World Cup mania: Croatias soccer team scores beyond the field
ZAGREB, Croatia — This is what it feels like, this summer of temporary perfection.
The Croatian Tricolor ripples from car rooftops and hangs outside bars, where the beer drinkers might start singing with no prompting at all. The young and the old wear the same soccer jerseys and retell the same stories and recount what it has felt like night after night, celebrating victories in a central square illuminated red by flares. They wipe away tears as they watch replays of previous games. And even though there is still one match to go — the World Cup final — they savor the days of lead-up, making plans, talking about the players, staying out late and, every so often, confessing that Croatia has hardly ever felt such joy.
“The feeling is only comparable with August 1995. Winning the war,” said Vlado Vurusic, a journalist and author. “We are half a step away from heaven.”
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For the rest of the world, Croatia’s run to Sunday’s World Cup final has been given the shorthand story of a charmed underdog. A nation with fewer people than Kentucky, in the span of 26 days, has won as many World Cup matches as the United States has managed in 68 years. Croatia is the smallest country to reach the finals since Uruguay in 1950.
But within Croatia, the national team’s performance is talked about less like a fairy tale than a reprieve — a burst of delirium across a nation that badly needed it.
Croatia has peace and tourism and democracy, but its 27 years of independence haven’t gone nearly as well as planned. Its economy, after years of recession and mismanagement, is well smaller than it was a decade ago. Since then, Croatia’s population has fallen 6 percent, with young people pouring out of the country to find work. If there’s any consolation, it’s that some of those young people are soccer players. They, too, have gone abroad. They’ve played for elite clubs in Barcelona and Madrid and Turin, and they’ve become among the best players in the world, capable of coming home, joining a national team and winning six matches in a row, surviving one heart-stopper after the next until everything else in Croatia is forgotten.
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“I’m afraid I’m going to die of a heart attack,” said Monika Herceg, 22, who works at a telecommunications company. As if to offer evidence of soccer’s numbing power, she held out the underside of her wrist, singed with an orange and gray cigarette burn.
“I must have gotten burned somehow during the game against Russia” one week ago, she said, “but I didn’t even feel it until I got home. There was just such adrenaline. I was covered in beer. I didn’t feel a thing.”
Croatians will admit they didn’t expect this to happen. Their soccer federation had been battered by corruption, and the national team had become an emblem for some of the country’s ills. But then in its second game of the tournament, Croatia dominated powerhouse Argentina. In the elimination rounds, it survived penalty kicks in matches against Denmark and Russia. And by the time the team ousted England, it felt as if the entire country had been recolored to match the team’s checkerboard uniforms — the pattern shaved into heads, draped over cars and worn by the nation’s ministers at a cabinet meeting.
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“This is ours!” one tabloid said two days before the match against France, and to back it up, the newspaper devoted two full pages to an analysis of head coach Zlatko Dalic’s palm. The lines of his hand, the article said, destined him to go “all the way to the top.”
“You only see smiles on our faces now. And you know, that’s not usual,” said Drazen Lalic, a professor at the University of Zagreb who teaches about politics and sports. “This is one of the greatest successes of the Croatian state during the last 27 years. First, we won in the war. Second, we established democracy. Third, we entered the European Union. And fourth, from my point of view, we made the finals. People now know of this little country of 4 million people.”
It is a country governed by a center-right party whose coalition holds a perilously narrow majority, and among the young, political apathy, not nationalism, is the defining trait. Its unemployment rate, at 8.9 percent, ranks among the highest in the European Union.
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Even by the fanatical standards of Europe, soccer has played a central role in Croatia’s identity. Many here note that the breakup of Yugoslavia — and the beginning of four years of fighting between Serb and Croat forces — was prefaced by a stadium-wide clash between Zagreb and Belgrade nationalist fan groups at a 1990 soccer game. Fanjo Tudjman, Croatia’s first president, was a soccer fan who said the sport could shape the country’s identity as much as a war, and touted the nation’s first generation of players as de facto ambassadors.
But it is this generation of Croatian players who’ve come to reflect the country’s many complicated layers. One player, Mario Mandzukic, grew up in Germany after his family fled the war. Another player, Luka Modric, spent part of his childhood in a hotel that had been turned into a site for refugees; his grandfather was killed by Serbian paramilitary forces.
In the run-up to the World Cup, Modric, the team’s willowy 5-foot-8 captain, could have been the rallying point for the country. He wasn’t. Instead, he was enmeshed in the nation’s most controversial corruption case — one involving the behavior of sports executive Zdravko Mamic, a power broker who for years would sign Croatian players and sell them at a lucrative profit to bigger European clubs. According to charges, Mamic — who has since fled to Bosnia to escape prison time — siphoned off millions of dollars in transfer fees. But during the trial, Modric provided testimony that contradicted earlier statements that were more damning toward Mamic. He was charged with perjury, and some Croatians criticized Modric, saying he was protecting a widely disliked figure.
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It’s taken four weeks of soccer for Modric to be largely forgiven.
“People are seeing these small miracles he’s doing on the playing field,” said Sasa Bart, a partner at a consulting firm in Zagreb.
Croatia has had years of sporting success, including a third-place finish at the World Cup in 1998, but it is this year’s team that has pushed into uncharted territory. Croatians widely expect that on Monday, whether the team wins or loses, many businesses won’t open at all. The team will land back in Zagreb and head by bus to a central square. One newspaper estimated the crowd for that welcome could reach 100,000.
“We need this,” said Ciro Blazevic, the head coach of Croatia’s 1998 national team. “Americans, the English, the French — they are all big countries with nuclear bombs. They are on top of the world. They don’t need to escape anonymity. But we are Croatia. All we have are atomic players.”
Ivana Crnica contributed to this report.
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