Richard Mills

‘It All Ended in an Unsporting Way’: Serbian Football and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989–2006

Part of a wider examination into football during the collapse of Eastern European Communism between 1989 and 1991, this article studies the interplay between Serbian football and politics during the period of Yugoslavias demise. Research utilizing interviews with individuals directly involved in the Serbian game, in conjunction with contemporary Yugoslav media sources, indicates that football played an important proactive role in the revival of Serbian nationalism. At the same time the Yugoslav conflict, twinned with a complex transition to a market economy, had disastrous consequences for football throughout the territories of the former Yugoslavia. In the years following the hostilities the Serbian game has suffered decline, major financial hardship and continuing terrace violence, resulting in widespread nostalgia for the pre-conflict era.

Velež Mostar Football Club and the Demise of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ in Yugoslavia, 1922–2009

In 1972 Josip Broz Tito—President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—addressed members of Velež Mostar Football Club on the occasion of the clubs fiftieth anniversary: Comrades, you a...

Fighters, footballers and nation builders: wartime football in the Serb-held territories of the former Yugoslavia, 1991–1996

The outbreak of war in the Yugoslav republic of Croatia during 1991, and its subsequent emergence across Bosnia and Hercegovina in the following year, had a devastating effect upon cultural life. Football was no exception. Yet in spite of raging conflict, the game continued to be an important aspect of everyday life throughout the region. This paper focuses upon the newly emerging states of Republika Srpska and Republika Srpska Krajina, the Serb-held territories of Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia, respectively. Football served as an important morale-boosting activity, providing soldiers with a distraction from the front, but it also served a higher cause. Via league and cup competitions, it assisted in the creation of ethnically homogenous states. Alongside media coverage of them, these competitions helped ‘map’ the ‘imagined communities’ of these incipient polities. Football was also harnessed as symbolic proof that all Serbs continued to belong to Yugoslavia. The game, and the sporting press that wrote about it, also provided an ideal subject for propaganda about enemy nations and a platform from which journalists could expound the necessities of the unification of all Serb states.

Laying the Foundations of Physical Culture: The Stadium Revolution in Socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract After liberation, the incipient socialist Yugoslavia engaged its citizens in an indefatigable process of reconstruction. An enormous wave of volunteers threw themselves into regenerating stricken cities and shattered infrastructure. A bastion of the revolution, physical culture was no exception: interwar venues were repaired and hundreds of new ones were built. These included flagship stadiums, as well as more modest undertakings: athletics grounds on Croatian islands, mountaineering hunts in Kosovo, and Bosnian bowling alleys among them. Major projects received public funding, but others relied on self-initiative, causing friction between the authorities and zealous locals. As the ‘stadium revolution’ evolved, professional companies worked on vast football grounds. At its zenith, expensive undertakings like Split’s Poljud [built for the 1979 Mediterranean Games] were highly prestigious for the communist authorities. These venues constitute a mixed socialist legacy, but many continue to serve the needs of successor states. Using archival documents and photographs, this essay explores a stadium revolution that unfolded in parallel with the revolution at large. It examines the dynamics that shaped Yugoslav sport and society. Yugoslavia’s experience, while unique, did not occur in a vacuum; the case provides a new perspective on the development of sporting infrastructure in revolutionary environments in general.

An Exception in War and Peace: Ipswich Town Football Club, c. 1907–1945

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of a football club as a means of understanding its late adoption of professionalism and its unusual wartime conduct. Ipswich Town were the only Football League team not to kick a ball for the duration of the Second World War. Arguably, the underlying causes of the clubs inactivity in both global conflicts can be found in the patriotic and staunchly amateur ethos that permeated the organisation, resulting in a very late conversion to the professional game in 1936. When the Amateur Football Association (AFA) seceded from the Football Association (FA) in 1907, Ipswich Town sided with the gentlemen amateurs and competed in the socially-exclusive Southern Amateur League until the season before the club adopted professionalism. The unique nature of Ipswich Towns evolution offers an opportunity to explore the decline of this branch of the game in the face of professional football, the protagonists who were caught up in it, and the relationship between football and civic pride. In wartime, the human and social continuities between the professional company and its amateur predecessor arguably proved to be more influential than the ruptures that resulted from a controversial inter-war abandonment of cherished amateur principles.

“The pitch itself was no man’s land:” Siege, Željezničar Sarajevo Football Club and the Grbavica Stadium

Inspired by microhistory, this essay explores the wartime plight of a football stadium and the multi-ethnic club that called it home as a means of understanding Bosnia and Herzegovina’s descent into conflict, the siege of Sarajevo, and the impact upon civilians. Like the suburb of the same name, Grbavica became part of the frontline during the siege. Deprived of its home, FK Željezničar continued to function, while players, staff, and supporters longed for a return to the shattered ground. At a local level, the organization offers a means of visualizing the development of the Grbavica suburb, from its socialist foundations to its post-Dayton reintegration. In this way, the life of the stadium and those who frequent it map onto the history of Yugoslavia, its dissolution, and the independent republic that emerged in its wake. Moreover, the wartime partition of the stadium, the club, and its supporters’ group – all of which were claimed by actors on both sides of the frontline – were representative of political developments in a state where the ethnic balance was forcibly reengineered. This reconstruction of Grbavica’s war harnesses original photographic evidence, oral history, maps, contemporary journalism, and the transcripts of the Hague Tribunal.

Cold War Football: Soviet Defence and Yugoslav Attack following the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948

Abstract This essay explores the symbolic role played by football in the Tito–Stalin Split (1948–1953). In particular, it examines the Yugoslav national team’s victory over the Soviet Union at the 1952 Olympics in Finland. It asks how Yugoslav sports administrators, athletes and the press negotiated the transition from a position of affectionate sporting emulation of the USSR, to one of hostile opposition. Both regimes paid close attention to international sporting competition and its potential propaganda benefits. Shedding light on an early intra-socialist rupture, this case deserves to be considered alongside better known instances of sporting conflict in the Cold War.

The Communist Legacy of the Former Yugoslavia in Photographs

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TRAVEL THROUGH the former Yugoslavia without constant reminders of the region’s recent past. Socialist-era buildings retain their prominent city centre locations in the capitals of all of the successor republics, whilst the countryside remains littered with monuments honouring the achievements of Tito’s victorious Partisan Army. There is also no escaping Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution, with many villages, towns and cities still struggling to come to terms with the physical damage inflicted by war. The following photographic selection attempts to offer a brief insight into those relics of the past which, through their physical presence, continue to have an impact upon the present day. These photographs were taken by the author between 2007 and 2009.