World Cup finalists Croatia are a football team forged in war
Why the seemingly unbeatable France must fear tonight’s opponents
● Three of the four teams that reached the football World Cup semifinals represent Western European societies struggling with immigration and integration. The fourth, and most surprising, consists entirely of local boys from a tiny country.
Croatia’s success has different origins than those of its rivals: in that country, football is more than a game. It’s fed a war, the nation-building that followed — and the post-victory comedown, which, perversely, may have led to its team’s stunning achievement.
For a country with a population of 4.2 million, Croatia is spectacularly successful at sports. Besides football, it’s got top teams in handball, water polo and basketball, and Croatian tennis players are part of the global elite.
In part, this probably has to do with genetics: Croats (and their neighbours from Serbia and Bosnia) are among the tallest people in the world, and many are naturally athletic. There are thousands of sports clubs, most of them left over from the former Yugoslavia’s achievementoriented sports project.
Football, however, is a special case. In May 1990 there was a riot at Maksimir Stadium, in Croatia’s biggest city, Zagreb. It was between Zagreb Dinamo and Red Star, from Belgrade, the capital of neighbouring Serbia. To many Croats, this was the beginning of the civil war that destroyed Yugoslavia and established their country as a separate state.
The Serb fans were led into the riot by Zeljko Raznatovic, who as Arkan became a war criminal. Police intervened too late and focused on the hardcore Dinamo fans. A Dinamo player, Zvonimir Boban, got into the fight to help a fan. His act became a symbol of resistance to Croats.
At another game, between Hajduk Split and Partizan Belgrade, in September 1990, Hajduk’s hardcore fans burnt the Yugoslav flag and chanted: “Croatia — independent state.”
“If the Maksimir riots are interpreted as the ‘day the war started’, then this game had to be termed as the day Yugoslavia stopped existing,” wrote Dario Brentin of Graz University in Austria, who has studied the links between football and politics in the Balkans.
Franjo Tudjman, the nationalist leader at the head of the independence drive, used the football fan organisations’ radicalism to drive his message, and the game itself to acquire legitimacy for an increasingly independent Croatia.
In October 1990, a match between a selection of Croat players and the US national team was seen as the secessionists’ major diplomatic success. Sportsmen and -women served as Tudjman’s informal ambassadors throughout the war.
In 1998, when Croatia unexpectedly won third place in the World Cup, Boban, the team captain and national hero, praised Tudjman as “father of all things we Croats love, also the father of our national team”.
Tudjman centralised football governance and sometimes would even interfere in coaching decisions; to him, football was a weapon and a tool for building a national identity for domestic consumption and for a world that wasn’t particularly interested in distinguishing between “former Yugoslav” states.
Tudjman died in 1999, but his state-building project was successful enough eventually to get Croatia into the EU (it acceded in 2013). Still, the country was and remains no stranger to postcommunist corruption, and in recent years, much of the Croatian football story has been about graft.
In early June, Zdravko Mamic, former CEO of Dinamo Zagreb and the unofficial boss of Croatian football, was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison for diverting some $18-million (R240million) from players’ transfer fees. Dinamo sold their top players, including Luka Modric, the star of the national team, through an agency run by Mamic and his brother.
Mamic fled to Bosnia, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Croatia. Modric is accused of perjuring himself during the Mamic trial, at which his testimony could have helped the football boss.
Another Croatia star, Andrej Kramaric, refused to sign a contract like Modric’s, according to which Mamic’s agency would have been entitled to part of his transfer fees.
The fans, who have waged a war in recent years to end corruption in Croatian football and get more of a say in how the clubs are run, are again at the forefront of a political battle — this time against Croatia’s crony capitalism; to them Kramaric is a hero and Modric is a traitor.
It’s unclear whether Croatia can be as strong when this generation of stars retires. The country’s economy is suffering from years of mismanagement. With youth unemployment at 33% and the heavily indebted government too deeply involved in key industries, the country can hardly sustain the training system it inherited from socialist times. While fans remain a political force, with all their nationalist warts and anticapitalist pathos, the fervour of the 1990s no longer determines the political landscape.
Yet that fervour appears to be back to some extent as the country celebrates the team’s victories. This may be the last war for a while that the national team is winning, but the memories of the time when football was more than a game still live.
That’s why Croatian President Kolinda GrabarKitarovic is the only national leader at the World Cup to wear the national colours and make a convincing show of supporting the team. The Tudjman-era legacy, the realisation that sometimes a team’s performance may be existentially important for a nation, isn’t gone.
Croatia’s success lies at the crossroads between professionalism forged in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish leagues and the fierce spirit of the 1990s. This is a combination that left England by the wayside and can be fearsome even to the seemingly unbeatable French.