Croatia’s World Cup success is no fluke
The small country wins thanks to a unique combination of professionalism and warlike nationalist fervour
war criminal. The police, considered an instrument of the Serb-led Yugoslav state, intervened too late and focused on the hardcore Dinamo fans — the Bad Blue Boys, as they call themselves. A Dinamo player, Zvonimir Boban, got into the fight to help a fan. His act became a symbol of resistance to Croats.
At another football game, between Hajduk Split and Partizan Belgrade, in September 1990, Hajduk’s hardcore fans, the Torcida, burned the Yugoslav flag and chanted, “Croatia — independent state.”
Franjo Tudjman, the nationalist leader at the head of the independence drive, used the football fan organisations’ radicalism to drive his message and football itself to acquire legitimacy for an increasingly independent Croatia. In October 1990, a game between a selection of Croat players and the US national team was seen as the secessionists’ major diplomatic success. Athletes continued serving as Tudjman’s informal ambassadors throughout the ensuing war. And once it was won, Tudjman — who proclaimed that “after war, sport is the first thing by which you can distinguish nations” — continued attaching major importance to football.
In 1998, when Croatia unexpectedly won third place in the World Cup, Boban, the team captain, 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 European Union (it acceded in 2013). Still, the country was and remains no stranger to post-Communist corruption, and in recent years, much of the Croatian football story has been about graft. In early June, Zdravko Mamic, former chief executive of Dinamo Zagreb and the unoffi-