Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe

by Jonathan Wilson

And so, predisposed to eastern European football, I joined onefootball.com, where I was given the chance to do something about it. What had been an interest became a passion, if only because it is far more stimulating to write pieces involving match-fixing, prostitutes and assassinations, than yet another transfer rumour concerning Mario Jardel.

It is a personal book, a record of my trips to eastern Europe, of the people I met there, and of the tales they told. In that sense, it is a testament to the extraordinary cultural fact of football, its universality, its ability to draw together people from utterly different backgrounds. Primarily, though, it is the story of how eastern Europe has changed since the Berlin Wall came down – told through football.

‘A man can love his wife,’ Ihor said, ‘even if he knows she does not look like Brigitte Bardot.’

There are almost constant complaints about referees, while it is generally accepted that, particularly towards the bottom of the table, the practice of ‘three-for-three’ is commonplace. The scam is practised throughout eastern Europe, and involves a cooperative of sides who agree that when they play each other the team at home will always win – if five teams are involved, for example, each is guaranteed fifteen points.

Polonia Warsaw are one of eastern Europe’s most romantic clubs. Founded by the Warsaw intelligentsia, their players fought in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and so the Communist government, regarding the club as dangerously independent, ensured their budget was never sufficient for them to rise higher than the second division. ‘Polonia was not only football,’ Engel said. ‘You could meet scientists or artists or painters there. There was a very good atmosphere within the club, because when you don’t have a lot of money what you have to have is spirit.’

The addition of a Nigerian forward captured most of the attention, but it was far from Engel’s only innovation as national coach. Polish football, he realised, had become stuck in the ways of the seventies, and unthinkingly persisted with a libero. That, he decided, had to go, but the introduction of a flat back-four took time.

Johan Cruyff once commented that Total Football could not have developed in a country that didn’t play hockey – movement off the ball being key to that sport – and it is probably significant that in eastern Europe it was not uncommon for footballers to play ice-hockey in the winter. English football, by contrast, had grown up in the public schools in tandem with rugby, in which structure is everything and positions have clearly defined objectives.

having himself been at the heart of the disgraceful denouement to

Yugoslavia were what Brazil would have been had they been European, self-doubt suppressing imagination and bringing to the surface the cynicism that has always underlain the technical excellence. Self-doubt, in fact, is the defining characteristic of Serbian football: they are Europe’s most consistent chokers.

Serbian football, he admitted, suffered from the same problem as all leagues post-fragmentation, both in the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR: the big clubs were simply too dominant. ‘Nobody wants to watch a league where everybody knows who will win,’ he explained.

Croatia’s ill-feeling towards Serbia is only to be expected, but Croatian football has seen a more general rise in violence.

To paraphrase what Brane Oblak said of the situation in Slovenia, it is as though rivalry, if it does not exist, must be invented.

That may all sound a touch abstract for the average football fan, but politics in the Balkans is far more central to everyday life than it is in Britain, and a banner at the Maksimir at the first leg of the play-off called on Croatia to win 4–0: one goal for the Ljubljanska Bank, one for the Bay of Piran, one for the land borders dispute, and one for the Krsko power station.

On the last plane to leave was Hasan Salihamidži, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy who would go on to become the greatest player in Bosnia’s independent history.

Salihamidži lived in Jablanica, about thirty miles east of Mostar on the road to Sarajevo. Most people seem to agree that, although a decent footballer as a child, he was nothing out of the ordinary. What set him apart was his will to succeed, his desire for self-improvement. Every morning, the young Hasan would get up at 6 a.m. and run for ninety minutes before school. After classes, he practised the piano, and then caught a bus into Mostar to train with Velež, which at the time was the only top-flight club in the city, supported by Croats and Bosniaks alike. In 1991, he even took the prize for the best pupil in his elementary school with fives (the top grade) in every subject. He was, in short, one of those sickening people who are good at everything.

‘As soon as I left Bosnia for Germany,’ Salihamidži said, ‘I realised that all life is a fight. People talk about the kings, about Zidane, Cantona, Ronaldo, but there are no kings in football. You can be a king for a day, but tomorrow the king will be somebody else. In every game, every practice, every minute of every day, you have to give everything as though it were a Champions League final.’

Yerevan, itself, is a strikingly unusual city, constructed almost entirely of pink stone, and dominated by Mount Ararat, which looms on the horizon, just over the border with Turkey. There was something weird about the sun there as well; just as the light seems somehow thinner in northern cities such as Gothenburg or St Petersburg, so in Armenia it seemed thicker, as though what I were seeing was not the city itself, but the city as it would look in an over-coloured postcard from the sixties.

Invaded variously by Persia, Turkey and Russia, mass migrations have been a regular part of Armenian history, and the diaspora has been so accepted as a fact of life that it is a point of pride that there is an Armenian community in virtually every country in the world.

lizards disguised as Henry Kissinger;

Russian football, like pretty much everything else in the country, was once in the hands of vast, state-run organisations, and is now in the hands of a small group of very rich men.

The disaster for eastern Europe is that their clubs were at their weakest just at the time when the advent of the Champions League and the Bosman ruling was increasing the gulf between rich and poor, with the result that the standard of football in the Premiership or la Liga is now far, far better than it is in Croatia or Poland.

Clubs look abroad, and so, increasingly, do fans. Local football will never wholly die, for certain clubs have an emotional hold, and the market, anyway, requires a nursery for new talent, but this, I suspect is the future: football globalised almost to homogeneity. That may, in time, lead to decline in corruption, but an indefinable something will have been lost.