The main reason is probably that he comes from a region no one takes seriously footballwise. 10 years ago you could buy some amazing talents in South America for surprisingly low prices, but not today when all the teams scout that area heavily. Unlike there, Eastern Europe is not regarded highly by the best leagues despite the fact that more and more decent players are coming from there (from Croatia, Serbia, Romania, now Bosnia too etc.), but you can still buy them at a cut price.
I can speak for players coming from ex-Yugoslavia (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo). As someone who's followed Yugoslavian football in the past. Yugoslavia always had a lot of technically gifted and creative players. But had a very restrictive system in which a player was not allowed to play abroad until they were 28 (pretty much the beginning of the twilight of their careers.)
I will give you an example of Safet Susic, beast of a player who would have been a household name in the world if he hadn't spent the first 10 years of his career confined to playing in Yugoslavia. Joined PSG when he was 28 and still managed to attain the legend status there, and is regarded today as one of PSG's best players ever.
Gerd Muller had this to say about Susic:
"If you were to rank Safet Sušić with the all-time greats, you would have to put him in at least the top 40." And Muller probably never heard of Susic until after he was 28.
Traditionally we never lacked technical ability, we lacked in conditioning and stamina. Because the football played in Yugoslavia was not so running and stamina oriented.
Fast forward to the early 90s and the Balkan wars. Large portion of population got displaced. In case of Bosnia one third of population was exiled. You are now seeing kids of Bosnian expats, who are being brought up in much better organised youth systems. And the conditioning and stamina is no longer an issue. Certainly players like Ibrahimovic, Pjanic, Besic, Begovic, Jelavic, Shaqiri.. to name a few, fall in this category.
So to some Bosnia may not sound like some country with a long footballing history but they would be mistaken, because we are football mad like you wouldn't believe. Our league is [Poor language removed] however, because anyone decent leaves as soon as they can (Dzeko was sold to Teplice for 75k Euro! and the people who sold him couldn't believe how lucky they got to get that much for him), and for a long time we coudn't put a decent national team together due to corrupt FA and so on.. But the talent never lacked.
