Bosnian Football: a (not so) Brief History

I told myself I’d keep this short. I failed. Summarizing the early days was easy enough, but glossing over the details that I’ve lived through myself proved too difficult. This will probably be the longest post I’ll ever write, but I’ll try to make it up to you by linking to assorted Youtube goodies along the way. Sound good?

Origins:

Rather than delving into prehistory (the arrival of football by way of Vienna), I’ll start with the Yugoslav period. As most readers will know, Bosnia-Herzegovina was one of the federal republics in this now-defunct state, along with Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia. Between Red Star’s 1990-91 season and the ‘98 World Cup, most people are familiar with the footballing exploits of the first two. Less well known, however, is Bosnia’s unofficial standing as the 3rd footballing republic.

There’s no denying that in football, as in many other spheres of culture, Serbia and Croatia were dominant. That said, Bosnia-Herzegovina was a notch above the remaining republics, and played an important part in building Yugoslavia’s football tradition. Of the top ten clubs on the Yugoslav First League’s all-time table, 5 are Serbian, 2 are Croatian, and 3 (#7 Sarajevo, #8 Željezničar and #9 Velež) are Bosnian. Of these three, Sarajevo and Željezničar were the only two non-Serbo-Croat teams to win the title. Bosnian players, ranging from Dušan Bajević to Safet Sušić, were not only featured in the national team, but played prolific roles.

Establishment and the 1990s:

The infamous 1992-95 war brought virtually all footballing activity to a grinding halt. The clubs were effectively defunct, the ultras swapped the terraces for the trenches and all promising talent left the country to continue their careers elsewhere. Although a national selection was formed as early as the 1993 Mediterranean games, the logistical problems were immense. When an officially recognized national team emerged from the wreckage in 1995, it had the goodwill of the international community and little else.

The available talent pool was a particular problem for manager Fuad Muzurović. The war had left Bosnian talents uprooted and scattered across Europe, so a necessary generational change was made all the more difficult. Equally problematic, ethnic tensions and political animosity meant that star players of Serb and Croat ethnicity couldn’t or wouldn’t play for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Players like Mario Stanić (Parma, Chelsea) and Risto Vidaković (Red Star, Real Betis) would’ve been key names on Bosnia’s roster in the 90s, but were instead lost to neighboring states.

The Slišković era:

The first decade in the history of Bosnia’s national team was thus a very turbulent one. Various managers came and went, as Bosnian football was repeatedly re-structured and re-organized alongside the rapidly changing country. On the whole, however, things changed for the better. By 2002, sectarian competitions had been merged to form a unified country-wide league. Slowly but surely, locally-trained Bosnian Serb and Croat players were integrated into the national team. And abroad, a promising generation began to reach maturity, with players such as Elvir Bolić (Fenerbahce), Elvir Baljić (Real Madrid), Hasan Salihamidžić (Bayern Munchen), Sergej Barbarez (HSV), Mirsad Hibic (Atletico Madrid) and Muhamed Konjić (Monaco).

This generation reached its prime under the tenure of manager Blaž Slišković (2002-2006), when it very nearly achieved the major goal of post-war Bosnian football: qualification to a major tournament. Unfortunately, both campaigns – for Euro 2004 and the 2006 World Cup – ended in heartbreak. In 2004, Bosnia simply had to beat Denmark at home to finish first in the group; it drew 1-1 and ended up third. Two years later, a qualifying spot was still theoretically possible heading into the last game against Serbia in Belgrade; the game ended as 1-0 loss and was marked by now-infamous crowd violence.

The quest for Euro 2008, when all the troubles with Bosnian football broke to the surface, actually began with great optimism. Bosnia had been drawn as the 3rd seed to what seemed like the easiest qualifying group – Group C – together with Greece, Turkey, Norway, Hungary, Moldovia and Malta. Unfortunately, the wheels came off the wagon very early on. After starting the campaign with a 5-2 away drubbing of Malta, Bosnia suffered a 3-1 loss to Hungary at home. The debacle started in the 36th minute, when the Greek Cypriot referee awarded Hungary a nonexistent penalty. As if that wasn’t enough, three minutes later, Emir Spahić was given a second yellow card for arguing over a foul. In the ensuing confusion, the Hungarians scored two more goals in the 46th and 49th minutes. It was Bosnia’s first defeat at Zenica’s Bilino Polje stadium, and the nation was shocked. Slišković offered to resign, but the FA refused and instructed him to re-focus on the upcoming matches against Greece and Moldova.

With these two games, the situation deteriorated from bad to worse. Obviously in disarray, Bosnia went down 0-2 to lowly Moldovia, before clawing back to a 2-2 draw. Against Greece, the team suffered another questionable penalty decision. This time, a Greek player shot the ball directly at a defender’s face, and the latter raised his hands to protect himself. The referee pointed to the spot and Greece took a 0-1 lead. Then, only a short time later, he gave Saša Papac a red card for a foul committed by Emir Spahić. Despite being a man down, Bosnia dominated the game for the next hour or so, getting several good shots in on goal. Unfortunately, it all fell apart in the last 8 minutes, as the Greeks scored three more to finish 1-4. This time, no one stopped Slišković from handing in his resignation; the qualifying campaign was over before it had ever really begun.

Savez – the roots of the problem:

Before going into the reactions to the loss against Greece, it’s important to explain just how corrupt and incompetent the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Football Federation is. The country’s FA – abbreviated as NFSBiH or simply called “Savez” (the federation) for short – traces its current form to the integration of the previously mentioned sectarian domestic competitions. So by 2002, the separate Herzeg-Bosnia (Croat), Republika Srpska (Serb) and “Bosnian” (Bosniak-Muslim dominated) leagues were merged to form the Bosnian Premier League, and the Savez was created as its country-wide governing structure.

Unfortunately, the compromises made to achieve this resulted in an incredibly corrupt and dysfunctional institution. Rather than having one president, the position rotates between members of the country’s three main ethnic groups. But unlike in other countries, where FAs are headed by society’s big names and football luminaries, the men at the top of the Bosnian football pyramid are borderline-criminals, appointed through shady back-room dealing and with little or no background in sports. To illustrate this, take Iljo Dominković, the current Croat member of the NFSBiH presidency. Prior to the war, he worked at a provincial corner store and as a low level sports journalist. Today, he’s the most powerful man in Bosnian football. This is a picture of him and his family at the 2006 World Cup.

I wish I was kidding.

Needless to say, Dominković and the other higher-ups at the NFSBiH are hated by the overwhelming majority of Bosnian fans. Some specific reasons? Well, they launched no complaints over the referee decisions in the Greece and Hungary games. Then, following the crowd trouble at the Serbia-Bosnia game (a number of Bosnians were injured by rocks and flares thrown into their section), they placed all blame on their own fans. And they’ve done next to nothing to bring in Bosnian talent playing abroad; they rejected this guy when he offered his services as a teenager.

But it’s not just that they’re wholly incompetent to do their jobs, it’s that they’re also using the national team to launder money and make profits off of it. Two of the senior-most officials are currently in court for “losing” hundreds of thousands of Euros, all while NFSBiH publicly claims to be lacking funds. A number of players, ranging from midfielder Elvir Rahimić (CSKA Moscow) to Sead Ramović, have come forward saying they were told they had to pay their way onto the team.

Meanwhile, players of less than dubious quality have often been called to the team because their managers had connections with the FA officials. A cap for the Bosnian national team looks really nice when you’re trying to sell a client to some lower-level Russian club, and it was understood that the FA officials in question would get a nice share of the profits. There have literally been dozens of these players, brought into the national team through a revolving door, making one appearance and never being heard from again. But perhaps the most absurd example is Ante Aračić, who was called up for the re-match against Greece in the Euro 2008 qualifiers. Aričić isn’t even Bosnian – he’s from a town in Croatia. What’s more, at the time that he was called up, his team was at the very bottom of the Belgian league and he hadn’t made a single appearance all season.

Rat savezu – War on the FA

The war in the 90s had left hundreds of thousands of Bosnians living as refugees abroad, in countries like Germany, Sweden and the United States. By 2007, this “diaspora” was well integrated into their new countries, but keeping a close watch on developments at home. The national team – a source of national pride for any community – had became a particularly important expression of Bosnian identity for those living thousands of miles from their homeland. Organized support quickly arose, and coalesced around an organization specifically formed to support Bosnia’s national sports teams – BHFanaticos, or BHF for short.

BHF rapidly grew, establishing branches in all countries with significant Bosnian populations, and particularly within Bosnia-Herzegovina itself. Its achievements were impressive, and included an astounding 15,000 Bosnian fans at an away qualifier against Belgium. Needless to say, they were harshly critical of the Savez from the outset. When Bosnia lost the games against Hungary and Greece, they began their “rat savezu,” or “war on the FA.” They called for an immediate boycott of the national team, and were soon joined by several of its best players, including captain Sergej Barbarez. Chaos ensued. In the next qualifying game, against Norway, they made sure their presence was felt.

The protest certainly captured people’s attentions, but the end result was entirely unexpected: Bosnia won 2-1. A few months later, interim coach Fuad Muzurović guided the team to another unexpected victory in Sarajevo. This time the victim was Turkey, as Adnan Čustović scored from a corner kick in the closing minute to make it 3-2. With a quiet 1-0 victory against Malta a few days later, Bosnia had remarkably made its way back up to 2nd place in the group. Suddenly, supporters were divided, and pressure on the FA was noticeably lower.

But Muzurović made a costly mistake in the next game against Hungary. When several of the boycotting players indicated they would be willing to return, he brushed them off, calling them unneeded and maintaining that the squad he had could do the job on its own. With an uninspiring 1-0 away loss, the popular enthusiasm behind his team burst like a balloon. The fans boycott was in full force, and a pitiful 4,000 showed up at Sarajevo’s Koševo stadium (capacity 36,000) to see Bosnia lose 1-0 to Moldovia. Coupled with the U-21 team’s away defeat to Malta, the Savez had lost all the good will it had managed to hold onto. The team suffered through three straight defeats to finish the campaign in fourth place.

Chaos ensued. Muzurović was promptly fired, along with nearly all the youth-side coaches. Chariman Ahmet Pašalić, arguably the most hated member of the Savez, was pressured into resigning. Earlier in September, Milan Jelić, Serb member of the FA presidency and prominent nationalist ogliarch, died of a heart attack; he was replaced by the relatively moderate “outsider” Bogdan Čeko. After much deliberation and extensive pressure from the fans, Meho Kodro was appointed the new national team manager.

Kodro to Blažević and beyond

In the early days of the Bosnian national team, Kodro was its first real star – an accomplished goal-scorer that was brought to Barcelona by Johan Cruijff. Bosnian supporters greeted his appointment enthusiastically, because they saw him as an “untouchable” immune to the corruption around NFSBiH. Kodro himself was cautiously optimistic, bringing in Elvir Bolić – by then the national team’s all-time leading goalscorer and an outspoken critic of the NFSBiH – as assistant. The boycotting players all returned, and the atmosphere was generally great.

Unfortunately, things quickly deteriorated. Prior to the appointment, NFSBiH officials had scheduled a friendly against Japan in the middle of all major European club competitions. Kodro had to put together a ramshackle team of youngsters and domestic league players and fly them to the other side of the world with minimal preparation – they lost 3-0. NFSBiH promised not to make such rash decisions again, but then three months later scheduled a bizzare friendly with Iran and a home match against Azerbaijan.

Bosnia had played Iran several times in the past several years, and it was a public secret that the matches were scheduled because they brought in money “on the side” for Savez officals; one player even told of seeing Pašalić walking around with a bag full of cash. Kodro was outraged by the decision, and outright refused to take the team to Tehran. The players and fans overwhelmingly stood behind him. BHF threatened wide-spread reprecussions if the FA “laid a finger” on Kodro.

On May 17, Kodro was sacked. Incredible public outrage followed. A new boycott was called for. Virtually every player with any name-recognition either suffered mysterious injuries or flat out refused to come. The national media ran daily stories against the FA officials. Massive street protests were organized in Sarajevo, involving clashes with the police. Kodro and Bolić pledged to do all within their power to bring the NFSBiH leadership down, scheduling a humanitarian game in Sarajevo on the same day as the Azerbaijan friendly. More than 20,000 people attended it, while several dozen came to the “official match” in Zenica. With an important NFSBiH meeting on the horizons, the public expected resignations and a major restructuring. Instead, NFSBiH postponed the meeting for a month, moved to another city and did absolutely nothing. Then, on July 10th they appointed Miroslav Blažević as Kodro’s replacement.

Blažević, born in 1935 in the central Bosnian town of Travnik, is undoubtedly one of the biggest coaching names in the history of Yugoslavian football. This is not because he’s a particularly capable tactician, but because of his charismatic public persona, the media circus that follows his every move and his previous successes at the helm (he was Croatia’s manager at the 98 World Cup). Once he came on the stage, much of the criticism of the NFSBiH quieted down dramatically. In the nearly half a year since, he’s received healthy media support while cultivating a love-hate relationship with Bosnia’s fans. While distracting from the abuses of NFSBiH and thus stalling reform, he’s also inspired a lot of optimism and fostered a generally positive atmosphere. His record in World Cup 2010 qualifying, however, has been so-so: he engineered a disappointing 0-1 loss against Spain, a record-breaking 7-0 demolition of Estonia, a frustrating 1-2 self-destruction against Turkey and a thorough 4-1 beating of Armenia. In that time, he’s benefited from a new generation of Bosnian talents starting to reach maturity. Time will tell whether it can transcend the limits of its predecessors.