Football can be a serious business. It has repercussions for livelihoods, communities, even entire countries. Winning or losing can affect the mood far more than should be possible for something that is “only a game”. But what about when football goes beyond moods, or jobs? What about when it threatens peace? What happens, when football starts a war?
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It was May 1990. Red Star Belgrade, one of Yugoslavia’s biggest teams, went to fierce rivals Dinamo Zagreb. This was more than even the most virulent standard footballing rivalry. In the febrile atmosphere of the slowly collapsing Yugoslavian state, this was about national pride, a rare opportunity for Serbians and Croatians to show their patriotism while subsumed into the federation that made up their state. It would turn out the be the spark that ignited war, death, and ethnic cleansing.
It was a hot day in Zagreb on 13th May. The general – Tito – who had held together the Yugoslavian coalition had died a decade earlier, and the slow descent to revolution and conflict had reached a tipping point. Endless lines of police officers demonstrated just how dangerous this particular game had become, but nothing could prepare the world for what was to follow.
The hatred between Zagreb’s Bad Blue Boys, ultras named for the Sean Penn film, and Red Star’s Delijie, had intensified through the 1980s. When Zagreb had defeated Red Star in 1989, their fans had thrown racial insults at Red Star, a horrific foreshadowing of the events that would come in the early 1990s. One week before the match in 1990, Croatia had held its first election, independent from the Yugoslavian state that was based in Belgrade. The far-right nationalists had won a landslide victory, and this was a chance to let out their triumphant frustration against the Serbians, and for the Serbians to pay back the Croatians for daring to vote against them.
Red Star’s head ultra, Zljko Raznatovic, led the Delijie to Zagreb from Belgrade. They destroyed the train they were on. Once in Zagreb, they destroyed any symbol they could find of Croatian nationalism. But once in the stadium, they were met with a wall of Dinamo supporters, each equally angry and each equally ready to fight. Anti-Serbian racial chants were ubiquitous, from the majority of the 20,000 crowd that had made their way into the stadium more than an hour before kick-off. The Bad Blue Boys coordinated the attacks, and the Delijie, unwilling to stand by and allow the upstart Croatians to dominate the proceedings, acted. It is difficult to say whether it was planned or spontaneous, the violence was so commonplace that it could have been either. They began to tear apart the stadium, throwing seats, pieces of advertising boards, rubbish, anything they could lay their hands on, at the Dinamo fans. The home fans responded with rocks. This was more than the usual conflict.
Refusing to be boxed in, Red Star’s fans forced their way over the fence and into a group of Dinamo fans, and the fighting began in earnest. The Bad Blue Boys stormed the pitch, facing down hundreds of police officers. When the police started fighting back, Zvonimir Boban got involved, attacking an officer he felt was mistreating a fan. Boban would be held up as a hero of the Croatian resistance for this but banned by the Yugoslavian FA and unable to compete at the 1990 World Cup. The single incident is cited by some as the beginning of the Croatian resistance, and with it the beginning of the Yugoslavian wars.
The match itself was, unsurprisingly, abandoned. Red Star’s players managed to get back to the dressing rooms, but Dinamo’s stayed on the pitch to help their fans. The violence continued for several hours, with hundreds injured and thousands involved. But the consequences went far further than football.
The match, or lack of it, highlighted to both sides the tensions between the different Yugoslavian nations, and both Croatia and Serbia responded militarily. The war that ignited became the Croatian War of Independence, and saw fierce fighting as Croatia sought freedom from Yugoslavia. Serbian forces moved in quickly, supported by ethnic Serbians in Croatia, and seized vast swathes of land, before Croatia turned the tide and eventually forced Serbia out of Croatia for good. But it didn’t stop there, and Croatia began to fight to break up the Yugoslavian State once and for all. This second conflict saw Croatia try to remove Serbians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and led to the far more infamous Bosnian war.
Hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, and the first genocide in Europe since the Second World War. It would be difficult to put all of the blame on a football match. The tensions were already there, and intensifying. But Dinamo Zagreb v Red Star Belgrade has gone down in history as the match that started a war.
And what of the ultras involved? We already know Boban became a symbolic hero of the resistance, and Dinamo still have a banner at home games thanking fans at that match for starting their road to independence. But the detail is much, much darker. The Bad Blue Boys were among the first to join the paramilitary groups that rampaged across the country, conducted summary executions and killing thousands. And the Delijie? Zljko Raznatovic would become infamous as General Arkan in the war, and the ultras joined his Serb Volunteer Guard. That unit, though small, was feared across Yugoslavia, also killing thousands and engaging in ethnic cleansing of Bosnians in the region.
The match that started a war might be an exaggeration, but the ultras that murdered thousands? That’s the truth.
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