Slaven Bilic and Igor Stimac recount the birth of a team driven by a deeper purpose because of the terrible Balkans conflict
made by Louis Myles about this era of Croatian football. “I was very emotional,” Stimac says of his involvement in the film. “I didn’t feel good going back to that time because, whenever anyone brings me back to those days, it’s suffering again.”Bilic and Stimac grew up in Split, in communist Yugoslavia, alongside other Croats but also people who would become citizens of Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo. “I had a great childhood,” Bilic stresses.
He is keen to stress he was not a martyr. Other Croatian players, especially the obviously great ones like Boban, were picked by Yugoslavia. Admitting that he only learned of his father’s work with nationalist groups in later years, Bilic stresses that there was “nothing extreme about my dad’s views” and he concentrates instead on the quality of Yugoslavian football. Players were not allowed to go abroad until they were 28 and so the standard of the league was not far behind the best in Europe.
War, however, was looming. After the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, nationalism in eastern Europe intensified. Croatia’s first democratic elections were held in May 1990 and independence seemed an enticing reality. But tensions deepened as Serbia reacted with forceful aggression. A few days later, on 13 May, Dinamo Zagreb played Red Star Belgrade.
Bilic says: “I was shocked we were going to play in light of what happened in Zagreb in 1990. It was very hostile and boiling and on television every day we heard the Serbs were in Croatia and Slovenia. We were always big rivals but that season Red Star were better than us. They would soon become European champions but we felt like we were playing for Croatia against Serbia. We won, of course, and that cup is treated like a war trophy.