Sudden end of a golden generation (nd-aktuell.de)

Ukraine’s footballers have only dried their tears after narrowly missing out on the upcoming World Cup in Qatar with a 1-0 loss in Wales. The national team wanted to give the people at home a sign of hope by qualifying for the World Cup in Qatar. By comparison, potential success in upcoming Nations League games, starting this Wednesday in Ireland, would be cold consolation in wartime. The aggressor’s team is not allowed to play at all – Russia’s national team has been suspended since the beginning of March and, although qualified for the qualifying games, is not allowed to play at the World Cup. Such sanctions are not new; Yugoslavia was excluded almost exactly 30 years ago.

In the fall of 1990, the Yugoslav national team was among the best in the world. She clearly won her first qualifiers for the 1992 European Championships against Northern Ireland, Austria and Denmark. The leading players had known each other for years: in 1987 they had won the Junior World Cup in Chile, in 1990 they had only failed in the quarter-finals at the World Cup for senior national teams in Italy at eventual runners-up Argentina. And now, ahead of the 1992 European Championships in Sweden, they wanted to complete a development that was always going up with the perfect result – with the title.

For decades, the national team was considered a symbol of the functioning Yugoslav multi-ethnic state. In 1990, too, players from all six republics formed a unit. They came from Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia. “The players have met again and again in sports schools since they were young,” says social scientist Dario Brentin, who studies football in the Balkans. “And they met in the Yugoslav league because they weren’t allowed to go abroad for a long time. This is how friendships developed in which national origin and identity didn’t really play a role.« Stars like Robert Prosinečki, Darko Pančev or Predrag Mijatović believed that they belonged to a »golden generation«.

There hasn’t been a trace of such harmony in society since the 1980s. Economic crises and tensions encouraged the longing for ethnically homogeneous individual states. Nationalism led to hate speech, violence and game abandonment in the stadiums. When Red Star Belgrade won the European Cup in 1991, its fans hardly waved Yugoslav flags, but more and more Serbian flags. In Croatian stadiums in Zagreb or Split whistled during the Yugoslav anthem. The national team stormed towards the European Championship anyway. The 7-0 win over the Faroe Islands in May 1991 was the last time the team played with their best line-up.

In June 1991 Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence. The Serb-dominated People’s Army of Yugoslavia wanted above all to bring Croatian territory back under control. In the war that followed, more than 10,000 people were killed and more than 250,000 displaced. Red Star Belgrade hooligans also fought in Croatia and committed war crimes, some of whom later displayed a street sign from Vukovar, a largely destroyed town in eastern Croatia, at a league match in Belgrade. Red Star had to play home games in the European Cup abroad by order of the European Football Union Uefa. Despite the war, the Yugoslav national team was allowed to continue preparing for the 1992 European Championships – meanwhile without Croatian and Slovenian players.

In March 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina also declared its independence. The minority of Bosnian Serbs did not want to accept this, and their troops laid a siege around Sarajevo. In the center of the Bosnian capital was the FK Željezničar stadium, right at the front. Fighting broke out, the lawn resembled a crater. A Serbian sniper killed a soccer fan trying to save a woman who had been shot.

In the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, Ivica Osim heard the news with great concern. Born in Sarajevo during World War II, he identified with the diversity of Yugoslavia. In 1986 the coach took over the national team. On May 23, two and a half weeks before the start of the European Championship, he resigned as national coach. His speech was televised. “My country doesn’t deserve to take part in the European Championships,” he said through tears. “Resigning is the only thing I can do for my city. So that people will remember that I was born in Sarajevo.« Even without their beloved coach, the shrunken Yugoslav squad made their way to the tournament in Sweden.

Their quarters in the coastal town of Ystad were near a camp for Balkan refugees. Fearing protests against the team, the Swedish police moved their camp to Leksand in central Sweden. On May 30, 1992, eleven days before the start of the European Championship, the United Nations passed Resolution 757. It dealt with sanctions against Yugoslavia. The next day the Yugoslav team was excluded from the European Championship.

“Today, people in the Balkans look back on 1992 in very different ways,” says Richard Mills, author of The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia. “In Croatia, being excluded from the European Championship is not the end, but the beginning of a great era.” The new Croatian national team reached the quarter-finals at the 1996 European Championship and two years later finished third in the World Cup. Robert Prosinečki went down in history as the first player to score World Cup goals for two countries, in 1990 for Yugoslavia and eight years later for Croatia. Football accompanied the formation of the Croatian nation.

But in the years that followed, football also showed how fine the line is between patriotism and nationalism. Ultras in Belgrade hailed Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić, responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, for killing 8,000 Bosnians. In Croatia, fans sometimes glorify the Ustasha, a fascist movement during World War II. In all of the successor states of Yugoslavia, supporters also commemorate the victims of the wars of collapse with songs and choreographies. And in the youngest country, Kosovo, many people associate the national team with a social awakening.