Normalising Political Relations through Football: the Case of Croatia and Serbia (1990–2013)

Abstract

‘In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.’ This aphorism, attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre, can be applied to the situation in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s: football was very complicated indeed. During that period, football stadia across the country became breeding grounds for nationalist conflicts, especially between football fans from Serbia and Croatia. Yugoslavia, at that point, was facing deep internal crises, economic as well as political, while interethnic tensions between the constituent nations were driving the country further towards what seemed like an inevitable dissolution. Like most of Western Europe during the 1980s, Yugoslavia had serious problems of hooliganism and football violence. While in Britain Margaret Thatcher was cracking down on what was identified as a ‘slum game played in slum stadiums watched by slum people’ (Goldblatt, 2008, p. 542), the roots of football-related violence in Yugoslavia were of a different nature.