The U21 national team of Macedonia opened the new 2025 EURO qualifiers with an important victory against the host side Sweden.

photo by SvFF: Andrej Stojchevski congratulates keeper Marko Alchevski after a save

n, the strong selection of Sweden within the first round of group C, of the qualifiers for the placement of the European Championship in Slovakia 2025.

The chosen 11 of national team coach Dragi Kanatlarovski played tactically perfectly, compactly and did not allow the Swedish counterparts too much space to play. The opponent had no solution for the excellent placement of our footballers, and in the end Macedonia quite deservedly managed to celebrate a lone goal win.

The game winning goal was scored by Ivan Nikolov early in the 7th minute.

The goal:

It is worth highlighting the fantastic performance of our goalkeeper Marko Alchevski, who made several outstanding saves preventing the Swedes from equalizing.

Macedonia: Marko Alchevski; Stefan Despotovski, Andrej Stojchevski, Reshat Ramadani, Metodi Maksimov (60′ Vane Krstevski), Ivan Nikolov, Luka Stankovski (77′ Dimitar Todorovski), Hamza Ramani (77′ Aleks Zlatkov), Behar Feta, Berat Kalkan (64′ Matej Angelov), Mario Ilievski (c) (60′ Luan Abazi). Bench: Viktor Krstevski, Ivan Nikoloski, Mario Richkov, Martin Talakov.

Macedonia will now welcome the Netherlands on Tuesday at 15.30 CET at the Petar Miloshevski training center in Skopje.