Football in the Balkans II

Preface

Richard Mills

The year 2024 marks the thirtieth anniversary of contrasting events in the history of football on the Balkan Peninsula. While national teams and players from the eastern Balkans experienced a golden age three decades ago, football in the war-torn west of the peninsula was internationally isolated and territorially riven. Yet, even there, play continued.

Over 90,000 spectators packed into Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium to witness Romania’s group stage victory over 1994 World Cup hosts the USA. Having topped the group, the Romanians overcame Argentina in the round of sixteen, before bowing out on penalties in the quarterfinals. Neighboring Bulgaria had an even more successful tournament, with victories over Argentina, Mexico, and defending champions Germany on their way to the semi-finals and a fourth-place finish. The USA94 “All-Star Eleven” featured Romania’s Gheorghe Hagi and Bulgarian teammates Krasimir Balakov and Hristo Stoichkov, the latter ending the tournament as joint top-scorer. Stoichkov also took the Ballon D’Or in 1994, a year when fellow World Cup star Hagi joined him at FC Barcelona. It was a summer that thrust these post-socialist countries on the Black Sea’s western shores into football’s global limelight.

The contrast with developments on the western, Adriatic, side of the peninsula could not have been starker. As Diana Ross opened the feel-good USA94 tournament with her comically inaccurate ceremonial penalty kick, the inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia had already endured three years of devastating conflict. The Yugoslav national team had been expelled from the international stage and the domestic football landscape shattered by the disintegration of the federal state and its sporting competitions. Nevertheless, the game stoically endured in the most difficult circumstances. In Bosnia and Hercegovina, an ongoing complex civil war resulted in the evolution of three distinct “national” competitions in 1994. In Bosnian government-held territory, Čelik Zenica won the inaugural Championship of Bosnia and Hercegovina, having hosted a makeshift final tournament under irregular wartime conditions. In Bosnian Serb territory, a fraught logistical situation made it impossible to hold a league championship in 1994, but Kozara Gradiška lifted the Republika Srpska Cup as part of celebrations to honor the Republika Srpska Army. Not to be outdone, the short-lived Bosnian Croat entity staged its own Football Championship of Herceg-Bosna, won by Mladost Široki Brijeg. Neither did the carnage of war prevent Bosnian footballers from appearing on the international stage, albeit in unconventional ways. In spring 1994, FK Sarajevo returned from a 12-month tour of Europe and Asia, where they raised awareness of the plight of their besieged city. In one of the more astonishing moments of the lengthy siege, some fifteen thousand Sarajevans took advantage of a ceasefire to watch a match between a city representation and a team of UN peacekeepers. It was a world away from the glitz and glamour of the Pasadena Rose Bowl, but even here football enabled players and fans a brief moment of respite.

In war-weary neighboring Croatia, the game thrived on either side of tense battlelines. The ailing breakaway Croatian Serb state of Republika Srpska Krajina—which would disappear from the map just a year later—held its own competitions in 1994, culminating with state president Milan Martić presenting the RSK Cup to victors Bukovica Kistanje. In the territories under Zagreb’s control, Croatian football was doing its best to rebuild, although the fact that strategically vital transport links remained severed by the separatist entity meant that the young republic’s clubs had to take lengthy detours by road and sea to compete in domestic competitions. UN sanctions against the much-diminished Federal Republic of Yugoslavia barred Serbia’s football giants from European football—including 1991 continental champions Red Star Belgrade—but Croatian sides had been readmitted for the 1993–1994 season. This enabled Hajduk Split to shine on the European stage, as they reached the quarterfinals of the 1994–1995 UEFA Champions League. Indeed, the group stage of that competition suggested that the region’s clubs had a bright future. Alongside Hajduk, the Balkan contingent consisted of Galatasaray, 1986 winners Steaua Bucharest, and AEK Athens.

Thirty years on, the football landscape of the Balkans is transformed. Romania and Bulgaria, the powerhouses of 1994, have failed to qualify for the World Cup for over 25 years. By contrast, the countries of the former Yugoslavia have made a combined total of 14 appearances at the finals between 1998 and 2022, providing two qualifiers for every edition of the World Cup. Most striking of all are the feats of the Croatian national team. Representing a young country of under four million inhabitants, Croatia’s footballers made an astonishing run to the World Cup Final in Russia, a feat sandwiched between impressive third-place finishes in 1998 and 2022. Elsewhere, Greece provided one of the shocks of European Championship history, returning to the 2004 tournament after a lengthy absence and winning it as a rank outsider. Turkey, a footballing power that had been absent from the World Cup finals for over four decades, provided another shock by finishing third at the 2002 World Cup and followed this up with another third-place finish at the 2008 European Championship. Yet, club sides from the Balkans have struggled in European competitions over the last three decades, rarely reaching the latter stages. Galatasaray—based on the Balkan west bank of the Bosporus strait which divides the Turkish largest city—are a rare exception, having lifted the UEFA Cup in 2000.

Domestically, club football across the region has struggled in the face of economic hardship, corruption, legal scandals, and the constant exodus of talent to more affluent leagues. Political and financial transitions which began in the late-1980s have culminated in pitched battles over the ownership and identities of such storied clubs as Steaua Bucharest and CSKA Sofia, but also of lesser-known sides like Kosovo’s FK Trepça/FK Trepča. This has generated national league tables featuring multiple iterations of the same club, with contested claims to the legacies of their socialist-era forebears. A sad continuity throughout the decades in question have been the deadly bouts of hooligan violence and nationalist outbursts that have scarred the game across the region. Most recently, we have witnessed the fatal stabbing of an AEK Athens fan during violent clashes involving visiting Dinamo Zagreb ultras in August 2023, and a physical assault by a Turkish Süper Lig club president on referee Halil Umut Meler, which triggered the Turkish Football Federation to temporarily suspend all league football in December 2023. Other major developments over the last three decades have included the turbulent reintegration of league football in post-war Bosnia and Hercegovina, the controversial recognition of Kosovo by UEFA and FIFA, and the steady development of the women’s game throughout the region. The same period has seen the peninsula capture international attention in other ways. The erection of state-of-the-art stadiums in Balkan capitals (though the countries of the former Yugoslavia are notable exceptions in this regard) has attracted multiple European finals to the peninsula. Most recently, Bucharest staged matches of the delayed UEFA Euro 2020 tournament, Istanbul hosted the 2023 Champions League Final, and the Albanian capital Tirana welcomed the inaugural UEFA Conference League Final in 2022.

Ever since the first leather ball rolled into the Balkan Peninsula, the game has been at the forefront of social and political developments. Consequently, the region’s football landscape has attracted growing academic interest over the last three decades. In the intriguing collection of essays that follows, editors Teodor Borisov, Maroš Melichárek, and Dariusz Wojtaszyn offer readers new insights from talented and innovative researchers based at universities across the continent. In combination, they shed light on a tantalizing array of historical and contemporary developments. With the game as fluid now as it was back in 1994, this is an opportune time to subject Balkan football to another round of scrutiny.