Aleksandar Mitrović: The Clutch Goalscorer

Welcome back to the Road to the 2022 World Cup series, where I write about players who could (and in most cases, likely will) feature in the biggest tournament in football. As nations secure their qualification, I will aim to cover at least one player for as many of them as possible.

Last time in this series’s debut, I covered Simon Kjaer, the Danish captain who has performable admirably on the pitch but earned even more respect for his actions off the pitch to help Christian Eriksen during his time of need at Euro 2020. For more about his story, click this link.

This article will focus on a player whose nation, like Denmark, has qualified for 3 of the last 4 World Cups (and you can go further to 2006 for 4 of the last 5 if you include its former state). Denmark partially shed its underdog status through a semifinal finish in the Euro 2020 tournament and with a dominant qualifying campaign. On a smaller scale, Serbia did similarly by topping a World Cup Qualifying group featuring Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal. The clinching game was a 2–1 victory at Estadio da Luz, where Dušan Tadić’s equalizer canceled Renato Sanches’s earlier effort.

The man who scored the decisive goal, his 44th representing Serbia, was none other than Aleksandar Mitrović.

Aleksandar Mitrović was born on September 16, 1994, in Smederevo, Serbia, part of Yugoslavia at the time. Smederevo is the administrative center of the Podunavlje District, and being just 28 miles away from the capital…