilani have worked hard in the following years to build a culture at Vlora. That culture is informed by values Bliani was raised with in Albania, but also is a platform for respect and camaraderie across countless lines of nationality, religion, race, and more.
“The culture of Vlora is a culture of working together, bettering yourself and being willing to listen to others, respecting everybody. … It’s all about how I grew up. In Albania, we’re very competitive. We don’t like losing in any game, but we’re all part of the same community. That’s why I’m always willing to put everybody in the spotlight. That’s what soccer is about, everyone being part of the community. We compete on the pitch, yes, but we also help eachother. That’s part of Albania, with everything we have been through, the community is everything. … Everyone can be involved. We want to show an example that we can all live together.”
The Origins
Vlora first took shape after Bilani left the club Minnesota Kings. He gathered players to take part in a Latino league in Burnsville. He eventually reconnected with players he met in high school and college, putting together a team that would go touring around futsal leagues in the cities and tournaments between 2011 and 2012.
“I felt like calling the team Vlora meant that I would always have a connection with home. That kept me going, kept me motivated. It was also a way to introduce people to my home, because a lot of people here didn’t know about Albania,” Bilani said. “Vlora played in the winter and we played with a team in Edina called Super Eagles in the summer. We were getting better but we weren’t division one. I talked to Kris Chavez, who owned the Super Eagles, and basically we agreed that I would take over the team because she wanted to move on from running it. So, the following year we rebranded the team as Vlora City FC. We went on to earn promotion our first year as Vlora in the MASL.”
The role of matchmaker was not new for Biliani, but lower league soccer in Minnesota did present unique challenges, some of which only helped fuel the fire.
“I’ve always done stuff like this, since I was young. In Albania, I was the kid that would get our neighborhood together to play other parts of the city, I would talk to the leaders of the other groups and we’d organize scrimmages. … When we became Vlora City in the MASL, we asked a few teams that were high level in the state for scrimmages, most of them rejected us either because they didn’t want to worry about losing to a D2 team or because they thought we were inferior to them. … I told my players when that was happening, mark my words we’re going to be a big club someday and everyone’s going to want to play us. … Those reactions kind of motivated me to push harder and it also helped me understand later on that I wanted to give opportunities to other clubs that wanted to play against us.”
The team’s first division one season brought plenty of attention, but Vlora’s empact grew tenfold after the team later decided to join the UPSL.
“We did tryouts to figure out what we were working with and 40 people came out. It was cool to see so many people interested,” Bilani explained. “The numbers and the range of skill made us realize we should have a second team, so we joined MASL division four as well. I didn’t want to cut players, I wanted to give people opportunities to play. … The year after we reached MASL division one, we started playing friendlies against some UPSL teams, Granite City, FC Minneapolis, and we were performing well consistently and we were being told we were good enough to play in the UPSL. … We had about 140 trialists when we hosted tryouts for that season, that’s our biggest tryout pool ever. That made us all realize the potential of the platform we had built and how much it could still grow.”
Making an Impact
Vlora became heavily involved in the local community in 2020, helping their neighbors get by in the difficult times that followed the COVID-19 lockdown and the killing of George Floyd in South Minneapolis.
“I saw that my community was hurting, from COVID, from the death of George Floyd, and I felt we had a platform that could get people together and make an impact,” Bilani continued. “We got everyone in our circle together and we raised money and gathered resources. We were able to pay for multiple food trucks and we helped people and schools around uptown, midtown, also some in Northeast Minneapolis. We also raised about $5,000 which we used to help people who were homeless or struggling. We did that work because it was time of need.”
Staying connected to the community and helping make a positive impact off the pitch is an aspect of the club that Bilani hopes to grow more and more in due time.
“Helping others is something that is a unique feeling, you can only experience this feeling by doing it. It can’t be explained,” he said. “That’s something that’s been stuck with me since we started. We want to continue to grow the ways we connect with non-profits and help people out in the metro. We want our players to be agents of change too.”
