Praise for Behind the Curtain:

‘This is a blissful book, lovingly and stylishly written’

Daily Telegraph

‘A fascinating documentary of post-Communist Eastern Europe … a

compelling read. That Wilson writes with humour and charm makes it all
the more engaging’ Independent

‘Wilson captures the essence and the magic that Eastern European football
has brought to European soccer as a whole, while documenting the
heartache, corruption and decay that now degrade a once noble past. If you
love the romance and the history of the beautiful game and have a passing
interest in the complex geo-politics of the former Eastern bloc, then the
cover price is a mere bagatelle in comparison to the pleasure you will derive
from reading and owning Behind the Curtain’ Tribune

‘Wilson writes captivatingly with humour … anyone with an interest in

Eastern European sport will be consulting this book for years to come’
Financial Times

‘Intriguing, entertaining history-cum-sports-travelogue of postwar Eastern

Europe through the lens of the beautiful game’ Metro London

‘Terrific’ Daily Telegraph

‘Jonathan Wilson brilliantly plugs the gaps in our knowledge … Wilson is

an observant and witty guide to life in Eastern Europe as seen through the
lens of the beautiful game’
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘A painstakingly researched and skilfully told journey into previously
uncharted territory, which sheds much light onto a fascinating topic’
FourFourTwo

‘In this part-travelogue, part-history Jonathan Wilson captures the

contemporary chaos of the region’ Observer Sport Monthly

‘[A] fascinating and perceptive travelogue … includes a fine collection of

anecdotes too colourful for fiction’ Sunday Times

‘Superbly researched … Wilson breaks up the prose with wittily observed

travel writing’ When Saturday Comes

‘I have a confession. This is the first book about football I have ever read.
On this evidence, that is my loss. I shall certainly look out for any more
books by Wilson. With style and erudition, Wilson proves that football is a
metaphor, an allegory, and much more than just a game’ The Times
 CONTENTS

Cover
Praise for Behind the Curtain
Title Page
Map
Foreword
Epigraph
Prologue
1 Ukraine: Playing the System
2 Poland: The Ugly Daughter
3 Hungary: More Bricks than Kicks
4 The Former Yugoslavia: Ever Decreasing Circles
i Serbia-Montenegro
ii Slovenia
iii Croatia
iv Bosnia-Hercegovina
5 Bulgaria: Chaos Theory
6 Romaina: Anghels with Dirty Faces
7 The Caucasus: Wandering Rocks
i Georgia
ii Armenia
iii Azerbaijan
8 Russia: Fallen Idols
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Author Bio
Also by Jonathan Wilson
Copyright
This book could not have been written without Sorin Dumitrescu, Stoyan
Georgiev, Nedim Hasi , Taras Hordiyenko, Maciej Iwanski, Sándor Laczkó,
Armen Nikoghosyan, Milena and Ljiljana Ruzi , Aleš Selan, Vladimir
Soldatkin and Zaza and Natya Tsuladze, all of whom devoted huge amounts
of time and effort to helping with research, translation and logistics. To
them I am hugely grateful. I must also acknowledge the input of Philippe
Auclair, Slaven Bili , Neil Billingham, Duncan Castles, Marcus
Christenson, Fuad Dargakhly, Gamid Gamidov, Luke Gosset, Elvir
Islamovi , Dennis Kopylov, Yevhen Kravs, Simon Kuper, Ben Lyttleton,
Toma Mihajlovi , Boris Navasardian, Dejan Nikoli , Vladimir Novak,
Gunna Persson, Zdravko Rei , Kristian Sotiroff, Matt Spiro, Radu Timofte,
Sergey Tsimmerman, Axel Vartanyan, Duncan White, Rafał Zaremba and
Yuliya in Baku, all of whom were generous with assistance, information
and advice.
Thanks also to my agent David Luxton for managing to interest anybody
in a book on such a recondite theme; thanks to my editor Ian Preece at
Orion for his support and suggestions; thanks to Mat Snow and Hugh
Sleight at FourFourTwo and Paul Simpson at Champions for publishing my
pieces on eastern Europe with such bewildering regularity and so providing
the seeds from which this book grew; thanks to onefootball, for handing me
such a brilliant start in journalism, teaching me the value of distrust, and
introducing me to so many wonderful people; thanks to Marcus
Christenson, Dan Magnowski and Mithran Samuel for reading the
manuscript and making criticisms and corrections; thanks to the Financial
Times, for employing me long enough to have the resources to research the
book, and for terminating my contract in time to write it; thanks to Emma,
Dom, Cath, PJ, Jon, Bic and Sas for at various times putting up with my
books, papers and supposed grumpiness; thanks to Rachel, for convincing
me it was worth writing a proposal and for introducing me to David in the
first place; thanks to Kevin McCarra, for underwriting the project to the
tune of 30 Złotys; and thanks, finally, to my parents, for pretty much
everything.

PHOTO CREDITS
p. 1 Shakhtar Donetsk
p. 2 Shakhtar Donetsk
p. 3 E. Shainskyi
p. 4 E. Shainskyi; Football Federation of Ukraine
p. 5 E. Shainskyi
p. 6 Empics
p. 7 Empics
p. 8 Empics
p. 9 Toma Mihajlovi
p. 10 Toma Mihajlovi
p. 11 Igor Zaplatil
p. 12 Toma Mihajlovi
p. 13 Jonathan Wilson
p. 14 Jonathan Wilson
p. 15 Jonathan Wilson; Fuad Dargakhly
p. 16 Fuad Dargakhly; Pavel Yeriklintsev
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and
from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was
which.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
 PROLOGUE

It is a little after six when the train pulls into Belgrade. After the
overwhelming heat of the previous day, it is refreshingly cool as I stumble
out of my compartment. An early-morning mist hangs over the station,
mingling with the smoke and fumes of the trains to form a haze that is
tinted yellow by the sun as it slants through the iron-girdered roof. A
Serbian folk song, piped through the loudspeakers, plays in the background.
As I peer up an almost deserted platform, indistinct figures scurry in the
distance. The fact of the railway aside, there is nothing by which to date the
scene; I could be stepping off the train at any time from about 1920
onwards. It is probably the music that gives the moment a filmic feel, but I
almost expect a mysterious figure to appear at my elbow furling an
umbrella and commenting meaningfully on the daffodils in Moscow this
spring.
As it is, the first person I speak to that morning is a taxi driver. I don’t
need a taxi – I’ve already arranged to meet two journalist friends in the
station restaurant at nine – but I know he will know a backstreet money
changer. It turns out he’s in that line of business himself, and so, after a
brief haggle conducted in the dust on the bonnet of his car, I change my
Slovenian tolar into Serbia-Montenegrin dinar at a rate significantly higher
than that offered by the station bureau de change, which is closed anyway. I
return to the ticket office, and book myself on a train departing for Budapest
that evening, then make for the restaurant. It occurs to me as I sit there
drinking coffee after coffee and eating small, bitter sausages, killing time
until Milena and Ljiljana, my two Serbian friends, turn up, that mornings
like this are exactly why I like eastern Europe so much.
 It’s the question people always ask when I mention that I’m heading off to
Romania or Ukraine or wherever for a holiday that doubles as a research
trip – why there? I’m not sure there is an easy answer. There are the
obvious pragmatic reasons, of course. It’s cheap, for one, which is a major
bonus for a freelance. There is, at least compared to Africa or Italy or South
America, very little competition. And, given the widespread corruption,
there are stories in abundance. Plus, there is the fact that when I worked for
onefootball.com, I developed a range of contacts across the region. In many
cases, they are now friends.
But it’s also true that something in me warms to eastern Europe, and I
rather suspect it’s related to my affection for the classic thrillers of post-war
espionage. There is, to my mind at least, just something plain romantic
about taking a rattling old night-train from Ljubljana through Zagreb to
Belgrade, about sipping thick Russian coffee in a St Petersburg café
watching ice floes drift down the Neva, about buying raspberries wrapped
in newspaper from an Armenian peasant on a mountain pass in the
Caucasus. There is a magic even in the names: Odessa, Tbilisi,
Szombathely. I fear that sounds frivolous, almost condescending: I hope
not. I hope there is a Serb version of me, delighting in his journeys from
London to Ipswich to Blackburn, smacking his lips at the thought of another
lukewarm station pasty and revelling in the poetry of the Tyne-Wear Metro
as it ploughs through Brockley Whins, East Boldon and Seaburn before
finally pulling into Stadium of Light. At heart, for me, it’s probably little
more than nostalgia for a world I’ve seen only in films. Certainly Belgrade
that morning had the feel of a novel by Greene or Le Carré.
Such is the spy-novel theory. My parents, I suppose, should also take
some of the blame. Until I was seven we took every summer holiday at
Patterdale in the Lake District. Then we started going to Slovenia, which is
probably as close as abroad gets to Ullswater. There were differences,
though. Very few Keswick tea shops, in those days, had pictures of Marshal
Tito on the wall. And then there were borders, and dinars, and breakfasts of
black bread and cheese – all fine, enticing things. I’m not saying that if I
hadn’t gone to Bohinj in 1984 I’d now be writing a history of football in the
Lake District, but there’s no question that those holidays made me far more
aware of Communism, and particularly of Yugoslavia. Certainly I was the
only person in my class who wanted Red Star to win the 1991 European
Cup final against Marseille, with their Sunderland-supporting former
Newcastle winger Chris Waddle.
And then there is the style of football played in eastern Europe. I’m not
sure there is any particularly good reason for this, but I just prefer precise,
technical football. If I’d been a decade older I’d probably be one of the
many Dutchophiles who grew up on Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels. As it
is, my benchmarks were Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Dragan Stojkovic. I
suppose, my brain having always been more adept than my body, I naturally
look to those who try to make football a cerebral pursuit. In October 2002 I
saw Vojvodina beat Sartid Smederevo 5–1 in Novi Sad with some
wonderfully fluent pass-and-move football. After the match their coach
asked me what division Vojvodina would be in if they were an English side.
Technically, I said, they were as good as pretty much anybody in the
Premiership; physically they would be destroyed by even an average first
division side. The emphasis is just on a wholly different part of the game.
I am also, I confess, largely a pragmatist when it comes to sport. I may
condemn it, but deep down I quite admire cynicism, and there will never be
a greater blend of cynicism and sublime skill than that Red Star European
Cup-winning side of 1991. I’m not sure I will ever love a side as much as I
loved that one. If you can, get a video of their 2–1 victory away to Bayern
Munich in the first leg of the ’91 semi-final. FIFA clearly deserve praise for
the way they have made football more open in the past decade by doing
away with the tackle from behind and the backpass, but that game shows
how beauty could flourish despite the brutality, and how, being harder
earned, it was somehow worth more. If Dejan Savi evi and Brian Laudrup
were that good then, with defenders hacking at their every stride, they
would be truly extraordinary players today.
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.
And if it sounds self-centred and flippant to take to a country because it
does good scandal, the other side of the coin is that there is just a chance
that my publishing a story in Britain about corruption in, for instance,
Romania may make some impression on the ground in Bucharest. And
however meagre that impact is, writing that kind of article still seems far
more worthwhile than the ‘St Mirren full-back strains hamstring’ sort of
story. Maybe that’s just the guilt of an easy-living football journalist talking.
This, then, is the book of my work covering eastern European football,
first for the late onefootball.com, and then as a freelance. It isn’t a history of
eastern Europe, or even of eastern European football. In some ways, it isn’t
even about football per se – at least not in the sense of goals and bookings
and corners – even if football is at the same time the ostensible purpose of
my travels, the lens through which events are viewed, and the agent that
binds the whole thing together. 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. Vestiges of the old
system coexist uneasily with the new, and the result isn’t working: whatever
else has changed for the better, the football – with the possible exception of
the game in Russia – has grown immeasurably worse. So inevitably, this is
also, in an indirect way, the story of capitalism, and its effect on the
socialist economies of the east, the story of how football has dealt with the
new ideology and its new set of masters.
 1 UKRAINE
Playing the System

Stark and black, a statue of Lenin strides along Artema, the main street of
Donetsk. Stand in front of him, beside the fountains in the square, and it is
as though nothing has changed since the city – noticing about eight years
too late the way the wind was blowing – abandoned the name Stalino in
1961.
Walk behind Lenin, though, and the perspective changes. Incongruously,
he now appears to be marching straight towards the McDonald’s. Perhaps
he intends to give them a piece of his mind, to overturn the tills and the
deep fat fryers as Christ slung the money changers from the temple, but a
glance around would tell him he is fighting a losing battle. To his left is a
German bank, to his right an Irish pub, and straight ahead, just over the road
from the McDonald’s, is the Donbass Palace, a luxury hotel with rooms
costing between $250 and $2,500 a night. And this on a street named after a
hero of the 1917 Revolution.
Everywhere you go in Donetsk there is building work, and most of it, at
least in the centre of town, seems to involve neon lights. Having watched
Shakhtar Donetsk reserves draw 0–0 with Chornomorets Odessa reserves
one Tuesday, I headed out for a couple of quiet beers, but my conservative
soul was soon driven back. Even in the middle of the week, the nightlife
throbs. There is a disconcerting brazenness to it, but there is also a great
energy, a palpable sense of a region on the up – even if there are persistent
concerns about the traditional heavy industries. Again and again people say
to me with a shake of the head, ‘Ah, but you should have seen it two years
ago …’, should have seen it, in other words, back in the old days, back
before the boom.
Back then, Donetsk was little different from how it had been in Soviet
times, just another grimy industrial city churning out coal and steel to
further the socialist dream. So rooted was it in industry that, until Stalin had
it renamed in 1924, the city was known as Yuzovka, after John Hughes, the
Welshman who established the first ironworks in the area in the late
nineteenth century. When a football team was established in the city in
1936, it was called Ugolshchiki – or ‘Coal-workers’ – but by the summer it
had been renamed Stakhanovets in honour of Aleksey Stakhanov, the local
miner who produced such prodigious quantities of coal that he was lionised
by the Soviet regime as an example to other workers. For years Shakhtar
(‘Miner’), as they finally became known in 1946, were just another
Ukrainian team, chugging along in the wake of Dynamo Kyiv, winning four
Soviet Cups but little else. All that, though, is in the past: the team is as
upwardly mobile as the town and the face of Ukrainian football is changing.
‘When I came to Shakhtar,’ as their captain Anatoliy Tymoschuk put it, ‘I
dreamed of being champion; now I want to be champion of champions.’
I went to see Shakhtar play Dynamo in Kyiv on the opening day of the
Ukrainian season in 2004. It was July, but the weather was hideous, a stiff
wind driving across the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium and drawing with it
grim curtains of rain. None of the ground was under cover, so I huddled in
the press box under half an umbrella. Under the other half was Taras
Hordiyenko, who was once onefootball’s correspondent in Ukraine and on
that trip was acting as my fixer. He learned his English from technical
manuals, and, at least when he’s detailing plans, it shows. ‘What we shall
do today is the following,’ he said when he turned up at my hotel that
morning. ‘Number one: make some phone calls. Number two: leave the
hotel. Number three: buy our rail tickets to Lviv. Number four: have
breakfast …’ The effect is rather like Orwell’s instructions for making a cup
of tea, or perhaps the catechism: it may sound a bit stilted, but at least you
know where you stand.
On the way to the ground Taras had insisted on making a detour into an
expensive ladies’ clothes shop to buy a carrier bag each. We could, clearly,
have popped into a supermarket and picked up bags for far less than the one
hryvna (12p.) we ended up paying, but in Ukraine carrier bags are a symbol
of status. It is very rare, for instance, to see a Ukrainian on a night-train
who is not clutching a Hugo Boss carrier bag. ‘What we shall do with the
bag is the following,’ Taras said. ‘Number one: place it on the seat. Number
two: sit on it.’ A fine plan, which at least meant I was never getting wet
from underneath, but with the rain dancing and swirling beneath the
defences of the umbrella I was nonetheless soon drenched. With the
possible exception of a Sunderland game at Grimsby when I stood out in
the sleet for two hours selling the fanzine, only for the game to be
abandoned after seven minutes (a day that was so cold that my mate Iain,
after a quick dash to the toilet, couldn’t get his fly buttoned again), I’m not
sure I’ve ever been so miserable in a football ground. It’s one thing to get
soaked on the open terrace at the Roker End as a teenager, revelling in some
half-baked notion of suffering for the team and knowing that within a
couple of hours you’ll be back in the warmth of your gran’s front room
drinking coffee and eating ginger biscuits, quite another to do so a decade
later in a press box in Kyiv with only the nebulous thought of a book to
write for consolation.
At the same time I was aware that what was happening on the pitch was,
at least in terms of Ukrainian football, of seismic importance. Shakhtar gave
Dynamo a pasting. Admittedly they only wrapped the game up when Igor
Duljaj made it 2–0 nine minutes from the end, and Dynamo did have the
odd chance to equalise early in the second half; but Shakhtar, as their coach
Mircea Lucescu said afterwards, could easily have been three up by half
time. No matter, the result was significant enough: Dynamo had never
previously lost a home league game in the Ukrainian championship by more
than one goal.
Dynamo, naturally, attempted to play down the defeat. ‘The way our team
is prepared in the summer means we are not in peak physical form at the
beginning of the season,’ their midfielder Andriy Husyn explained. ‘We
have certain problems because of that, but if you look at the past few
seasons, the evidence is that the system is correct.’ The belief in systems is
characteristically Ukrainian, and there is an element of truth in what he
says: Dynamo have made a habit of late-season surges (and Shakhtar of
late-season collapses). There appeared more to this defeat, though, than
early-season teething. For much of the game, Shakhtar were utterly
dominant, and only when the thought that they might actually beat Dynamo
occurred to them did they begin to look vulnerable. For half a century
Dynamo reigned supreme in Ukrainian football, and everybody else still
lives in their shadow.
‘In the Soviet period, Dynamo were almost sure of beating other
Ukrainian teams,’ József Szabo, a former Dynamo player who was
appointed coach for a second time shortly after the defeat to Shakhtar,
explained. ‘It was like a pyramid in Ukraine with Dynamo at the top.’
Crucially, the patron of the club through the seventies and eighties was
Volodymyr Scherbytskyi, the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party. ‘He
was a great football fan,’ Szabo said, ‘and if there was a good player at
Dnipro or Shakhtar or some other Ukrainian club he would make one phone
call and the player would be in Kyiv – no money, or anything like that.’
It would be difficult to overestimate the extent to which Dynamo
dominate the psychological landscape of Ukrainian football. In Soviet
times, they effectively represented the whole of the republic, and fans from
across Ukraine rejoiced when they got one over on central authority, as
represented, however tenuously, by the Moscow clubs. That gave them a
significant advantage, because the Moscow clubs, as well as being hated by
teams from outside Russia, all squabbled among themselves, whereas the
likes of Shakhtar and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk had a tendency to roll over for
Dynamo. The major clubs in other republics – Ararat Yerevan in Armenia,
for instance, or Dinamo Minsk in Belarus – had a similar function as
national symbols.
‘In Soviet times,’ the former Dynamo and USSR defender Andriy Bal told
me, ‘one of the ways each republic presented its face was through its best
football team. Every team had its own way of playing. The Caucasus states
and Uzbekistan could be recognised by their technical ability, the way they
kept possession of the ball and their movement – just like the South
Americans. Latvians, Lithuanians and Belarusians played like Germans.
Moldova was similar to Romania. Ukrainian and Russian sides combined
Western features and technical ability.’ Dynamo, though, had a particular
emotional hold because of events during the Nazi occupation.
Just on the right as you come out of the main door of Dynamo’s stadium is
a curious sculpture, a blockish structure bearing in relief the images of four
footballers. You wouldn’t know unless somebody told you, but it
commemorates the Dynamo players killed after the notorious ‘death
match’. Its subtlety is appropriate: no game has ever been so submerged in
myth and counter-myth. After the Second World War, the match became the
stuff of Communist legend, the ‘official’ version claiming that the
Luftwaffe challenged Dynamo to a match, and responded to losing by
having every Ukrainian player summarily shot at the final whistle. Various
embellishments were added, the wildest of which had German soldiers
shooting at Dynamo players during the game. As inconsistencies in the
various accounts were exposed, and the issue of whether the players were in
some way collaborators was raised, there were even those who claimed the
match had never happened at all.
The truth, as Andy Dougan sets it out in Dynamo: Defending the Honour
of Kyiv, is rather more complex, but hardly less tragic. Several Dynamo
players, and three from Lokomotiv Kyiv, ended up working in the same
bakery during the occupation, and they entered a re-established Kyivan
league as FC Start in 1942. They won every match, beating, among others,
Hungarian and Romanian garrison sides. Flakelf, a team representing the
Luftwaffe, then challenged them to a game, which Start won 5–0. A
rematch, with an SS referee, was hastily arranged, but despite some brutal
tackling from the Germans, Start won 5–3, Flakelf’s humiliation being
compounded when Oleksiy Klymenko, a young defender, rounded the
keeper, dribbled to the line, then, rather than score, ran beyond the ball and
hoofed it back towards the middle of the pitch.
Gradually, after the game, the eleven Start players were rounded up for
interrogation. Mykola Korotkykh, who had served in the NKVD (the
forerunner of the KGB), died after twenty days of torture, while the other
ten were sent to the prison camp at Syrets, near Babi Yar, the ravine where
thousands of Jews and others undesirable to the Third Reich were
massacred. Being physically fit, the players survived atrocious conditions
for six months, until, in reprisal for an attack on a plant that repaired
motorised sleighs, Paul Radomsky, the camp commandant, had one in three
prisoners executed. Klymenko, Ivan Kuzmenko, the huge centre-forward,
and Mykola Trusevych, who still wore his goalkeeping jersey, were shot in
quick succession. Another player, Pavlo Komarov, who is believed to have
collaborated, simply disappeared. The myth may have been better known
than the truth, but the effect was the same: Dynamo became a rallying point
in the darkest days of occupation, and, at least until fragmentation, retained
a patriotic value as the team of all Ukraine.

A little further away from the stadium is another statue. If the first is
difficult to decipher, there is no mistaking the second. Perched on the end of
a bench, chin propped on hand, it is emphatically Valeriy Lobanovskyi – the
Colonel – Dynamo’s greatest manager and the man who, appealing to
nationalist sentiment three decades after the death match, gave Dougan his
subtitle. It is a remarkable work, its sharp angles, surprisingly redolent of
the young Brian Clough, hinting at the revolutionary energy of
Lobanovskyi’s early managerial self. Even the yellowish bronze in which it
is cast seems to recall the gingery tinge of his hair.
Bizarrely, the day after the Shakhtar match I was asked to ape the pose for
Ukrainian national TV news, not on the bronze replica outside, but on the
actual blue plastic bench inside the stadium. Not for the first time in eastern
Europe, I found locals bemused that a British journalist should have come
to watch one of their league games. I still treasure a small clipping from a
Serbian sports paper topped with the implausibly dull headline: WILSON
WILL REPORT (perhaps in Serbian it’s a clever pun) after I’d gone to
Belgrade to see a Red Star–Partizan derby. Nonetheless, I’d never been the
subject of a TV news report before, so I unhesitatingly acceded to the
crew’s demands that I wander around the stadium gazing whimsically into
the middle distance, as though the concrete bowl itself shimmered with the
ghosts of Blokhin and Belanov, and then fold myself into Lobanovskyi’s
place in the dugout. Only later did it occur to me that I might have been the
victim of some weird candid camera programme in which unsuspecting
foreigners are gulled into impersonating famous Ukrainians, but if I were,
nobody ever told me.
Lobanovskyi died in 2002, but his genius still presides over Ukrainian
football. I met him only once, at a Champions League game eight months
before his death, when the ravages of time and cognac had left him white-
haired and red-faced; overweight and wheezing. He was sixty-three when
he died, but he looked twenty years older. After that 2–1 defeat to
Liverpool, though, even as he slumped behind a press-conference desk,
answering questions with a splenetic reluctance that made clear he was
there only because UEFA demanded he should be, his authority – the
unthinking deference with which he was treated by Ukrainian journalists –
was obvious.
In a coaching career that lasted thirty-three years, he won eight Soviet
titles, six Soviet Cups, five Ukrainian titles, three Ukrainian Cups and two
European Cup-Winners’ Cups. But, more than that, Lobanovskyi defined
Ukrainian football. If one goal can encapsulate a philosophy, Dynamo’s
moment of self-expression came in Lyon in 1986. With five minutes
remaining in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final, and Dynamo leading Atlético
Madrid 1–0, Vasyl Rats advanced down the left, drew two men, and played
the ball inside to Ihor Belanov. Belanov took two touches, and, as the
centre-back moved across to close him down, he, without so much as a
glance, laid the ball right for Vadym Yevtushenko. He moved one pace
forward, forcing the full-back inside to close him down, then instinctively
flicked the ball right for the overlapping Oleh Blokhin, who ran on to his
pass, and, as the goalkeeper came off his line, lofted the ball over him to
make it 2–0. Three minutes later Yevtushenko added a third, and Dynamo
had their second Cup-Winners’ Cup.
It is the second goal, though, that has become the image of that final. It
was quick, instinctive, and utterly clinical; once Rats had initiated the
move, there was something almost inevitable about its conclusion. It was a
goal conceived in the laboratory, and practised relentlessly on the training
pitch, until, when the opportunity arose at the highest level, it could be
executed without a thought. It was Lobanovskyi’s scientific football in its
purest form.
To speak of scientific football in Britain can be misleading. It was a
supposedly scientific approach with which the former FA technical director
Charles Hughes and Wing Commander Charles Reep tried to convince us
that football is at its most efficient when it consists of whacking endless
long balls into Positions of Maximum Opportunity, the damaging theory
that became orthodoxy at the FA in the eighties. Lobanovskyi’s conception
was far more subtle and lethal than that.
 It is overly simplistic to claim that Lobanovskyi and the prevailing
ideology turned players into little more than cogs in a machine, but there is
no denying that his Dynamo were a discernibly Soviet side and it is
probably not inaccurate to say that they played a Communist version of the
Total Football of Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff, which emerged in the
West at roughly the same time. The key difference, I would suggest, was
less in the philosophy itself than in how it developed: Lobanovskyi thought
up his systems and imposed them on players, whereas the Dutch model was
more organic, growing out of the happy accident that several of that Ajax
side had played together for years, having grown up in the same district of
Amsterdam.
The tenets, in essence, were the same: hard pressing when out of
possession, rapid movement of the ball and interchange of players while in.
Control of space was still the key, but whereas the Dutch had great
individual skills, and in Cruyff a brilliant, charismatic leader, the prime
asset of Dynamo was their fitness. ‘Since Lobanovskyi’s time,’ Szabo said,
‘we have used the same training programme, which was produced from a
special laboratory that we developed. In former years when our players
were lacking technical skills compared to western European players, the
feature we had was our ability to run a lot.’ Although not, if Husyn is to be
believed, early on in the season.
The idea recurred whenever I asked what was distinctive or unique about
Ukrainian football, yet strangely a number of the Ukrainians who have
moved west have been notorious for their laziness. The former Rangers
manager Walter Smith once dismissed a question about Oleksiy
Mykhailychenko’s lack of work-rate by referring archly to his ‘economy of
movement’, while Serhiy Yuran at Millwall became a byword for the flabby
foreign star, picking up his wages and lapping up the lifestyle while
contributing little or nothing to the club. In fact, only Andriy Shevchenko
could truly be said to have prospered having left the Lobanovskyi fold.
Oleksandr Zavarov was a flop at Juventus; Serhiy Rebrov did nothing at
Tottenham (although he is not alone in that); while Belanov’s form over his
first two seasons in Germany was so bad that, when his wife was caught
shoplifting, Borussia Mönchengladbach offloaded him to Eintracht
Braunschweig of the third division.
 For all their fitness, though, Dynamo were not, as the Western press liked
to portray them, a machine. Yes, they practised set moves, but as Professor
Anatoliy Zelentsov, Lobanovskyi’s great collaborator, has always been at
pains to make clear, more in the manner of chess players, ready to adapt to
circumstance, than of robots. And while they may not have had a leader as
overt as Cruyff, constantly marshalling and cajoling, it would be nonsense
to suggest they were little more than a clockwork model programmed to do
Lobanovskyi’s bidding. ‘Have you seen how bees fly?’ Zelentsov once said.
‘A hive is in the air, and there is a leader. The leader turns right and all the
hive turns right. It turns left and all the hive turn left. It is the same in
football. There is a leader who takes a decision to move, say, here. The rest
need to correct their motion to follow the leader. Every team has players
which link “coalitions”; every team has players which destroy them. The
first are called on to create on the field, the latter to destroy the team actions
of the opponent.’
In such a system discipline is paramount, yet Lobanovskyi the player was
the image of the dilettante left-winger, taller than most, and slower, but
blessed with sublime close control and one of the best left feet the Soviet
game has known. In the Moscow press, they called him ‘Cord’, because of
the way the ball at times appeared to be tied to his boot laces. He was
innovative as well, studying the great Brazilians of the late fifties and
developing his own version of Didi’s ‘falling leaf, a means of imparting
backspin on to the ball such that it loses pace mid-flight and drops. Talk to
older supporters and they recall how they used to go to Dynamo matches to
watch Lobanovskyi take corners. Dynamo won the Soviet title in 1961 and
the Cup three years later, but although Lobanovskyi was popular with the
fans, he never got on with Viktor Maslov, who took over as coach in 1964.
Yet Maslov was effectively Lobanovskyi’s precursor, a fearsome
disciplinarian who introduced the notion of a tight pressing game to the
Soviet Union. After early opposition – one newspaper printed a picture of
four Dynamo players closing down an opponent with the caption ‘We don’t
need this kind of football’ – he led Dynamo to three successive titles
between 1966 and 1968. By then, though, Lobanovskyi had gone.
‘As a player, Lobanovskyi could do almost anything on the pitch,’ his
Dynamo team-mate Viktor Serebrennykov said. ‘But he didn’t like to fulfil
the routine work, and he was very clever and keen on tactics; that was why
he fell out with Maslov. But this difference of opinion forced Lobanovskyi
to re-evaluate his conception of football, and that was what made him the
great coach he became.’
Lobanovskyi played just nine times in the Cup-winning season of 1964,
and the following year moved to the comparative backwater of
Chornomorets Odessa. After two years there, he joined Shakhtar. In 1968,
as Maslov won his third straight title with Dynamo, Lobanovskyi finished
fourteenth. At the age of twenty-nine, utterly disillusioned, he retired from
football. ‘That’s it,’ he told club directors. ‘I’m leaving. I’m sick of playing
anti-soccer.’ Again it is easy to see the similarity with Clough. He too was a
brash and brilliant forward whose playing career ended at the age of
twenty-nine. He too developed a style of play so distinctive that when
players left it they tended to struggle, and he too had his battles with
alcohol.
Lobanovskyi could have drifted out of football, but later that year he met
Zelentsov, in those days a young academic brimming with enthusiasm for
the statistical methods he believed could be employed to improve standards
of coaching. Lobanovskyi quickly warmed to the idea. He was a qualified
plumber, but he had been a talented mathematician himself, graduating
from high school with a gold medal, and even after joining Dynamo Kyiv
as a nineteen-year-old, he continued his education at the Kyiv Polytechnic
Institute. ‘All life,’ he once said, ‘is a number.’
Zelentsov, with his chunky jumpers and faintly absurd Michael-Caine-as-
Harry-Palmer-style glasses, is almost a stereotypical academic, but even in
2005 he was presiding over Dynamo’s laboratory. ‘Lobanovskyi and I
became really inseparable,’ he said. ‘He once told me in public at a party:
“You know, if not for you, I might not have come off as a coach. I owe you
my formation, my knowledge, skills, understanding and realisation of
football.”’
Lobanovskyi took charge of Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, then in one of the
four parallel second divisions, in 1969, and immediately set about applying
his new methods. ‘If you want to be a good coach, forget the player you
were,’ he said. ‘My relationship with Maslov didn’t turn out well, but that’s
not important. He was a great tactician who taught his players how to play
football.’ Lobanovskyi, the man who as a player had called himself an artist
and demanded the artisans did his running for him, came out in favour of a
hard pressing game. ‘To attack,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to deprive the
opponent of the ball. When is it easier to do that – with five players or with
all eleven? The most important thing in football is what a player is doing on
a pitch when he’s not in possession of the ball, not vice-versa. So when we
say that we have an excellent player, that comes from the principle of one
per cent talent and ninety-nine per cent hard work.’
Dnipro won promotion in 1971, and, two years later, Lobanovskyi
returned in triumph to Kyiv, winning the league and cup double in his first
season. Then, in 1975, Dynamo became the first Soviet side to win a
European club competition, beating Ferencváros of Hungary in the Cup-
Winners’ Cup final.
There were, though, flaws to his method, which were highlighted at
international level. ‘I don’t want a team of stars,’ he always maintained. ‘I
want to create a star team.’ He had that at Dynamo, but, in the limited time
international managers are given to work with their players, he found it
impossible to create the same fluency or understanding with the USSR.
There was an obvious solution, and Lobanovskyi took it in April 1975,
sending the USSR out for the 200th international in their history – a
European championship qualifier against Turkey – with a team comprising
eleven Dynamo Kyiv players. The Soviets won 3–0, but Lobanovskyi,
mindful of the potential political dangers if a team of Ukrainians was seen
to let down the USSR, repeated the experiment only once – in a 2–1 win
over the Republic of Ireland the following month. When he tried to impose
his regimen on players from other clubs, though, they resisted, and his first
spell in charge of the USSR ended after players went on strike following
defeat to East Germany in the semifinals of the 1976 Olympic Games, in
protest at his exhausting training methods. The closest he came to
international glory was in the 1988 European Championship in Germany,
when the USSR, having beaten Holland in the group stage, lost to them in
the final, missing a penalty and suffering that ludicrous Marco van Basten
volley as they did so. Football is full of what-might-have-beens, but there is
no doubt that the USSR struggled without their sweeper Oleh Kuznetsov,
who was suspended for the final; as Zelentsov says, without its leader, the
hive cannot fly.
At club level, though, the success never ended. Lobanovskyi’s genius was
to continue developing his system as the game evolved, and he also proved
remarkably adept at adapting to the changing political climate in the late
eighties. In Soviet times Dynamo, like all clubs with the name, were the
team of the secret police, and so were run by the Ministry of the Interior. As
glasnost took hold, though, Lobanovskyi saw huge advantages in turning
professional, in becoming a proper, commercial enterprise. If he could
achieve the success he had with a group of Ukrainians who were technically
still amateur, what would he be able to do if he could buy players from
abroad and pump even more money into developing the laboratory? And
how much more expensive Armenian cognac would he be able to buy?
Lobanovskyi lobbied Scherbytskyi, for whom Dynamo had built a five-
storey underground palace, and he pulled strings until the politburo gave
Dynamo permission to privatise. Given that sports clubs were exempt from
taxation, that proved hugely profitable, as Dynamo set up joint ventures
with Western companies and began what was effectively an import-export
business. They had licences to deal in gold, platinum and parts for nuclear
missiles; and those were not obtained without the involvement, or at least
the blessing, of organised crime. Nobody who made a profit when the
USSR fragmented did so entirely legally, but there were constant rumours –
many, admittedly, emanating from Russia – that Dynamo were the team of
the Ukrainian mafia.
After a poor World Cup in 1990, Lobanovskyi left Ukraine for the UAE,
but he was persuaded to return in 1996. As other eastern European teams,
deprived of state subsidies, crumbled, Dynamo thrived. ‘We were fortunate
that three things came together,’ Serhiy Polkhovskyi, their urbane vice-
president, told me. ‘We had the generation of Shevchenko, Luzhny and
Rebrov, we had rich investors, and we were able to persuade Lobanovskyi
to come back. Of course the fact we had rich investors persuaded the
generation of Shevchenko, Luzhny and Rebrov to stay, and the fact we had
that generation and rich investors persuaded Lobanovskyi to come back.’
So in the end, it all came down to the money – often, it was felt, rather too
directly. In 1995, Dynamo were banned from European competition for
three years after an attempt to pay off the Spanish referee Lopez Nieto
ahead of a Champions League game against Panathinaikos. The ban,
though, was lifted after a year because UEFA decided that suspending
Dynamo was hampering the development of Ukrainian football; that is how
dominant Dynamo were.
 With Shevchenko, Luzhny and Rebrov, Dynamo reached the semi-finals
of the Champions League in 1999, and it would have been they rather than
Bayern Munich who met Manchester United in the final had they not
squandered 2–0 and 3–1 leads in the first leg. Quarter of a century after he
had first become coach at the club, Lobanovskyi was still performing
miracles. Polkhovskyi, though, believes that it was not long after that that
the warning signs began to emerge.
I first met Polkhovskyi at Dynamo’s Champions League game against
Liverpool in October 2001. Gérard Houllier, then Liverpool’s manager, was
in hospital after collapsing with a ruptured aorta at a league game against
Leeds the previous Saturday, and, given that Lobanovskyi had recently had
heart surgery, it seemed not unreasonable that he might offer a few words of
sympathy and support. Most managers would leap at such an easy
opportunity to satisfy the press, but Lobanovskyi didn’t turn up at the pre-
match press conference, sending instead the Serbian sweeper Goran
Gavranci , who had neither had cardiac problems nor been heard of in
England. So I asked Polkhovskyi if he could perhaps phone Lobanovskyi
for a quote. Absolutely not, he said, with a weary resignation that bordered
on the apologetic.
These days, Polkhovskyi admits that working with Lobanovskyi was a
nightmare. ‘He was like Kha from the Jungle Book,’ he said. ‘You never
knew what he was thinking, and he was always ready to pounce.’ Bolstered
by his statistics, Lobanovskyi was notoriously dogmatic and authoritarian.
‘When I was a player it was difficult to evaluate players,’ Lobanovskyi said.
‘The coach could say that a player wasn’t in the right place at the right
moment, and the player could simply disagree. There were no real methods
of analysis, but today the players cannot object. They know that the
morning after the game a sheet of paper will be pinned up showing all the
figures characterising their play. If a midfielder has fulfilled sixty technical
and tactical actions in the course of the match, then he has not pulled his
weight. He is obliged to do a hundred or more.’
Inevitably his attitude led to conflict. Oleksandr Khapsalys, who played
for Dynamo in the late seventies and early eighties, recalled how
Lobanovskyi would simply shout down any perceived criticism. ‘It was
better not to joke with Lobanovskyi,’ he said. ‘If he gave an instruction, and
the player said: “But I think …”, Lobanovskyi would look at him and
scream: “Don’t think! I do the thinking for you. Play!”’
Oleh Blokhin, the star of the 1975 side, never enjoyed the warmest of
relationships with his coach and neither did Ihor Belanov, who won the
European Player of the Year award in 1986. ‘My relationship with
Lobanovskyi wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t friendly either,’ he said. ‘It was
simply professional. But he did a lot for me. He invited me to Dynamo and
persuaded me to play his way. We had quarrels, but we were aware that we
were doing a great thing.’ As if to prove there were no hard feelings,
Belanov named his son Valeriy.
As the world moved on, though, the distance between Lobanovskyi and
his players grew. The age difference didn’t help, but the problem was more
the difficulty of having increasingly to deal with players who had not been
brought up in a Communist society. ‘He had internal torments,’
Polkhovskyi said. ‘Previously, a word or a glance was enough to assert his
authority and explain what he wanted. Maybe it was typical of the
Communist system, but now players have a greater freedom and an
individuality. They become stars – like Beckham, what is Beckham? A pop
star? – and so they do not put the team first.’ In other words, Lobanovskyi,
a product of socialism, struggled to come to terms with the advances of
capitalism. In that, he is far from unique.
For all their off-field activities, on the pitch Dynamo continue to play the
socialist football Lobanovskyi and Zelentsov developed in their laboratory.
I remember the bewilderment in the press box at Highbury during a
Champions League game between Arsenal and Dynamo as we tried to
identify the blond bloke who’d just put in a cross from the left. ‘Georgi
Peev?’ somebody suggested, reading his shirt number from the replay on
the TV screen and checking it against the team-sheet. ‘Can’t be – he’s the
right-back,’ came a dismissive shout, but it was: at its best, their movement
can still delight. Football, though, has moved on from the days when teams
would be mesmerised by protean opponents.
When Lobanovskyi died in May 2002, Oleksiy Mykhailychenko, who had
been his assistant since 1997, took over and Shakhtar promptly won their
first Ukrainian title. Dynamo won the next two championships, but nobody
ever seemed convinced by Mykhailychenko. He was, in fairness, in an
impossible position. How, after all, do you replace a national icon; a man so
popular that over a million Ukrainians flooded the streets on the day of his
funeral to pay their last respects? When Bill Shankly resigned from
Liverpool in 1974, Bob Paisley, feeling his authority undermined by his
predecessor’s continued presence, had to ban him from the training ground.
Ghosts, though, are not so easily banished. Lobanovskyi’s genius was to
keep the club in a state of perpetual evolution, but any change
Mykhailychenko made became a major risk, fraught with the possibility of
a failure that would be seen as a betrayal of Lobanovskyi’s tradition. And so
Dynamo stagnated.
After the defeat to Shakhtar, Mykhailychenko was downbeat to the point
of moroseness. ‘Don’t blame the players,’ he said. ‘Blame me.’ Dynamo
did, and after a Champions League defeat to Trabzonspor a month later, he
was sacked. The laboratory, though, will go on; Szabo, the man who
replaced him, had been acting as vice-president with a responsibility for
football and had coached the club between Lobanovskyi’s second and third
stints as manager.
When I met him in his office in the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium, he was
quite open about the fact that in his first spell in charge he remained in the
great man’s shadow. ‘The laboratory would develop some plan and would
propose it to Lobanovskyi,’ he explained. ‘He would look at it and then
change it according to his opinion. It was the same for me. I took something
from the lab and we introduced some changes according to what I thought.
But I knew what Lobanovskyi would think, and tried to do the same.’ And
now? ‘It seems that times have changed, and so it may be necessary to
introduce some changes to our playing style.’ Their socialist football has
been superseded by Shakhtar, the thrusting capitalists from the home of
Ukrainian socialism. Polkhovskyi, ever a man for a literary allusion,
compared them to Rastignac, the ambitious youth created by Balzac who
first appears in Pére Goriot.

I arrived in Donetsk at lunchtime four days after Shakhtar’s victory in Kyiv,

having taken an early-morning train from Dnipropetrovsk. Having expected
the industrial heartland to resemble a bleak Beamish – all grim terraces
huddling in the drizzle – I confess I was slightly disappointed by its
modernity. There wasn’t even any miserable Dickensian weather, just a
baking sun that had pounded relentlessly through the train window leaving
me in desperate need of a shower. ‘The things we shall do today are the
following,’ said Taras. ‘Number one: go to the hotel. Number two: take a
room. Number three: you will take a shower. Number four: meet Mark
Levytsky …’
In fact, we had barely had time to complete numbers one and two when
Levytsky turned up at the hotel. He was an imposing bear of a man, who,
with his pale linen suit, neat grey moustache and gigantic spectacles, could
have been a Greek shipping magnate, but was actually a vice-president of
Shakhtar, a post he took after an illustrious career as a sports journalist. He
immediately offered a tour of the training base. These are normally
necessary evils, diplomatic plods round empty fields while a painfully
enthusiastic groundsman lists the ‘x’ pitches, ‘y’ of which have undersoil
heating, and ‘z’ of which floodlighting, but Levytsky’s tour was different.
For one thing, he gave me a lift in a vast chauffeur-driven car with blacked-
out windows; for another, even through the medium of a translator,
Levytsky was outrageously funny. He had an aura of gravitas, but seemed
to revel in puncturing it with conspiratorial stage whispers (the serious
leather-bound notebook in which he made regular jottings, I noticed, was
decorated with pictures of Britney Spears). And for another, Shakhtar’s
training base was like no other I had ever seen.
The pitches were immaculate, the weights room modern and spotless, the
players’ quarters spacious and comfortable, but it was the extras that were
extraordinary. There was, for instance, an aviary. ‘Some of the players and a
couple of the coaches,’ Levytsky explained, ‘like birds.’ It is easy to
imagine a director in England uttering the words with dread, but Levytsky’s
meaning was entirely ornithological. Players have a stressful job, they need
to relax, and so the club has provided the means for them to do so. And if
the aviary doesn’t do it for them, there is also a huge fishing lake, specially
stocked with swans, a basketball court and a myriad other distractions. The
effect is more five-star resort than boot-camp. Perhaps, though, it needs to
be. How else would the club attract players to the blasted industrial east?
These days, barely a summer goes by without Shakhtar smashing the
Ukrainian transfer record to sign the likes of the Nigerian striker Julius
Aghahowa or the Brazilian midfielder Matuzalem, and they have brought in
coaches of the international stature of Nevio Scala and Mircea Lucescu. For
much of their history, though, they were just another provincial club, whose
sole distinguishing feature was the passion of their support, the local miners
turning out in sufficient numbers that Shakhtar regularly won the trophy
awarded by the Soviet authorities for having the largest average home gate.
Everything changed in October 1995 during a home game against Tavriya
Simferopol.
Shakhtar tend to play home games these days at the Olympic Stadium,
which is passably modern, but back then their home was the crumbling and
faded Shakhtar Stadium, which still hosts reserve games. There is
something striking about the scale of the construction and the resolute
functionality of the design, but the overriding impression, even on a sunny
day, is of drabness. Being there was like viewing everything through a grey
wash: there wasn’t a bright colour anywhere, apart, that is, from the area
immediately around the VIP box, where the plastic seats were new, and
screamingly orange.
Tavriya were the first champions of the independent Ukrainian league, but
their visit to Donetsk three years later should have been unremarkable. The
match, though, was immediately given an edge when Shakhtar’s president
Oleksandr Bragin (or Alik the Greek, to give him his underworld
nickname), having missed a number of games following an attempt on his
life, decided he would put aside security concerns and attend. He and his
right-hand man, Rinat Akhmetov, went first to the nearby village of
Dokuchayevsk to see the reserve side play, then hurried back to Donetsk for
the main game. By the time Bragin got there, the match had kicked off, so,
deciding not to wait for Akhmetov, who had been held up in traffic, he and
his bodyguards rushed straight up the stairs to the VIP enclosure.
‘It was a very humid day,’ Levytsky told me. ‘I was leading the TV
broadcast and I was sitting in the commentators’ cabin just below the VIP
lodge. We saw before the game that Bragin’s security people had gone
through the place, but I can’t remember whether they used sniffer dogs as
Akhmetov does now.’
It was pronounced safe, but a few seconds after Bragin had opened the
door and entered the passage leading into the box itself, there was an
almighty explosion. ‘They had recently constructed the roof on the main
stand,’ Levytsky said, ‘and when the bomb went off there was such a sound
that I thought one of the girders must have snapped. The game went on for
maybe twenty or thirty seconds before the referee realised what had
happened and took the players off.’
It was almost a decade after the incident that I spoke to Levystky, but he
clearly still found it difficult to discuss, constantly taking his glasses off and
rubbing his eyes. ‘I stopped commentating and went upstairs to see what
had happened,’ he said. ‘I saw a TV reporter running away and asked him
what was going on. He told me not to go into the VIP lodge because it was
too terrible to look at. Then I saw Ravil Safiullin who was the brother of
Bragin’s wife and at the time was Shakhtar’s vice-president. We went into
the lodge together. There were bits of bodies everywhere. Then Safiullin
saw a severed arm, and recognised that the watch around the wrist was the
president’s, and that was when we knew he was dead.’ Four bodyguards
were also killed.
In 2004, at a trial in Luhansk, the one surviving member – or so he
claimed – of the group that carried out that attack explained how they had
tailed Bragin for several days before planting the bomb and detonating it
remotely. ‘As to who ordered it,’ Levytsky said, ‘there is no clear answer,
but in the early nineties criminal groups were dividing up the territory of the
former USSR, and it was rumoured in Donetsk that the assassination was
something to do with that.’
A year later, Akhmetov replaced his former mentor as president. Thanks
to his metallurgical interests, he is now the richest man in Ukraine. He owns
the Donbass Palace Hotel and, quite aside from the redevelopment of the
training facilities, has spent in excess of £50million on players. He is, as
anybody in Donetsk will tell you, the Ukrainian Abramovich, except that he
has invested at home. So emotionally attached to the club is he that in
September 2000, after Arsenal had come from two down to beat Shakhtar at
Highbury with, of all things, two late Martin Keown goals, he was the last
person to leave the ground, slumping in his seat as the lights went out
around him. ‘He has fallen in love with the club,’ said Lucescu. ‘Maybe
when he was a child he wanted to be a football player. His passion for the
club makes me passionate.’
Passion is a word used a lot about Shakhtar. To their fans, that is what
separates the miners – the living, breathing blue-collar proletariat – from
the bloodless aesthetes in Kyiv. And a part of that, at least in the years
before the arrival of Scala and the death of Lobanovskyi coincided to bring
them their first league title, was their habit for surging into leads only to
fritter them away. In 2001, on a freezing night in Poltava, I saw them play a
poor Vorskla side. They took an early lead, hurled everything forward in
search of a second, and conceded a sloppy equaliser, allowing Dynamo
back into a title race that could have been over by Christmas.
That night, as their coach Viktor Prokopenko, an emotional, charismatic
man committed to cavalier football, resigned, I asked a Shakhtar fan if he
was frustrated by the way his team persisted in a suicidally attacking
approach. He told me that that was the spirit of the club, that they were all
about heart and passion, whereas Dynamo, with their scientific ethos, their
computer printouts and their laboratory, while they might be winners, were
little more than machines. Little wonder what success Shakhtar have had
has come in the Cups.
When I relayed Polkhovskyi’s description of Shakhtar as a modern
Rastignac to Levytsky, he snorted. ‘Let them read Balzac,’ he growled with
a dismissive waft of his arm. ‘We will concentrate on football.’ Typical
Kyivans, he seemed to be suggesting, always over-intellectualising. Even
the club song, after eulogising miners completing a shift and going to watch
the team, contains a snide reference to the fact that ‘not only students with
books are waiting for Shakhtar’s victory’. Everything at Shakhtar is referred
back to the collieries: even their kit of orange shirts and black shorts is
supposed to represent the experience of miners leaving the dark of the pit
for the bright of the day.
Shakhtar are comfortably the best-supported side in Ukraine, regularly
attracting over 20,000 fans to home games, although that is nothing to the
figures they got in the eighties. All over Ukraine, clubs are struggling for
crowds, partly because the football is poorer and partly because there are
simply far more recreational distractions now than there were twenty years
ago. Dynamo, curiously, although they pack out the 80,000-capacity
Olimpyskyi Stadium for Champions League games, struggle by on an
average of under 10,000 in the league.
Akhmetov would have it no other way: when he bought into football, he
wanted the whole package, including a backdrop of fervent orange-clad
fans. More because of that than for commercial reasons, Shakhtar are
desperate to attract more fans to matches, offering free tickets and inviting
supporters to training sessions where they can quiz their president. They
even offer a VIP package, costing around three times the usual entrance fee,
by which fans get a cushion, a copy of the club newspaper and a cardboard
lunch box that includes sandwiches, chocolate and (pertinently for anybody
who remembers the Fast Show sketch about nouveaux middle-class fans in
England), a tube of Pringles. However many they attract, though, they will
never generate the kind of merchandising revenues possible in Britain,
because the fans just aren’t rich enough. The major sportswear
manufacturers apply a uniform rate across the world, so a replica Adidas
shirt, for instance, costs £45 whether you buy it in Donetsk or Doncaster. If
it seems expensive in Yorkshire, it is three-quarters of the average
Ukrainian monthly wage.
That Shakhtar are now capable of providing a challenge is good for
Ukrainian football as a whole, as even Dynamo admit. ‘Competition,’
Polkhovskyi said with a twinkle, ‘can only give more honour to our
victories.’ It has not, though, made much of a difference to the smaller
clubs, who still find themselves banging their heads against a glass ceiling.
As far as they are concerned, the only difference is that where once the
structures of power were controlled by Dynamo, now they are controlled by
both Shakhtar and Dynamo.

Dnipropetrovsk is a sprawling industrial city on the banks of the Dnipro.

With its bars and restaurants the waterfront could be idyllic, a Ukrainian
equivalent of the Docas in Lisbon, were it not for the lurid green sludge on
the surface of the water, and the huge factory on the far bank, on which is
written, just in case you hadn’t got the message: HOUSE OF STEEL.
In the bar of my hotel, a gloomy, dark-panelled chamber, I met Ihor and
Volodymyr, two Dnipro fans with aspirations to hooligan status. They were
both convinced that their team was the victim of a national conspiracy. ‘You
know that Dynamo run the federation and Shakhtar the league?’ Ihor asked
as soon as our conversation turned to football. At the time, the president of
the Ukrainian Football Federation was Hrihoriy Surkis, the brother of the
Dynamo president Ihor Surkis, while the president of the league was Ravil
Safiullin, the former vice-president of Shakhtar.
To Ihor, it is simply a fact that if Dnipro challenge the duopoly, they will
be beaten down. In 1994, for instance, Dynamo only pipped them to the
league title in the final match of the season, but then neutered Dnipro as a
serious challenger by signing their four best players the following day.
Which begs the question of why, if they know their team can finish only
third, the likes of Ihor and Volodymyr bother (and, judging by the scars on
his arms, Ihor has suffered for his devotion). ‘A man can love his wife,’
Ihor said, ‘even if he knows she does not look like Brigitte Bardot.’ True
enough, but most fans surely dream that there will come a time, for two
brief hours on a Cup final afternoon, when football will enact its magical
transformation and she will.
For all Ihor’s pessimism, it has happened to Dnipro before. They won the
Soviet championship in 1983, famously beating Spartak Moscow 4–2 on
the final day of the season to clinch the title, and then again, even more
remarkably, five years later, despite losing their two best players, Hennadiy
Lytovchenko and Oleh Protasov, to Dynamo on the eve of the season. Their
manager for that second triumph was Yevhen Kucherevskyi, and, after a
spell in Russia with Arsenal Tula, he has returned to the club. With his
battered face and straggly hair – imagine a taller, stockier version of Eric
Gates – he is instantly recognisable as one of the old-school football men
who no longer exist in English football, or at least not in its upper echelons.
He is somehow both enthusiastic and world-weary, as though the cynicism
built up by years of frustration cannot quite extinguish his passion for the
game. ‘To be honest, I didn’t think the team would challenge for the title
that season,’ he recalled. ‘During pre-season I said to the players: “I know
that some of you were dissatisfied that all the newspapers wrote about
Lytovchenko and Protasov, but now they have gone, and you must prove
that you are worthy of praise.” It was only two nails missing from a whole
bench.’
The bench held up remarkably well, but it was only as autumn drew in
and Dnipro faced Zenit in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) that Kucherevskyi
began to believe his side could win the title. ‘Matches against Zenit were
always difficult,’ he said, ‘and the difficulty was increased because it was
already cold and they were playing on their artificial pitch. Also, their
coach Yury Morozov was a friend of Lobanovskyi, and so because our main
rivals were Dynamo we knew it would be a hard game. Before the match I
told the players to forget they were playing on an artificial surface and just
play as though they were playing on grass. All the players were covered in
blood because of friction burns, but we won 1–0, and that was when I knew
we would win the league.’
But then came glasnost and fragmentation, and, although Dnipro were the
first Soviet club to privatise, financially they have fallen way behind both
Dynamo and Shakhtar, and are notable today only for having taken the
decision not to sign any foreign players. ‘Today, here as in all European
countries, money is the decisive factor,’ Kucherevskyi said. ‘Nowadays, if
you have money, you can buy players, you can pay salaries, you can build a
training base – everything that is necessary for football. In the USSR,
everything was based on order, on being afraid, on discipline. Back then we
often had to break the law. We had to find money to motivate the players
because footballers earned less than a cleaner did in England. Coaches were
not simply coaches: I would wake up in the morning and have to think
about everything from the toilet paper for the players to the team bus. I had
to go to the authorities to beg them for things. At that time it was normal to
say “I have wangled something”, rather than just “I have got something”.’
His ambivalence is not uncommon. In many cases the supposed freedoms
of capitalism are merely theoretical, while corruption continues to blight the
system. Certainly that is the general feeling in Taras’s home town of Lviv,
way out in the west near the border with Poland. We arrived on the night-
train from Kyiv and made straight for his flat, where I would have had a
shower had there been any hot water. On the plus side, there was breakfast,
prepared by Taras’s wife, Olenka.
Ukrainians don’t do breakfast as we know it. To them it’s a meal like any
other, and so most days in Ukraine began with a search for a restaurant
where I could eat something bland like yoghurt while Taras tucked into a
cutlet or a steak. The only concession he made was not to have soup, which
apparently is only for lunch. Olenka, with a kindly nod to my Western
tastes, laid out a plate of cooked meats and cheeses. And boiled potatoes
and a cauliflower, grown in Taras’s allotment, battered and fried, which was
far nicer than it had any right to be.
It was in Lviv, on 14 July 1894, that Ukrainian football was born
(although Lviv was in those days part of the Austro-Hungarian empire).
There may have been impromptu games before that, but it was then that the
first organised and verifiable match took place, a show put on by the Sokil
Sports Club. Part of a whole day of demonstrations of various sports, it was
scheduled to run until the first goal was scored, and so lasted only six
minutes (or possibly seven, Yaroslav Hrysyo, the president of the Lviv
Regional Football Association allows). It was enough, and football took off
in the region, although Karpaty, Lviv’s major local club, were not founded
until 1963 as a civil side, run by a trade union, to match the local army
team, SCA.
Karpaty became one of the better Ukrainian teams, no Dynamo Kyiv it is
true, but able to hold their own in the second division of the Soviet league,
and, between 1971 and 1977, and in 1980, good enough to take their place
in the Supreme League. On an extraordinary night in 1969, they even won
the Soviet Cup, beating SKA Rostov in the final to become the first winners
from outside the top flight.
Volodymyr Paltsun, the editor of Vilna Ukrayina, the official Lviv-region
newspaper, watched the final on television in his office. It was a warm
evening and he had the window open. Early in the second half, with
Karpaty desperately chasing an equaliser, he heard a shout from the
Regional Communist Party offices across the street, urging the Karpaty
captain Ihor Kulchytskyi forwards: ‘Kulya, don’t give in!’ It may not seem
like much, but it has become one of the emblematic anecdotes of their
triumph. At a time in which a stony face was part of the uniform of political
leaders, such an outburst of emotion was remarkable. Later that evening,
after the celebrations had burned themselves out, trams left their official
routes to carry the relatives of players home, which in Brezhnev’s USSR
was tantamount to anarchy.
That triumph confirmed Karpaty’s place in local hearts, and, with their
policy of fielding players from the Lviv and Zakarpattya regions – as
opposed to SCA, who conscripted from throughout Ukraine – they became
an outlet for western Ukrainian nationalism. That anti-Moscow sentiment
was intensified by events in 1977, when they were relegated behind CSKA,
who had not merely arranged that their final two away games should end in
draws, but had even reneged on that agreement and ‘inadvertently’ beaten
Ararat Yerevan 3–2. Once match-fixers start cheating each other, there is no
honour left in football at all.
Karpaty went up again in 1979, but as post-match demonstrations in Lviv,
particularly after victories over Moscow sides, became increasingly
common, the club became ever more problematic for the local Communist
leadership, until finally, in 1981, Viktor Dobryk, the first secretary of the
Lviv Region Communist Party, shut them down.
Despite having a USSR international and three players who had played in
the USSR side that had won the 1978 Under-21 World Championship in
their squad, Karpaty, rent by cliques, were relegated in 1980, and, the
following season, weakened by the departure of several key players,
finished a disappointing eleventh in the second flight. Dobryk, citing
‘problems with trade-union financing’, and insisting he was acting ‘to
strengthen Lviv football by collecting together the best players from both
teams’ merged the two clubs to form SCA Karpaty. The army were put in
control and, although the new entity took Karpaty’s place in the second
flight, most of their remaining players had left within two years. Interest in
the team diminished, but the final straw came in 1985 when SCA Karpaty
were ordered to throw a game against CSKA Moscow. Both sides were
battling for promotion, but a decision was taken in Moscow that a military
team from the provinces should not be allowed to get in the way of the
army’s premier club.
Karpaty’s story took a turn for the better in 1989, when they re-formed
and began the slow process of working their way up from the bottom of the
Soviet championship; SCA Karpaty, meanwhile, slowly sank, and now play
in the regional leagues under the name Halychyna, having moved to
Drohobych, a small town about forty miles south of Lviv.
This, though, is not a story with a happy ending. Karpaty were relegated
in 2004, and once again there were widespread accusations that they had
been deliberately targeted for having kicked against the system. Most clubs
tend to spend most of their existence at least partly convinced that they are
being cheated, but in Karpaty’s case there was definitely something odd
going on.
Karpaty’s problems, it seemed, centred on their president Petro
Dyminskyi. Most people seemed to agree he is ‘difficult’, a man who
adheres to his principles no matter what, the real trouble being that a
rigorous belief in ‘fair play’ (the English term is used across Europe, and
the English, curiously, are seen as its prime exponents) is not necessarily
the most useful asset if you’re looking to prosper in Ukrainian football.
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. ‘In our federation there is a
division of honest play,’ Oleksandr Bandurko, the vice-president of the
Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU), explained to me through his press
officer. ‘If there are signals that such a thing has happened we refer it to the
commission and they try to clear up the situation. We generally use the
reports of the referee and the match delegate, which can indicate that the
match was played without due sporting struggle, but really it is not easy to
prove that the match was arranged in advance. The problem is serious
because the only strict proof is to catch somebody red-handed. We realise
such a problem exists, as it does in any country, and we are working on it.’
Which is no great consolation to Karpaty.
It is refereeing decisions that provide the most direct evidence. One club
official claimed to have heard a referee say that he would ‘kill Karpaty
because they are not paying’, while estimates of how many points
Dyminskyi’s refusal to play along cost Karpaty in the 2003–04 season range
from seven to ten. On three occasions the mistakes against Karpaty were so
blatant that match officials were subsequently suspended by the FFU. As
president of the Lviv Regional Football Association and a member of the
FFU’s Referees’ Committee, Yaroslav Hrysyo has a foot in each camp. I
met him in a hotel room in Kyiv where he was staying after attending a
FFU congress that had elected the former Dynamo Kyiv supremo Hrihoriy
Surkis, unopposed, for another four-year term as president. Hrysyo was
adamant that Karpaty were moaning about nothing. ‘We considered all the
games that were presented to us,’ he said. ‘The referees were punished for
their mistakes. These appeals concerned three matches; the league consists
of thirty matches, so I don’t think such mistakes can be an excuse for the
team’s failure. The mistakes were punished so it’s impossible to say other
agencies were involved.’
The situation has improved immeasurably, he insisted, since his time as a
referee, when he was often called upon to take charge of games being
played in war zones. He spoke of tanks at a stadium in Azerbaijan, and a
blockade at Yerevan airport, but his worst experience came in Fergana,
Uzbekistan, refereeing a game between Neftyanik and Kotayk of Armenia.
Neftyanik had an Armenian president, and, as Kotayk were desperate for
points to avoid relegation, he was concerned that if Neftyanik lost, he
would be accused of throwing the game. Accordingly, he did the exact
opposite, and offered Hrysyo a bribe. ‘I never agreed to such proposals,’
Hrysyo said. ‘I heard about it happening several times that something
would be promised, but it would remain only a promise.’
At half time, Kotayk led 1–0, and as he left the pitch Hrysyo was greeted
at the touchline by the city mayor, who was carrying a gun. ‘You can
imagine what pressure like that does,’ he said. ‘You try not to make
mistakes against the home team. Anyway, I was lucky; soon after half time
Neftyanik scored twice and the game passed off much more peacefully.’
Both penalties, perhaps? ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Whenever teams lost away
games and there’d been a penalty, they always went home and blamed the
referee, so I tried never to give them.’ It might not be perfect, but Ukrainian
football has at least moved on from those days.
Perhaps not far enough, though, for quite aside from the refereeing,
Karpaty felt aggrieved by their 3–2 defeat to Borysfen four games from the
end of the season. Borysfen’s captain, the former Ukraine midfielder Yuriy
Maksymov, was suspended, but played anyway, scoring one and setting up
another. Karpaty, not surprisingly, appealed, but the FFU, contrary to all
precedent, allowed the result to stand.
I had spoken repeatedly to the club, and they had assured me that they
were keen for me to investigate and would give me every assistance. Even
the day I left Kyiv on the night-train west, I was told I could talk to players
and club officials, and examine the videos of the dubious games myself, but
by the time I arrived, something had changed. There was cordiality, but
little cooperation. A new general director, Yuriy Dyachuk-Stavytskyi, had
been appointed, and, after forty years in the Soviet and post-Soviet game,
he was a pragmatist. The president’s anti-corruption drive had been
tempered, and the logic seemed to be that if Karpaty were to be promoted
the following season, the last thing they wanted to do was to antagonise the
FFU or the Professional League.
During my conversation with Dyachuk-Stavytskyi, he received a number
of phone calls, two of which were of particular interest. One informed him
that the tapes of the controversial incidents had arrived, but, presumably
reasoning that I would not understand, he ordered them to be taken away
again. The other was to tell him that members of the official fan club
wanted to arrange a meeting with me; he insisted that I should not be
allowed to talk to them. Dyminskyi’s war on corruption, it seemed, was
over, and a full-scale cover-up was in effect.
That left just one person willing to talk: the remarkable Yevhen Kravs, a
local journalist probably related to the general who led the Ukrainian
Galician Army through the turmoil of 1918–19. Perhaps because of his
glorious ancestry, he holds little truck with the discretion most of those
involved in Ukrainian football practise. We arranged to meet at his
apartment in central Lviv. He arrived fractionally after me, zipping up in a
brightly painted Zaporozhets. Robust and small, the cars – known locally as
Horbatyi, or Hunchbacks – were produced in huge quantities in Ukraine in
the sixties and developed a reputation for smoky unreliability. Kravs,
though, drove a souped-up model that he races with other enthusiasts. That
afternoon he should have been covering a tennis tournament, but, because
of persistent rain, he had spent the day tinkering under his car. When I first
met him, he was covered in oil.
His apartment was large, but sparsely furnished, achingly Bohemian. In
one corner of the room, where we chatted, stood a magnificent nineteenth-
century boiler, its gleaming white front adorned with a depiction in bronze
of the head of a German queen. In another, curled disdainfully in a window
box, was a Siamese cat. On the table between us was set a pot of excellent
coffee and a bottle of brandy. In Ukraine, he said, it is considered unlucky
to stop at two glasses, so we made sure we left that landmark well behind.
The first thing to understand, Kravs told me, was the power wielded by
Dynamo and Shakhtar. Under normal circumstances, it would be possible to
play one off against the other. In 2002–03, for instance, Volyn Lutsk, one of
the smaller sides in Ukraine, persuaded Dynamo to pay them a win bonus if
they beat Shakhtar and, having done that, got Shakhtar to pay them a win
bonus if they beat Dynamo, which they also did.
With presidential elections scheduled for the autumn, though,
circumstances in 2004 were far from normal. Hrihoriy Surkis, the president
of the FFU, was a key figure in the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine
(United), a political grouping of Kyivan oligarchs. His brother Ihor
succeeded him as president of Dynamo, and such was the identification of
club and party that in 1998 every player joined the SDPU. Dynamo’s badge
was regularly used on election literature, and it has even been suggested
that the sale of Shevchenko to AC Milan in 1999 was arranged at a time
that would do Surkis least political damage. (Although the fact he had just
scored three times in a Champions League quarter-final against Real
Madrid made it a sensible time to sell anyway.)
Usually, the SDPU would stand in opposition to the so-called Donetsk
Clan, which is headed by Akhmetov, but, having no viable candidate of
their own, the Surkis brothers, desperate to prevent the reformist Viktor
Yushchenko becoming president, were forced to back Viktor Yanukovych,
the Donetsk candidate.
Politically, anyway, Dyminskyi was known to oppose Surkis, and it is
probably no coincidence that his company found its tax affairs under
scrutiny during the 2003–04 season. ‘Two or three years ago the clans were
enemies,’ Kravs said, ‘and that might have helped, but now Dynamo and
Shakhtar are friendly so they have no interest in a third party, and have
ganged up on Dyminskyi. It is now less important for Surkis to win against
Shakhtar than to make his man president of Ukraine. For Akhmetov at the
moment it is less important to beat Dynamo than to buy the biggest
metallurgical organisation. They cannot be at continuous war, and it
happens that in the course of the last year they have come to peace. If
Dynamo and Shakhtar were at war, then Akhmetov might have helped
Karpaty.
‘They talked about three matches, but I know about more than three
matches. I can point to nine matches where the refereeing has been directed
against different teams. You can compare it to chess: the big players are
sitting in a room somewhere moving the pieces. Arranged matches and bent
referees happen all the time, and Dymynskyi is the first to stand against it.
He has suffered for that and I respect him for such a struggle. He is a
difficult person with many negative aspects, but I respect him. The problem
is that he has got the timing wrong.’
Maybe, but two decades ago Karpaty were run down just as surely. To
speak of timing seems merely a consolation, for the truth is that,
historically, in Ukraine it hasn’t paid for the little man to kick too hard
against his betters. Perhaps, though, times are changing, and not just with
the rise of Shakhtar. History does not make Ukrainians optimistic, but then
few predicted the kind of popular revolution in December 2004 that
overturned Yanukovych’s flawed election victory, and saw Yushchenko
installed as president.
Things, inevitably, will change as a result of the Orange Revolution. The
Zakarpattya chairman Volodymyr Paulyo, for instance, was arrested at the
club stadium in Uzhhorod, the heartland of SDPU support, having
apparently begun to equip a counter-revolutionary force. Some say he
intended to fire on demonstrators, others that he planned to disguise himself
as a Yushchenko supporter and seize a school in an effort to discredit the
protests. He was formally accused of having interfered in mayoral elections
in Mukachevo the previous spring, when opposition candidates were
attacked, polling stations looted and ballot boxes thrown into a nearby river.
The head of the local administration, Ivan Rizak, was also arrested, at
which his replacement, Viktor Baloha, decided local government could not
finance the club.
As Yushchenko’s reforms took hold, Naftohaz Ukrayiny, the state oil and
gas company, ended their $4m annual sponsorship of Vorskla Poltava, and
demanded the return of the team bus, which, it turned out, belonged to
them. In Kharkiv, the Metalist coach Hennadiy Lytovchenko, all his
assistants and a group of leading players abandoned the club – which was
controlled by the oligarch Oleksiy Yaroslavsky – and went across the city to
Arsenal, a division lower, but led by Viktor Chumak, a close ally of the new
head of the local administration. In Crimea, Serhiy Kunitsyn, president of
the regional football federation, was charged with budgetary irregularities
over the construction of a new stadium in Symferapol.
The biggest threat, though, is to the Surkis brothers and their control of
Dynamo. Andriy Shevchenko read out a statement on television backing
Yanukovych during the demonstrations, but others from the 1999 team have
deserted them. Oleh Luzhny spoke out in favour of the revolution, while
Serhiy Rebrov wore an orange sweatband in support of Yushchenko at West
Ham’s Championship victory over Watford. In February 2005, the club’s
shares were frozen by the state, pending investigations into the club’s
privatisation and subsequent financial activity.
If the power of the oligarchs really is waning (and they are not simply
being replaced by a new cabal), then perhaps there is a chance of free and
open competition and there is hope for the likes of Dnipro and Karpaty, and
league titles will have the ‘honour’ Polkhovskyi craves. That, though, is for
the future. As I bounced over the grass start to the runway at Donetsk
International, on a flight bound for Kyiv, I chatted to the businessman next
to me, a trader in aluminium. He liked football he said, and watched AC
Milan’s games in Serie A because of Shevchenko. And Ukrainian league
games, did he ever go to them? ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s too predictable.’
 2 POLAND
The Ugly Daughter

It was night, it was snowing on and off, and we had about 250 miles back to
Warsaw. Maciej Iwanski, a commentator for TVP and my fixer in Poland,
being young and thrusting, was driving quickly. As we zipped around a
shallow bend, the front right of the car bucked suddenly, dipping down, and
then, with a dreadful thump, jolted upwards. Maciej hit the brakes, and we
slithered to a squealing halt in the gravel by the side of the road. The
problem wasn’t difficult to spot: a large pothole, probably four inches deep,
eating across the asphalt. Using his mobile phone as a torch, Maciej
checked the wheel. We were lucky, just a crack in the hubcap.
A couple of days later, in an Irish pub in central Warsaw, I met Jerzy
Engel, the coach who led Poland to the 2002 World Cup finals. The week
he took the national job in early 2000, he told me, a newspaper had run a
survey on the state of the nation. Asked what the worst thing about Poland
was, most people replied ‘the roads’. Coming a close second, though, was
the national football team. Given they had failed to qualify for a major
tournament since 1986 that, perhaps, was not surprising. The abjection of
the national team, whatever the reality, has become a joke as solidly rooted
in the Polish comic landscape as England’s tennis players or British Rail
sandwiches are here. Poland, though, have not always been hubcap-
crackingly awful.

Wembley in 1973 was a good place to be the goalkeeper of an unfancied

team, and a bad place to be a Leeds United forward. If Jim Montgomery’s
reflex parry from Peter Lorimer in the FA Cup final was the greatest save
Wembley has known, the greatest goalkeeping performance came five
months later, as Jan Tomaszewski, having been dismissed as a ‘clown’ by
Brian Clough, produced a series of unorthodox blocks to earn Poland the
draw that saw them to the World Cup finals at England’s expense. Allan
Clarke converted a penalty to equalise midway through the second half, but
it is the footage of him – hands on hips, slowly, disbelievingly, shaking his
head as he spits and turns away after a close-range header has been
brilliantly parried – that endures as the image of Sir Alf Ramsey’s final
competitive game. It may have been only a draw, but back then, as
Tomaszewski said, ‘a draw at Wembley was like a win’ for away sides, and
that result, heralding four successive appearances in World Cup finals,
remains the pinnacle of Polish football history.
Clough later apologised to Tomaszewski for the clown jibe, claiming that
as he expected to be the next England manager he had wanted to downplay
Ramsey’s achievements, but the comment remains part of football lore
because it was so apt. Brilliant as Tomaszewski was that night, with his
dishevelled appearance, his mop of gingery hair held in place by a length of
twine, he seemed perpetually on the brink of comic mishap. He looked like
a clown, he acted like a clown, but he kept goal like a brick wall.
I met him on a morning of gentle snow in his home town of Łód , amid
the faded opulence of the café at the Grand Hotel. (‘You’ll easily find it,’ he
had said. ‘In Łód there is only one real street, and all the buildings that
aren’t on it are queuing to get on it.’) He was in his late fifties by the time I
met him, his face ruddied by alcohol and the ginger visible only in a faint
haze around his temples. The most striking thing about him, though, was his
size, and specifically the enormousness of his hands, which, it is no
exaggeration to say, were so big that he must have been able to catch a
football quite comfortably with just one of them.
Before Wembley, Poland’s only previous appearance in a major
tournament finals had come in 1938, when Ernest Wilimowski scored four
in a 6–5 extra-time defeat to Brazil in Strasbourg on a pitch so muddy that
the Brazilian forward Leônidas briefly experimented with playing in his
stockinged feet. Evidently recognising he was much too good for Polish
football, Wilimowski defected and later played for West Germany.
Poland won Olympic gold in Munich in 1972, and beat England 2–0 in
Chorzów the following May, but to have played just one game in nine
previous World Cups left a sense of inferiority, and Tomaszewski spoke of
Poland going to Wembley in a state approaching terror. ‘It was like
Cinderella going to the ball,’ he explained. ‘It was the first time we’d ever
played in a stadium with a roof; with a roof the roar is different. In Poland
we had only open stadiums. Wembley was hell.
‘Before the game there was a presentation to the queen. The Polish
players all stood to attention, but the England players were used to it, and
very casual.’ He mimed them standing, arms folded, chewing gum. ‘I said
then I would give five years of my life simply not to be humiliated.’
England had demolished Austria 7–0 there in a friendly three weeks
earlier, a result that had done much to reassure people that Chorzów was a
one-off aberration. ‘The English “knew” they had qualified,’ Tomaszewski
said. ‘It was only a question of how big the defeat would be, and that gave
us an internal motivation, like when your apartment is on fire and you rush
out with a huge TV. It’s energy from the liver, the kind of energy that you
produce when you are highly stressed, the power that comes from I don’t
know where.’
Poland’s goal, scored ten minutes after half time, was the result of two
mistakes – the first by Norman Hunter as Grzegorz Lato skipped by him on
the Polish left, and then by Peter Shilton as Jan Domarski’s shot squirmed
under his dive – but it remained Tomaszewski’s match. ‘That night I would
have put the mortgage on any horse he had a fancy for,’ Mick Channon
said. The draw remains one of those landmarks in the perceived decline of
English football, the first time England had failed to qualify for a World
Cup, but it was not a humbling lesson in the manner of the 6–3 defeat to
Hungary in 1953, or even the 3–1 defeat to West Germany in 1972. It was a
freak, and even at the time was widely seen as such, although that did not
prevent Ramsey being criticised for his negativity. Shilton described
Tomaszewski’s performance as ‘haphazard, wildly eccentric and, at times,
downright lucky’, and such was the clown’s psychological impact, that the
myth endures that Poland are a bogey team for England, even though
England have not lost to them since.
He was the indisputable hero at the end, but Tomaszewski almost gifted
England a goal in the opening minutes. ‘Our basic strategy was to play anti-
football, to stop England playing, just to keep possession,’ he said. ‘But
because I was so bewildered by the atmosphere, I made a crucial mistake
that could have ended everything before it had begun. I was ready to kick
the ball clear, and I put it down to run it out to the edge of the box. I hadn’t
noticed Allan Clarke, and he nipped in to steal the ball from me. I just saw
some shadow of a white shirt, so I grabbed at the ball. I got a hand on it,
and I was kicked by Clarke. It wasn’t a foul, but the referee whistled and
gave us a free-kick. That was what woke me up.
‘I remember hardly anything from the game. It was so noisy we were
going crazy. With 100,000 people screaming for England we couldn’t hear
our own thoughts, so I only realised, in the dressing room after the game,
that something special had happened when the vice-president of the Polish
Football Federation (PZPN) ran into the showers fully dressed, came under
the water and hugged me.’
The draw at Wembley gave Poland a new belief – ‘After Wembley,’
Tomaszewski said, ‘everything was different’ – and they went on to finish
third in the 1974 World Cup. They performed creditably in Argentina in
1978, and were third again in 1982. Then, in Mexico in 1986, having drawn
with Morocco and beaten Portugal, they lost their final group game to a
Gary Lineker hat-trick – creating the (statistically corroborated) impression
in Poland that England were their bogey team – and, qualifying only as one
of four best third-placed teams, were condemned to meet Zico’s Brazil in
the second round. Dariusz Dziekanowski and Jan Karas both hit the
woodwork with the score at 0–0, but Poland were eventually outclassed and
lost 4–0. They did not qualify again for sixteen years.
From nothing, they went to three good World Cups, had a slightly iffy
one, and vanished back into nothing again. What happened, then, in the
early seventies to prompt those twelve years of plenty? Success is rarely
complicated. Polish football is riven by division, but on this issue
everybody seemed agreed: a good generation of players nurtured by
visionary management. ‘Players come and players go,’ as a Serbian
journalist once told me. ‘All you can do is make sure that whatever seeds
you have are being cast in fertile soil.’
The man who prepared the ground in the early seventies was Kazimierz
Górski, described by Engel as ‘a fantastic coach’. Born in Lviv in what is
now Ukraine, Górski joined the army when the Second World War began,
continuing his football career with Legia Warsaw, the army club, in 1945.
There, his speed and nimbleness earned him the nickname Sarenka – ‘the
Roe-deer’ – but it was when he began coaching the national youth side in
1956 that his genius became apparent. Górski was famed for his modesty,
his mildness and his liberal attitude to discipline, but in post-war Poland
that in itself was revolutionary.
‘You need to understand that before Górski there was a special socialist
thing,’ Tomaszewski explained. ‘It was like the military. The coach was not
the same as the team; he was their commanding officer. But Górski created
a community. He treated the players as though they were his younger
friends. He said that everything is for all people – women, wine and song –
but he needed to know where, how much and with whom. We had private
lives. We were not like monks, but he was highly respected, so we also
knew there were limits. For instance [in the 1974 World Cup] Adam Musiał
was twenty minutes late for training before the game against Sweden, and
that’s why he didn’t play in that match. We could have lost the game –
Musiał was an important part of the team – but he broke the rule and that
was it.’
Górski was famous also for his banal, fatalistic catchphrases, which, in
Poland at least, are regarded as nuggets of gnomic profundity: ‘You can
win, lose or draw’; ‘The ball is round and there are two goals’; ‘He’s a good
coach, but he hasn’t had good results’. More importantly, he was a gifted
motivator, organiser and delegator, and instituted a professional mentality
two decades before professionalism was legal.
Janusz Basałaj, a former television commentator who is now president of
Wisła Kraków, is a man who takes the opposite view to Tomaszewski on
most issues. Characteristically, he preferred to give most of the credit to
Jacek Gmoch, the assistant coach, but even he acknowledged Górski’s
influence. ‘It was a good combination,’ he said. ‘Górski was a very good
old man. He got on very well with the players, with his humour and his
calmness. Gmoch had a very modern view of football and tactics. Gmoch
gathered information about opponents. For example, before the game
against England in Chorzów, he told the forwards that sometimes Bobby
Moore did not control the ball well, to press him in possession and that’s
how Włodimierz Lubanski scored the second goal.’ Górski’s supporters, of
course, would argue the credit is his for having appointed the right man as
his assistant.
Gmoch was in charge on his own by 1978, and Antoni Piechniczek was
manager in both 1982 and 1986. ‘In 1982 Piechniczek had almost the same
team,’ Tomaszewski said. ‘They had the same mentality, and that’s why
they had success. It wasn’t created by him, it was all created by Górski. In
1986 we had a different generation, and we were humiliated.’ The advances
made by Górski, Tomaszewski said, were lost. As the rest of the world
adopted an increasingly professional approach, Poland drifted backwards.
It is not, he insisted, simply an example of football’s cyclical nature.
Poland continues to produce talented players and their failure to translate
that into competitive success, to Tomaszewski, is the result of gross
mismanagement at every level from the government downwards, but most
particularly at the PZPN. ‘At Euro 2004,’ he said, ‘the best players were
mostly born between 1976 and 1978. If you were born in 1976, you would
have played at the European Youth Championship in 1993, which Poland
won. Where are those players now?’ They certainly weren’t in Portugal.
Youth football, though, is an unpredictable beast. In 1993, Poland also came
fourth at the World Youth Championship. If they are complaining about
failing to translate that promise into senior success, so too are Nigeria,
Ghana and Chile, the three teams who finished ahead of them.
The level of wastage is nonetheless remarkable. Poland were European
Under-18 champions again in 2001. ‘Where are those players?’
Tomaszewski asked. ‘In the third division.’ That is an exaggeration, but
only a small one. The best of that generation was probably Sebastian Mila,
who scored a swerving free-kick for Groclin Grodzisk against Manchester
City in the UEFA Cup in 2003. He left Groclin to join FK Austria during
the winter break in 2005, but, the morning I spoke to Tomaszewski, having
been left out of the side for a couple of games, Mila was splashed over the
front of the sports papers vowing to retire from football if he were not
handed a regular first-team place within six months. This, for Tomaszewski,
was evidence of the moral malaise of the Polish game. ‘We need to change
the whole structure,’ he said, ‘because football in Poland is corrupted. It is
an illness that has affected the coaches and everybody who is working in
football.’
After a brief and unsuccessful stint as coach of ŁKS Łód , Tomaszewski
has become a highly controversial columnist, a gadfly pricking perpetually
at the hide of the Polish footballing establishment. For him, it is not only a
question of facilities and organisation, but also, perhaps most
fundamentally, of mentality. ‘A footballer here earns ten times more than a
policeman or a miner, but still, when they lose, people say, “It’s only
sport”’, he said. ‘They don’t treat them professionally, as they should be
treated. There is still the old-style, old-fashioned thinking.’ Even Martin
Stefa ski, the PZPN’s league director, acknowledged that the old guard had
been allowed to dominate for too long. ‘Communism died in Poland in
1989,’ he said, ‘but it only died in the PZPN ten years later.’
It was in 1999 that Marian Dziurowicz was forced to stand down as
president of the PZPN after Jacek D bski, the then Polish sports minister,
who was advised by Tomaszewski, accused him of having failed to follow
his orders on the reinstatement of a player’s registration. D bski spent the
next few months trying, in vain, to find evidence of electoral and financial
irregularities but was forced to stop when FIFA threatened to suspend
Poland on the grounds of political interference within the federation. The
upshot was numerous documents were released, and the culture of the
organisation became far more open, but the credibility of the investigation
was undermined when newspapers began to report rumours that D bski had
links to organised crime in Austria. Although nothing has ever been proven,
it was widely suspected that his murder in 2001 – a single gunshot to the
head from close range after he had been lured out of a restaurant by a call to
his mobile telephone – was a mafia hit.
Tomaszewski’s position as the self-appointed conscience of Polish
football does not make him popular. ‘He was a very good goalkeeper, but
now he’s a very stupid man,’ said Basałaj. ‘He lives alone, he doesn’t have
good money, he is Mr Nobody, so he has to write bullshit. He has a big
mouth. When Clough called him a clown, he got it right.’
Basałaj’s loathing for Tomaszewski is perhaps best explained by their
clashes over the deal by which Canal+ bought the rights to screen Polish
football in 2000. Basałaj at the time was the head of Canal+ in Poland, and
he negotiated a $ 100m deal over five years to buy the rights from a
company called Go&Goal. The company had been headed by the former
Poland forward Zbigniew Boniek, but he had stood down after becoming
vice-president of the PZPN. Tomaszewski, though, claimed repeatedly that
Boniek had somehow interfered in the deal. In that instance, he seems to
have been significantly out of step, with most pundits suggesting that
$100m was extremely generous, and probably saved several clubs from
bankruptcy.
At other times, though, Tomaszewski has gone out on a limb, and got it
right. Perhaps he does exaggerate, perhaps the relentlessness of his assault
is wearing, perhaps his approach is unnecessarily confrontational, but
beneath the hyperbole there usually lies a nub of truth. He seems at times a
Cassandra, doomed always to be mocked while forcing Polish football to
confront its dark heart.
The scandal that followed Poland’s victory in the 2001 European Under-
19 Championship is a case in point. The morning after the final, a player
was arrested having been accused of raping a sixteen-year-old girl. The
story, though, was hushed up. ‘The worst thing was not that the incident
happened and the authorities tried to hide it, but the way they did it,’
Tomaszewski said. ‘Boniek decided to cover it up, and the players were told
to say that the player who was in jail was having a trial with a Finnish club.
How can they expect players to behave when they are putting them inside
this wicked cover-up?’ For almost three years, Tomaszewski worried away
at the issue, largely being ignored, until, in February 2005, as Zagł bie
Łubin returned from a midwinter training camp in Turkey, their forward,
Łukasz Mierzejewski, was arrested by Interpol in Leipzig, at which the
PZPN was forced to make the affair public.
He was later fully exonerated, but this, anyway, was not quite such a
squalid attempt at a whitewash as it may at first have appeared:
Mierzejewski was not the player initially arrested in Helsinki. ‘The problem
was that the guy they arrested was completely innocent,’ explained Stefa
ski. ‘The girl went to the hotel, pointed at the first player she saw, and the
police arrested him. That’s why the PZPN decided not to say anything: they
were absolutely certain the boy was innocent. If you are sure the guy was in
the hotel all the time, you have to protect him.’ That perhaps is
understandable, but so too is Tomaszewski’s desire for openness. The result,
unfortunately, is a series of unseemly squabbles between people who are
essentially on the same side. Some kind of reconciliation came in May 2005
when, after two referees were arrested on charges of match-fixing,
Tomaszewski was appointed president of the Ethics Commission the PZPN
established to investigate the scandal.

ŁKS Łód were playing KSZO Ostrowiec that afternoon, so we delayed our
return to Warsaw to go and watch them. We arrived at the stadium at about
ten to three, forty minutes before the scheduled kick-off, but it was
immediately apparent that something was amiss. The car park was deserted
but for a slightly bewildered-looking steward, and it took only the vaguest
muttering of ‘English journalist’ to get me through the front door. We
wandered across an old wooden-floored handball pitch, and headed,
unchallenged, past the dressing rooms, down the tunnel and out into the
arena, which was empty. True, it was snowing, and it was the second
division, but surely there should have been some activity? Then we noticed
there weren’t even any nets on the goals. Was it so cold the game had been
postponed?
Maciej got out the paper and checked again. Sure enough: 3.30. We
wandered back inside, and found the club secretary, a middle-aged woman
who seemed extraordinarily harassed. The kick-off, she snapped, was at
6.30. There are those who suggest a correlation between people knowing at
what time a game starts and them turning up to watch it.
With three hours to kill, we headed up to the stadium café. As we walked
in, Maciej was greeted by Piotr Tyszkiewicz, the coach of Kujawiak
Włocławek, who was there on a scouting misson and had also been misled
by the newspaper. He had formerly coached KSZO, but had been sacked
after refusing to pick the club owner Mirosław Stasiak, who, despite being
in his late thirties, on the heavy side and having had no formal football
coaching, felt it was his right to blunder off the bench for the last few
minutes, particularly if there was a penalty to be taken. ‘He was the owner,
the coach, the president, the sponsor and a player all in one,’ said
Tyszkiewicz. ‘A real Wash and Go man.’ Little wonder Tomaszewski spoke
of problems of mentality, of the caprice of club owners. That afternoon
Stasiak was listed on the bench, as was Janusz Jojko, one of the coaching
staff, who sat smoking at the table next to ours until about half an hour
before kick-off.
It was a name in the ŁKS starting eleven, though, that drew most of the
local press attention: Igor Sypniewski; a forward whose decline has become
almost emblematic of Polish football. He began his career with ŁKS, but it
was in Greece with Panathinaikos that he made his name, scoring against
Arsenal in the Champions League. By January 2001, though, Sypniewski
had fallen out with the Panathinaikos manager Angelos Anastasiadis, and
was transferred to OFI of Crete. There were rumours of heavy drinking, but
nobody in Poland took them particularly seriously until he signed a hugely
lucrative contract with Wisła. His time in Kraków was hugely
disappointing, and he managed just five games for them before being
offloaded to Kalithea in Greece.
Sypniewski’s contract there was terminated after just two appearances,
and, without a club, he took five months off football before being taken on
by the Swedish side Halmstad. He was so unfit when he arrived that he
threw up four times in his first training session, but by June he was the
league’s leading scorer, his tally including a memorable forty-five-yard
drive against Landskrona. That winter he signed for Malmö FF. ‘I have left
everything problematic behind,’ he said. ‘I am only looking forward.’
That seemed to suggest there might be some truth in the rumours of
alcoholism, but then his coach at Halmstad, the former Sweden midfielder
Jonas Thern, hinted that Sypniewski had been threatened by shadowy
figures in Poland. The player, unsurprisingly, was highly reluctant to
discuss what might have been meant by that. ‘It is a difficult question to
answer,’ he said. ‘My real friends are here in Sweden now and my friends
in Poland are my family.’
His new life soon began to disintegrate. That March, during pre-season
training in the Spanish resort of La Manga, Sypniewski, without giving any
warning or offering any explanation, walked off the pitch, lay down on the
touchline and refused to rejoin the session. ‘He has personal problems,’ the
Malmö coach Tom Prahl said. ‘He is receiving professional help at the
moment. It is a difficult problem that the club can’t help him with.’ The
Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet then reported that the Polish mafia were
hounding him for a cut of his previous transfer fees, to which, for reasons
unknown, they seemed to believe themselves entitled.
 Sypniewski scored twice on the opening day of the 2004 season, but those
were his only goals for the club. In May, he disappeared after raising a
middle finger at Prahl, and, having been given a final warning on his return,
was fired the following month when the squad came back from a training
camp in Dalarna. ‘I understand Malmö and I am sorry for everything that
has happened,’ he said. ‘They haven’t done anything wrong. It’s all my
fault.’
An unnamed player then revealed to Aftonbladet why Sypniewski had
been sacked: ‘He was completely uninterested. He didn’t engage in the
training sessions and when we had a game he didn’t bring his boots. The
last days he didn’t even eat with the rest of the squad. He just lay in his
room, watching television.’ As three different Swedish newspapers reported
that substantial sums had been taken from Sypniewski’s bank account, he
resurfaced with Trelleborg, but made only two appearances for them before
his return to Poland with ŁKS.
Against KSZO, although clearly overweight, Sypniewski had a fine game
as a lone striker, his intelligence and touch outweighing his lack of mobility
as ŁKS won 2–0. The main worry, though, was less the magnitude of his
waistline than of his pay packet. ‘Signing him was a completely idiot
move,’ said Tomaszewski. ‘They still owe players their salaries from last
year. With some of them earning 3,000 złotys monthly (about £520), they
sign Sypniewski for ten times more than any of the others are getting.
Sypniewski’s own agent said the player needed to be handled by a
psychiatrist. He’s treated like God compared to all the other players. This is
why they will not create professional football.’ Threats of strike action by
the players soon fizzled out, but they hardly spoke of a united dressing
room.
Unfortunately for Tyszkiewicz, his trip to Łód proved a wasted effort, as
he was sacked a couple of weeks later, and replaced by Bogusław Baniak, a
coach with a reputation as a promotion specialist. Only the most cynical
would suggest his success had anything to do with his friendship with
Ryszard Forbrich, the only person ever to be suspended for life by the
PZPN. Nicknamed ‘the Barber’ after his former profession, it was widely
alleged that he had an influence over certain referees. (He denies it and the
PZPN used the excuse that he had insulted an official to ban him, rather
than confront the issue head on.)
 Inevitably, given Forbrich’s reputation, questions were asked when
Kujuwiak came to play ŁKS that April. ŁKS had two men sent off in the
quarter of an hour before half time, and another dismissed just after. Facing
eight men, Kujuwiak finally took the lead, at which Sypniewski was also
shown a red card. The referee, Zbigniew Rutkowski, in the mistaken belief
that a game could not continue if one side was reduced to seven (actually,
the figure is six), then abandoned the match. Farcically, the twenty-six
minutes that remained were played out two weeks later, ŁKS’s seven men
eventually going down 3–0.
It is not so long ago that ŁKS were one of Poland’s better sides and
looked like taking advantage of the new financial situation. They finished
second in 1993, only for Lech Pozna , who had finished third, to be
awarded the title after ŁKS and Legia Warsaw were accused of match-
fixing. Nothing was ever concretely proven, but suspicions are always
going to be raised when the two sides vying for the title win 6–0 and 7–1 on
the final day of the season.
ŁKS were taken over by Antoni Ptak, a millionaire who owns a string of
flea markets across Poland and Russia. With Tomaszewski acting as his
adviser, they won the championship in 1998, their first for forty years, but
then had the misfortune to be drawn against Manchester United in the
qualifying round of the Champions League. A 2–0 aggregate defeat was
hardly shameful, but Ptak immediately began selling off their best players,
and in 1999–2000 they were relegated.
Ptak then bought the third division side Piotrcovia Piotrków Trybunalski,
and set up a school for young Brazilian players in the town. Piotrcovia were
promoted in 2002, but the following year Pogo Szczecin, historically a
much bigger side, were relegated to the second flight with financial
problems so severe that the club were eventually dissolved. Ptak promptly
moved Piotrcovia to Szczecin, renamed them Pogo and began playing
games at the council-run ground at which Pogo had played. Tomaszewski,
slightly surprisingly, sees nothing to blame Ptak for. ‘He got no help from
anybody in Łód ,’ he said. ‘Instead of being praised for what he had done,
he was insulted, so he decided to leave. Now he’s got big crowds, he’s
respected and he’s got the support he didn’t get here.’
From a pragmatic point of view he may be right. It will be little
consolation to Piotrcovia fans, but Pogo is an older, more established club,
and Szczecin a far larger city, and thus Ptak has transformed his team into
one of far greater potential. It is difficult, though, not to feel a sense of
unease at the arbitrary power wielded by the club owners. At least an
argument can be advanced that Ptak’s machinations have in some sense
been for the good of Polish football; with others that is emphatically not the
case.
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.’
That spirit lives on among their fans, who continue to arrange
choreography, even if it is rare for more than a couple of thousand to turn
up at their games. The day after the ŁKS game, I went to see Polonia play
Wisła, the league leaders. It was a day of vicious cold and frequent snow
showers, and, despite taking an early lead, defeat always seemed inevitable.
Their fans, though, continued in displays of flag-waving and card-raising
and let off flares at pre-arranged points in the game. Presumably, waiting
for the football to excite them was considered futile.
When capitalism came to Poland, Polonia were ripe for expansion. They
took their place in the Second Division East in 1991, were promoted in
1993, relegated a year later, and promoted again in 1996; at which they
were taken over by Janusz Romanowski. He had been a sponsor at Legia
Warsaw, and it was largely his money that took them to the quarterfinal of
the Champions League in 1996, but he became frustrated with the army’s
continuing involvement at the club, and, shortly after that quarter-final
defeat to Panathinaikos, he walked out and joined Polonia, taking with him
a number of players whose contracts he owned. He appointed Engel, who
had been coaching in Cyprus, and in 1997–98 Polonia finished second in
the table. The following year they were fifth, but in 1999–2000 Polonia did
the league and cup double, although Engel left midway through that season
to take charge of the national side. ‘I completely changed the team,’ Engel
said. ‘I sent away the old players and brought into the team a lot of young
ones. I was lucky because some of them were very, very talented boys.
When you don’t have big money to bring the absolute top players to the
team, you have to bring in players who are hungry for results. Fortunately I
was always lucky in finding good talents.’
Five of his signings were Under-21 internationals, but, most significantly,
two were Nigerian – eighteen-year-old centre-forward Emmanuel
Olisadebe, and nineteen-year-old playmaker Emmanuel Ekwueme. With his
soup-strainer moustache and fondness for grzaniec – a sweet beer drunk
warm and dusted with cinnamon – Engel appears quintessentially Polish
(for no nation does moustaches quite so well as Poland), but in football
terms he is radically modern. Olisadebe had already been rejected by two
clubs and was considering leaving Poland after being racially abused and
spat upon by Ruch Chorzów fans when Engel took him on. Four years later,
having been granted presidential dispensation to naturalise a year before he
met the residency requirement, Olisadebe was leading Poland’s charge to
the World Cup.
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. ‘They were used to a completely different system,
some defenders marking one player and doing nothing else,’ he explained.
‘The foundation was built from defence, and that is why we did not concede
too many goals.’ They didn’t score many either, though, drawing,
inevitably, sharp media criticism. ‘They started demanding that I should go
because we were not scoring in friendlies,’ Engel said with incredulity.
‘Slowly, slowly, slowly I taught the players the new system. I knew it was
getting better and better, but of course the people around the team did not
know about it, and most of the press were against us.’
Defeatism is a common Polish trait. Perhaps he had had a particularly bad
morning, but when I met Stefa ski, who gave the impression of spending
most of his life banging his head against brick walls, he seemed almost to
have given up. ‘The mentality of people living in Poland must change,’ he
said. ‘The Poles are always against … against everything. We have a long
tradition of fighting the Russians, the Germans and also each other. That’s
the problem; that’s why we struggle to create anything.’
 He gave as an example Poland’s efforts to raise a bid to host Euro 2012.
‘We are saying “OK, here is a chance for Poland to grow up,” but other
people are saying, “No, no, why, why? It’s impossible; let’s forget about it.”
Then the same people ask why our country is always treated badly. In
Poland everybody would like to have everything, but for free. Even the TV
rights: supporters ask why we’re selling the TV rights. Everything should
be for free. The clubs should have 1 m per year, but supporters think
people should go free to the games. Some of them probably believe the
clubs should pay them to watch it.’ When the Nobel Prize-winning poet
Czesław Miłosz, returning to Poland, was asked what he thought Poland
might have learnt from Communism, he replied ‘resistance to stupidity’.
Perhaps, though, what has been learnt is resistance, full stop.
With his attacks on negativity, Stefa ski could perhaps pass as an idealist,
but the truth is probably rather that he has become cynical about cynicism.
‘We have a long tradition of this,’ he went on. ‘It’s a problem beyond sport.
We are all the children of the Communist regime, even if we were against it
or born after the collapse of the system; it still is very, very much inside of
us. It’s in the mentality: the long tradition of fighting against occupiers, and
fighting against Communists …’
The naturalisation of Olisadebe solved the goalscoring problem, and, the
night that England won 5–1 in Munich, Poland beat Norway 3–0 to become
the first European side to qualify for the 2002 World Cup. Even before they
had arrived in South Korea, though, there were problems, when it emerged
that the PZPN had sold the players’ image rights without their consent.
Engel was diplomatic, suggesting that qualification was the realistic extent
of their expectations and that his side had suffered from the climate and
their lack of experience; Tomaszewski was predictably scathing. ‘The
World Cup campaign was devastated because Boniek wanted to gain,’ he
said. ‘The players wanted to sue the PZPN and so every day in Korea there
were meetings about the court case.’
Disconcertingly, Tomaszewski told Engel before the tournament that it
would see him sacked and replaced by Boniek, and that came to pass even
though over 2,000 fans turned up at Warsaw airport to congratulate the
national side on their return. Given they had spent much of the summer
threatening to sue him, the players understandably failed to respond to
Boniek’s management and he resigned after just three games in charge, one
of which was a home defeat to Latvia. It has even been suggested that
Boniek was only appointed because his reforms within the PZPN were
unpopular with the old guard, and that making him national manager
effectively rendered him sackable.
Engel, meanwhile, after taking a six-month break, returned to football
with Legia, before their owner Mariusz Walter decided the club wasn’t big
enough for the both of them. So, at the beginning of the 2004–05 season,
Engel returned once again to Polonia, appointing as his assistant his twenty-
five-year-old son, Jerzy Engel Jnr, who had achieved notable success
coaching in the third division. The previous season Polonia had finished
eleventh, just two points off a relegation play-off, and massively in debt,
but, with Engel instigating his policy of youth, they were seventh going into
the winter break.
He was making advances off the field as well, and it was reported that
Global Soccer Agency Ltd, a company based in Gibraltar, were prepared to
invest 150m in the club. Mysteriously, though, in January 2005, the club’s
owner Jan Raniecki blocked the deal, and Engel was forced out. ‘They had
the money for sure,’ Raniecki said. ‘The problem was the guarantees. GSA
wanted the land around the stadium, which is owned by the city. They
wanted Polonia to pay 1.2m a year to the city until they handed over the
rights, and I didn’t want to promise that.’
Engel promptly quit. ‘I hoped to bring foreign capital and build a
completely new team,’ he explained. ‘Unfortunately the owner didn’t agree
with this and at the last moment he decided to pull out. I had sided with the
other guys and he was against it, so I had to go.’
As if to underline the mess in which that left them, Polonia lost both their
next two games 5–0. Even with investment it is difficult to see where the
club can go while their stadium is owned by Warsaw city council, which
has shown little desire to improve it beyond the bare minimum required for
first division football. There is so little money that the hot water is turned
on only on match days.
The problem seems intractable. Although the younger Engel, convinced
by the panacea of the EU, spoke optimistically of a bright future driven by
realistic business practices, Stefa ski was downbeat. He was probably only
thirty, but he had the air of a much older man, perpetually running his
fingers through his hair, sighing and staring resignedly into the middle
distance. It can’t be easy being a universal scapegoat.
Other federations claim they have long-term plans, that things are slowly
moving in the right direction, but Stefa ski was candid enough to admit the
PZPN are whistling in the wind. ‘Poland,’ he admitted at one point, ‘is just
not a football country.’ And that is probably the top and bottom of it: as
Poland struggles to emerge from the Communist legacy, football simply is
not a priority. The country is neither desperate enough to need football as
validation, nor yet comfortable enough to afford it the inflated importance it
enjoys in Britain. ‘People say it’s the responsibility of the PZPN to build the
stadiums, to finance them, but it doesn’t work like that in western Europe.
There, the club is a part of the community, so for the local authorities it’s
important to keep the club running because people come to see the game,
they pay money there, and the money stays in the community. In Poland
football is like a very ugly daughter. The parents say, “OK, we have it, so
we have to have it” but they don’t really want it.
‘If we had more pitches, not only for football, but also for other sports, we
would have more healthy people living in Poland. Without that we have no
chance for success and the situation will get worse and worse and worse. In
Poland we have maybe 500,000 people playing football out of a population
of forty million. That’s a very small number playing football, but it’s still
half of the total number of people who are playing sport.
‘There wouldn’t be a problem if my friends and I could go and play
football after work, or at the weekend. In England you have thousands of
parks where you can play, but in Poland there are hardly any pitches. It’s
difficult if you’re a kid. You can play on bits of concrete between the blocks
of flats, but not on grass. So if you cannot play football for real, you have to
stay at home and play football on your PlayStation. This is the problem, and
all the people responsible for paying for youth and education should face up
to it. It’s more important to have a lot of people playing different games
than for this association to be successful. If you qualify for the World Cup
but have only one hundred thousand people playing football, it’s a disaster.
We need twenty-five million people playing football, basketball, whatever;
and then eventually we will have success.’
That will not happen, though, until there is government funding, but that
has fallen consistently since Communist times. In 1994, 0.7 per cent of the
government budget was spent on sport; in 2004 that figure had dropped to
0.055 Per cent. It doesn’t help that that money is distributed in direct
proportion to success at certain designated major tournaments, irrespective
of the level of competition or the costs involved in competing. That leads
both to minority sports being overfunded, and also to a reluctance to
promote talented footballers who emerge at youth level; it is more
profitable to win an Under-17 tournament than for players from that side to
be stretched by playing in the senior side. There could, in other words, be
no Polish Wayne Rooney.

On either side of the road, the potato fields stretched bleakly through the
snow to the grey horizon. Brown and flat and desolate they may be, but it is
here, in rural Wielkopolska, that the green shoots of recovery are poking
through. The city of Pozna , whose two clubs, Warta and Lech, have won
seven titles between them, was once the heart of football in the Polish west,
but it is the outlying villages that have enjoyed recent success. Of Poland’s
so-called ‘big four’, two – Arnica Wronki and Groclin Grodzisk – did not
play in the top division until 1995 and 1997 respectively. Both are small-
town teams based around one major company, and both have benefited
from an unusually astute commercial approach.
The first you see of Grodzisk as you approach from Pozna is the
floodlights. They may dominate the skyline, but the ground itself is modest,
quaint even, resembling, oddly, a provincial English cricket ground. That is
partly because of its size and partly because of the colour scheme – dark-
green seats on light-brown brick – but mainly because of the whitewashed
wooden grandstand. It is heritage-listed, but in 2005, the club were planning
to move it, piece by laborious piece, to a position overlooking a training
pitch. From an aesthetic and sentimental point of view that is a shame,
because the stand dates back to the club’s foundation in 1922; but Groclin
did not get where they are today by being emotional. This is a business club
run on robustly business lines, and if they are to expand and modernise,
heritage has to take a back seat.
In 1992 Dyskobolia were an ordinary village sports club, notable for
having been a rallying point for opposition to the Soviet occupation, but
little else. Their football team, quite logically, given the size of the village
that supported it, pottered along in the fifth division. Then Inter Groclin
Auto got involved. Four successive promotions saw the club reach the first
division, and, although they were relegated in 1998, they were promoted
again the following season and are now a fixture in the Ekstraklasa.
Compared to the crumbling wrecks elsewhere in the country, their ground is
conspicuously modern and luxurious, small but perfectly formed. Opposite
the wooden grandstand is a modern two-storey hotel (it is rumoured the
second storey was added because, in Poland, only those hotels with lifts can
be granted four-star status; the addition of a swimming pool would take it to
five), while the dressing rooms feature heated floors and three different
types of sauna.
Inter Groclin Auto is one of the commercial success stories of modern
Poland. Its owner, Zbigniew Drzymała, had worked in his father’s leather
factory, but it was when he bought a Romanian Fiat Maluch (a process
requiring not merely money, but also sheaves of paperwork and several
years of patience) that he had the idea that made his fortune. The car had
headrests, something Drzymała saw as little more than an oddity, until his
friends started asking if they could buy them off him. If so many of his
friends wanted them, he reasoned, the chances were that there was a much
larger market, and so he began producing them at his factory, which already
made covers for car seats. Groclin – the name derives from the first letters
of Grodzisk and Clinton, the city in the USA where Drzymała briefly lived
– is now one of Europe’s leaders in the field, supplying Volvo, Mitsubishi,
Toyota, Renault, Volkswagen, and Porsche.
Drzymała, a stern, bearded figure, was once an 800-metre runner at the
Dyskobolia club, but, for all his protestations of love for the institution and
football, his investment has had clear commercial advantages. In 2003–04,
Groclin beat Manchester City and Hertha Berlin in their first season in the
UEFA Cup, something that did much to advertise the brand across Europe.
‘After that,’ Drzymała’s assistant Jerzy Pi ta said, ‘we won new contracts in
France and Sweden because they had heard of us.’
There are also benefits closer to home. ‘The club helps workers identify
themselves with the company,’ Pi ta explained. ‘A lot of companies spend
huge amounts of money on loyalty schemes, but Groclin has that because of
football.’ The Grodzisk factory employs 3,000 local workers, most of
whom are women – ‘the football is for the husbands,’ Pi ta said – but there
are many more who benefit indirectly from the company, and average
crowds are around 4,000, about a quarter of the total population of the
village. In that sense Groclin is unusual for Poland, an organic club that is
part of the fabric of the community.
In Wronki, forty-five miles to the north, the story is similar. In Communist
times, the village was famous for two things: the maximum security prison,
and Amica, a company manufacturing household appliances. It has grasped
the capitalist nettle with a vengeance, and has expanded to such an extent
that it can proudly proclaim that one in three cookers bought in Poland is an
Amica cooker. The football club was founded in 1992 by the merger of B
kitnych Wronki and LZS Czarni Wromet Wróblewo, and took Czarni’s
place in the third division, but moved to Wronki. Like Groclin, they then
enjoyed successive promotions, but, as well as establishing themselves in
the top flight, also won a hat-trick of Cups between 1998 and 2000.
Both are admirable clubs, well run and deserving of their success. They
are both, though, essentially small clubs punching above their weight
because of the flabbiness and confusion that pervades so much of the rest of
the Polish game. ‘We have a lot of fans who just come here, sit down, watch
the game and go back home,’ said Pi ta. ‘They are not faithful fans –
“Sunday fans”, we call them. If we have success and create a good history
we will get more people involved, and we want more people to be real fans.
On the Internet 45,000 people claim to be fans of Groclin. We’re the third
most popular team in Poland. Looking at the future, to create a steady
crowd it is necessary to have regular good runs in Europe.’
Histories, though, take time to create, and, even then, a village team has
only so much potential. Nonetheless, along with Legia Warsaw and Wisła
Kraków, Arnica and Groclin make up the so-called ‘G4’ of Poland’s leading
clubs. Legia and Wisła are both old, traditional clubs, but they owe their
continued pre-eminence to recent sponsorship.
The army pulled out of Legia in 1997 (and established another army club,
CWKS, who play in the sixth division), at which they were taken over by
the Korean car manufacturers Daewoo. When they filed for bankruptcy two
years later, the club might have disappeared had not ITI, one of Poland’s
largest media companies, stepped in.
Wisła, meanwhile, were only promoted back to the Ekstraklasa in 1996,
since when they have benefited enormously from a sizeable sponsorship
deal with Tele-fonika, one of Poland’s largest two mobile telephone
companies. The other is Idea, who, in the winter break in 2004–05, became
the first sponsors of the league. Typically, the PZPN failed to consult the
clubs, and Wisła, bearing Tele-fonika’s name on their chests, refused to add
the logo of another telecommunications company to their sleeves.

Wisła are significantly the most successful club in recent Polish history,
completing a hat-trick of titles in 2005, but even their background could
hardly be said to be stable. They have had considerable success in the
UEFA Cup, beating Parma and Schalke 04 on their way to the fourth round
in 2002–03, and, given their domination of the domestic scene, European
competition is seen as the yardstick of their progress. Defeat to Vålerenga
the following season was a blow, and if losing to Real Madrid in a
Champions League qualifier in 2004–05 was excusable, an away goals
defeat to Dinamo Tbilisi in the first round of the UEFA Cup was not.
Wisła’s owner, the reclusive Bogusław Cupiał, demanded the whole board
resign, but their coach, Henryk Kasperczak, another member of the 1974
World Cup squad, refused. He, unfortunately, had a contract worth 22,000
a month until 2008, and, despite being suspended, refused to budge, even
when the Czech coach Werner Li ka was appointed to replace him. ‘This is
normal,’ Basałaj slightly bewilderingly said. ‘In Italy you see this all the
time.’ Well, perhaps, but when most Polish clubs struggle to afford one
coach, to pay two seems extravagant.
The G4, frustrated by what they had seen as the PZPN’s conservatism and
a voting structure in which much of the power still lies with the regional
federations, took matters into their own hands, and, in the summer of 2005,
the top division clubs, after lengthy legal wrangling, disestablished
themselves from the PZPN, founding a separate and self-governing
company. ‘A landmark for Polish football,’ Stefa ski acknowledged.
‘Perhaps the start of a new age.’
The financial divisions initially seem fairly equitable, with half of
television revenues to be split equally between the sixteen top-flight sides,
quarter to be distributed according to league position, and the remainder to
be divided by matches shown. Each of the G4 clubs, though, had a
representative on the eight-man supervisory board, so it seems reasonable to
assume that in time the bigger clubs will profit from the split. That may
allow them to compete more equally with top European sides, but there is a
danger. ‘The PZPN’s job is to look after all clubs,’ Stefa nski said, which,
by definition, is not true of the new body.
Pi ta compared the split to the formation of the Premiership in England,
which he seemed to view as some kind of paradise on earth. When I
suggested that, for all the improvements brought about by the Premiership,
there was a feeling that it had led to the grass-roots being run down, he just
laughed. ‘In Poland,’ he said, ‘there are no grass-roots.’
 3 HUNGARY
More Bricks than Kicks

Opposite the metro station at Határ út, the penultimate stop heading south-
east on the blue line, stands an Ibis hotel. Formed of grubby prefabricated
red and yellow blocks, it is a drab and depressing spectacle, entirely in
keeping with the neighbourhood. It’s halfway to the airport, but it’s hard to
imagine many tourists or foreign businessmen stay there. While the centre
of Budapest has made a virtue of its faded grandeur – its flower stalls, its
cafés and its bistros, a nostalgia for the declining years of the Austro-
Hungarian empire – here there’s just faded concrete, and the ugly orange
kiosks that dot the concourse don’t seem to sell much beyond bread and
porn. Nobody gets nostalgic for the declining years of Communist Hungary.
The only things even vaguely quaint are the rattling old chocolate-and-
cream trams.
I took the number 42 from Határ út to the end of the line, a wide street
that contrived to be dusty despite days of heavy rain. An old brown-brick
factory stood at one end, where the tramlines swept left in an arc back
towards the metro station. On the wall, beneath two rows of tiny cracked
windows, a peeling yellow sign revealed it used to have something to do
with the manufacture of aluminium. This was not a thriving area. To one
side of the factory ran a railway line, and, as I’d been instructed, I turned
right there, walking between the tracks and a row of squat, single-storey
cottages, remnants of the days when Kispest was a village, distinct from the
city. In the distance, to the left, beyond the tracks and a clump of untidy
trees, rose the angled supports of four ancient floodlights.
The security fences were freshly painted in red and black, but that
morning the Bozsik Stadium carried a distinct sense of decay. The concrete
was crumbling, the seats dulled by the sun. I walked along the back of the
terrace beneath the main stand. Nobody stopped me, but then, why would
they? There was nothing to steal, nothing that could be defaced beyond
what time had done already. At the far end of the ground was a mud
training pitch, pocked with puddles and surrounded by dilapidated sheds. In
one corner stood a model five-man wall for practising free-kicks, carved of
cheap plywood and hanging loosely from one strut. Beyond that was the
overgrown cemetery made famous by Antal Végh’s book Why is Hungarian
Football Sick?, the cover of which carried a photograph showing the
headstones with a handful of old men standing on the terrace in the
foreground, as though queuing for death.
Végh’s book was published in 1974, the year before Ferencváros reached
the final of the Cup-Winners’ Cup. Twelve years later he brought out a
follow-up, Incurable?. Nowhere else does past achievement so dwarf the
present. Picking through the mud that morning, it was almost impossible to
believe that the Bozsik Stadium was once the centre of the footballing
world, that it was there that the likes of Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis and,
of course, József Bozsik himself were forged into the Aranycsapat, the
Golden Squad.
An Englishman cannot be long in Budapest without somebody mentioning
the Aranycsapat and their 6–3 victory over England in 1953 – which,
thanks to the unusualness of the scoreline, is happily referred to simply as
‘the 6–3’. My train from Belgrade was still chugging through the suburbs
when the guard who brought my breakfast coffee felt compelled to point out
that we’d be arriving at the Keleti Station, where that Hungary side had
received a rapturous reception from 150,000 fans after their victory at
Wembley. A few months later, though, as they returned from the World Cup
in Switzerland, the mood in Budapest was hostile enough that the players’
train was diverted to the north-western town of Tata. Between November
1953 and July 1954, the Golden Squad fell from their zenith to disgrace.
Then it fell some more.
What 1966 is to English football, 1953 is to Hungarian. That Hungary
side might not have won the World Cup, but, to Billy Wright, the England
captain at Wembley that day, they were ‘the finest team ever to sort out
successfully the intricacies of this wonderful game’. Friendlies then were
far more than the anodyne exhibitions they tend to be today, and that game
at Wembley was billed as ‘the Match of the Century’. Hyperbole, perhaps,
with almost half the hundred still to run, but it is difficult to think of another
game the ramifications of which stretched so far.
In 1953, Britain was still great. The war was over, and won, rationing was
coming to an end, the Festival of Britain was fresh in the memory and there
was a young queen newly crowned – her place in the divine order of things
seemingly confirmed, as news broke on the day of the Coronation that the
Empire had conquered Everest. And, of course, in popular opinion, England
were still the best in the world at football, unbeaten at home against foreign
opposition – as the joke of the time had it – since 1066. (Provided, of
course, you ignored, as most did, the defeat to the Republic of Ireland at
Goodison Park in 1949.)
On that foggy November afternoon, though, England were outplayed. Six
months later, Hungary beat them again, 7–1 in Budapest. England had
believed herself innately supreme, but in two matches Hungary proved just
how far the world had moved on, just how far England – Britain – had been
left behind. Critically, as Jen Buzánszky, the right-back in the Aranycsapat
told me, it wasn’t so much that Hungary had better players, great though the
likes of Puskás, Bozsik and Nándor Hidegkuti assuredly were. ‘It was
because of tactics that Hungary won,’ he said. ‘The match showed the clash
of two formations, and, as often happens, the newer, more developed
formation prevailed.’ Hungary was Communist, radical, perhaps the future;
Britain was imperial, moribund, undoubtedly the past.
In the Empire Stadium – the Twin Towers themselves designed to reflect
the work of Lutyens in New Delhi, the jewel of the Empire – Hungary
struck a shuddering blow for socialism, and not just socialism, but a new,
post-Stalinist variant of it. The great dictator had died in March 1953 and,
in the July, after being summoned to Moscow to meet Khrushchev, Mátyás
Rákosi, Hungary’s loathed Stalinist leader, was deposed and replaced by the
liberal Imre Nagy. He implemented the ‘New Course’, abolishing
internment camps and granting amnesties to hundreds of political prisoners,
stimulating an optimism that was intensified by the continuing success of
Puskás and his side.
To understand why England were so perplexed by Hungary’s tactical
innovations, it is necessary to go back to 1925, when, alarmed at falling
crowds caused by increasingly defensive play, the British football
associations persuaded the International Board to change the offside law so
that only two defenders were required between attacker and goal line to
play him onside, rather than three, as had previously been the case.
Until then pretty much everybody had used the 2–3–5 system – that is,
two full-backs (what would become numbers 2 and 3), three half-backs
(4,5,6), an outside-right (7), inside-right (8), centre-forward (9), inside-left
(10) and outside-left (11). After the change in the offside law, though, 2–3–
5 became impractical as a defensive formation. Herbert Chapman, the great
Huddersfield and Arsenal manager, realised that he could enhance his
defensive cover by dropping the centre-half (that is, the player who had
been the central of the three half-backs) back between the full-backs. That,
though, left him short in midfield, and so the two inside-forwards were also
withdrawn, effectively giving a 3–2–2–3 formation: the so-called W-M. His
ideas were controversial, but were gradually accepted and adopted by other
English sides, even if newspapers until the 1960s continued to print team
line-ups as though everybody still played a 2–3–5.
So strong was the sense that such tinkering somehow meddled with what
was natural, that, when the FA made shirt numbering compulsory in 1939,
they specified the numbers be distributed as outlined above – that is, as
though each team lined up in a 2–3–5 system. This, of course, is why
‘centre-half’ is still used as a synonym for ‘centre-back’ in Britain, and also
why, in the days before squad numbers, teams playing 4–4–2 would
commonly line up, reading from right to left, back to front, 1; 2, 5, 6, 3; 7,
4, 8, 11; 9, 10.
In England, tactical experimentation had effectively died with Chapman in
1934. It became accepted that W-M was simply the way football was
played, with players shackled to certain areas of the pitch by their numbers.
That was probably largely down to an instinctive cultural conservatism; but
England’s sporting heritage, anyway, militated against the kind of fluidity
of movement shown by, for instance, the Dinamo Moscow team that toured
England with their passovotchka football in 1945.
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. In Hungary, as Buzánszky put it, ‘tactics were very
much up for discussion’, the debate being led by a triumvirate of radical
coaches: Márton Bukovi, Béla Guttmann and Gusztáv Sebes.
It was Sebes who led Hungary to glory at Wembley, but it was Bukovi
who came up with the critical tactical development. As coach of the
Budapest club MTK, he tinkered with the W-M, restoring the inside-
forwards to the forward line, and instead withdrawing the centre-forward. It
then became apparent that such a system required extra defensive cover,
and so another of the half-backs was dropped back, creating what was, in its
early days, effectively a 3–1–2–4 that eventually evolved into 4–2–4.
Even had Walter Winterbottom, the England manager, wished to buck
England’s conservatism, he was restricted to the W-M because that was the
formation with which his players were familiar from their clubs. In
Hungary, though, the system was far more focused on the national side,
partly because of the Communist government’s recognition of the
propaganda potential of sport and partly because the clubs had little
independence following nationalisation in 1949. Sebes, who was appointed
sole national coach that year after a brief time as part of a three-man
management committee, had seen that the great Italy and Austria sides of
the 1930s were predominantly drawn from one or at most two clubs, and
sought a similar system in Hungary. Nationalisation gave him his
opportunity, particularly given the advantages enjoyed by police and army
sides. It was then just a question of deciding which clubs to allocate to
whom.
Ferencváros and MTK had been the biggest pre-war clubs, but while the
secret police, the AVH, eventually took over MTK (whose name changed
from Textiles to Bástya to Vörös Lobogó – ‘Red Banner’ – and back to
MTK again between 1950 and 1957), Ferencváros were rendered unsuitable
by the right-wing traditions of their support. Sebes turned instead to
Kispest, in those days a small village club and far from an obvious choice,
but, crucially, the side for which Puskás and Bozsik already played. They
became the army team, and were renamed Honvéd – ‘Defenders of the
Motherland’. It was then a simple matter to persuade young footballers that
their national service was best spent playing for the club. Kocsis, for
instance, reached conscription age in 1950, and, given the choice of playing
for Honvéd or serving at a remote border post, unsurprisingly joined Sebes
in Kispest. Although there were a number of internationals at MTK, most
notably Hidegkuti, Sebes was effectively able to use Honvéd as a training
camp for his Hungary squad, facilitating his tactical experimentation.
It was at the Helsinki Olympics of 1952 that the world first began to take
notice of Hungary. The eastern bloc nations had an obvious advantage in
that all their top sportsmen were technically amateur and therefore eligible
for the Games, but, even allowing for that, there was something remarkable
in their 6–0 demolition of Sweden in the semi-final. ‘It was one of those
days,’ Puskás said. ‘Once we’d hit our rhythm we were virtually
irresistible.’ Yugoslavia were seen off 2–0 in the final, a result that was a
huge relief to Sebes, who, on the morning of the game, had received a
telephone call from Rákosi warning him that the government could not
tolerate defeat, Yugoslavia’s government having manoeuvred themselves
into a position of independence from Moscow, placing great strain on their
diplomatic relations with Hungary. Buzánszky’s memories are rather less
politicised. ‘At that time,’ he said, ‘Miss World was a Finnish woman. In
itself receiving the gold medal was a wonderful feeling, but it was a great
bonus to have Miss World handing over an olive branch and giving us a
kiss. I was so overcome with the moment I had to look in the paper the next
day to see if she really was as beautiful as I remembered.’
The president of the Football Association, Sir Stanley Rous, had been at
the Sweden game, and, impressed, approached Sebes to propose a friendly.
Rákosi was concerned about the possibility of defeat, but arrangements for
the game were nonetheless confirmed at a meeting of European FA leaders
late in 1952, by which time the development of the Golden Squad had taken
another major step forward.
Puskás was the greatest player of the Aranycsapat – ‘If a good player has
the ball, he should have the vision to spot three options,’ Buzánszky said.
‘Puskás always saw at least five’ – but England’s executioner in 1953 was
Hidegkuti. He was not even a regular in the Olympic side, but in September
1952, with Hungary two down after half an hour of a friendly against
Switzerland, he replaced his clubmate Péter Palotás. Hungary were level by
half time, went on to win 4–2 and such was Hidegkuti’s contribution that
his position was unassailable. ‘He was a great player and a wonderful
reader of the game,’ said Puskás. ‘He was perfect for the role, sitting at the
front of midfield, making telling passes, dragging the opposition defence
out of shape and making fantastic runs to score himself.’
The England game came increasingly to dominate Sebes’s thoughts, and it
was in his preparations for it that Honvéd’s role as a training ground came
into its own. Attitudes to Sebes today are oddly ambivalent, but Buzánszky
was dismissive of the critics. ‘His role was absolutely decisive,’ he said. ‘It
was like arranging cogs in a wheel – everything had to fit.’ Sebes wasn’t
just a fine coach, though; he was also a political operator of no little ability,
as he had shown in organising workers at the Renault factory in Paris before
the war.
Shortly after becoming coach in his own right, Sebes realised his system
needed a centre-back who was not merely strong and defensively sound, but
also capable of spreading play from the back. The ideal man, he decided,
was the Vasas defender Gyula Lóránt, but he, unfortunately, was in a
detention camp after plotting to lead a team of Hungarian defectors to play
a series of exhibition matches in western Europe. Sebes, undaunted,
appealed to the Interior Minister, János Kádár, ahead of a friendly away to
Austria, giving a personal guarantee that Lóránt would not abscond while in
Vienna. Kádár agreed, and Lóránt responded with a superb performance as
Hungary beat their great rivals for the first time in twelve years.
For all his political ability, Sebes remained, first and foremost, a football
man, as Tibor Nyilasi, the great Ferencváros and Hungary forward of the
1970s, told me. ‘When I was a kid, Sebes lived in the same area of
Budapest as me,’ he said. ‘He would come down to the square where I
played football with my friends, and take us up to his flat, give us
sandwiches, and show us Super-8 films of the 6–3 and 7–1 games. It was he
who recommended me to Ferencváros. He was like a grandfather. He lived
only for football. In the hard times of the fifties his voice was heard in
important circles.’
 He was also utterly meticulous, using his position of authority to force
opposing sides to adopt ‘English’ characteristics when playing Honvéd, and
ensuring nothing they would meet in England could surprise his team.
‘Sebes got hold of some English footballs, so we could get used to the kind
of ball that absorbed moisture and got heavier as the game went on,’
Buzánszky said. ‘He also knew the Wembley pitch was 74 metres across,
and widened the pitch at one of our training grounds so we could get used
to Wembley’s dimensions.’
It was in the matter of the balls that Sebes’s concerns proved most
justified. In their first game with the English version, a friendly against
Sweden in Budapest ten days before the match at Wembley, Hungary
played dismally and could only draw 2–2. Concerned about the effect that
performance, and a hugely critical reaction in the Hungarian media, could
have on morale, Sebes changed his travel plans, deciding that rather than
flying to London it would be better for his team to take the train, stopping
off in Paris for a warm-up against the works team of the Renault factory
where he had been employed before the war. ‘It was a big boost for
morale,’ said Buzánszky. ‘We won 18–0 and that proved to us that we
weren’t that bad.’
Nonetheless, the Hungarian mood in London was far from confident.
‘There was great anxiety on the bus before the game,’ said Pál Várhidy,
who was on the bench that day. ‘Before other matches players would chat
with each other, but this time there was silence.’ For all Sebes’s efforts, the
Hungarian players knew little of their English counterparts. ‘We didn’t even
know them from photographs,’ said Buzánszky. ‘At that time, the eyes of
the press stopped at the Austro-Hungarian border, and there was no
television. But in those days it was clear from the shirt numbers who would
play against whom. I was the number two, so I knew I would be against the
number eleven, George Robb. When I was in the tunnel before the match I
would always look to see what build my opponent was, and try to figure out
what kind of player he would be. If he had strong legs he would be fast; if
he had bendy legs he would be a dribbler. I had mixed feelings about Robb
– he looked fast and a dribbler. Wembley was like a holy place for
footballers, so there was a certain nervousness in going out there, but that
feeling lasted only until the first touch of the ball.’
 It didn’t take much longer than that for Hungary to take the lead, Bozsik
slipping in Hidegkuti to fire home from the edge of the box after only forty-
five seconds. It was the beginning of a rout. Jackie Sewell equalised, but
Hidegkuti soon added a second from Kocsis’s flick, before Puskás scored
the game’s most famous goal. Zoltán Czibor, notionally a right-footed left-
winger but emerging on the right, crossed for his captain, and as he
controlled it on the edge of the six-yard box, Billy Wright slid to make a
challenge, hurtling ‘like a fire-engine heading to the wrong fire’, as
Geoffrey Green put it in The Times. Puskás dragged the ball back with his
studs, and, in one movement, lashed the ball into the net, leaving Wright
sprawling. György Szepesi, who was commentating on the game for
Hungarian radio, suggested a plaque should be erected to mark the moment.
Bozsik got a fourth with a deflected free-kick, before Stan Mortenson
pulled one back to make it 4–2 at half time.
‘To me,’ Harry Johnston, the England centre-back that day, wrote in his
autobiography, ‘the tragedy was the utter helplessness … being unable to do
anything to alter the grim outlook.’ Presented with a deep-lying centre-
forward in Hidegkuti, England had no idea how to react. The rigidity of the
W-M meant that if Johnston followed him, it would leave a hole in the
middle of the back-line, but by allowing Hidegkuti time and space, he was
able to dictate the play. Bozsik added a fifth shortly after half time, drilling
in the rebound after a Czibor header was pushed on to the post by Gil
Merrick, the England keeper, and Hidegkuti soon volleyed a sixth from a
lobbed Puskás cross. Alf Ramsey converted a late penalty, but there was no
doubting the Hungarians’ superiority. ‘To be honest,’ Buzánszky said,
‘Kocsis was nowhere near his best. If he had shown his real form, the result
would have been even more cruel.’
English observers emphasised the teamwork of the Hungarians, their
fluidity and their ability to interchange positions, all of which gave weight
to Sebes’s insistence that his side played ‘socialist’ football. Whether Sebes
actually believed his claim, or whether he was simply saying what his
government wanted to hear is unclear, but it is certainly true that Hungary’s
strength was in the interaction of members of the team as opposed to the
individual talents of England. Nonetheless Gyula Grosics, the goalkeeper of
the Aranycsapat, and a perpetual opponent of the Communist regime, has
always rejected the idea that the victory could be attributed to ideology.
‘Football cannot be named after political systems,’ he said. ‘It is true that
the political leadership in Hungary fully exploited our success for their own
good, but it would be going too far to say that Communism or the socialist
system had anything to do with the Hungarian success.’
England, true to type, remained blinkeredly conservative, and, to the
bewilderment of the Hungarians, made no attempt to counter the deep-lying
centre-forward when they faced Hungary in the Népstadion in Budapest six
months later, losing 7–1. Over a million Hungarians applied for tickets for
that game, and, although official figures have the attendance at a little under
105,000, the actual attendance may have been far higher. Many, it is said,
having gained entry, used carrier pigeons to send their tickets to friends and
relatives waiting at home. These days the Népstadion – now the Ferenc
Puskás Stadium – is a wreck, another living monument to Hungary’s
decline, its top tier permanently closed for safety reasons, and capacity
limited to 26,000. Even so, it almost never sells out. ‘In a way, 1954 was
more important because it proved what had happened at Wembley was not
just chance,’ Grosics said. ‘Never before nor since has there been such
interest in Hungary for one match. In those days of dictatorship, it was
football that united people in Hungary with the five million Hungarians
living outside the borders. There was a feeling of togetherness in the
Hungarian nation, something to grab hold of and tie ourselves to.’ It was a
feeling that would soon evaporate. After four years unbeaten, the 1954
World Cup in Switzerland should have been the Aranycsapat’s coronation,
the confirmation of their supremacy. It became a nightmare, and the
disintegration began.
South Korea were hammered 9–0 in Hungary’s opening game in Zurich,
and then West Germany were thumped 8–3 in Basle, meaning that,
including a 10–0 win over Luxembourg in a warm-up match, Hungary had
scored thirty-four goals in their previous four games. In the West Germany
game, though, there fell a shadow, and it still clouds Hungarian football
today. With the score at 5–1, Puskás was caught from behind by Werner
Liebrich and had to go off. He missed the next two matches, with what X-
rays would later reveal was a hairline fracture of the ankle, and, although he
played in the final – also against West Germany – he was clearly not at his
best. Which, of course, begs the question of whether Liebrich’s assault was
deliberate. Sebes certainly felt so, and, in Captain of Hungary, published
the following year, Puskás wrote of ‘a vicious kick on the back of my ankle
… when I was no longer playing the ball’.
Time, though, cooled his sense of injustice, and he later said that he didn’t
believe there had been a calculated plan to injure him. Hidegkuti, in his
autobiography, called it ‘a correct tackle, and quite accepted in football …
He was just trying to tackle Puskás, who strained his ankle.’ It is true that
Liebrich, a player noted for his robust approach, had changed places with
the right-half Jupp Posipal only ten minutes before the foul, but there is a
big difference between deploying a physical midfielder to mark the
opposition’s best player and setting out deliberately to cripple him.
Hindsight has lent momentousness to the incident, but at the time that one
challenge seemed insignificant alongside what ensued in the quarter-final
against Brazil, a match that became known as the Battle of Berne. Goals
within seven minutes from Hidegkuti and Kocsis effectively decided the
game, which was eventually won 4–2, but the contest was only beginning.
Two penalties were awarded and three players sent off, and the final whistle
brought both a pitch invasion and a brawl in the tunnel, during which Sebes
was cut above the eye with a bottle, and the Hungary dressing room was
invaded by furious Brazilians.
The semi-final, against the defending world champions Uruguay, is
generally regarded as one of the greatest matches ever played. Hungary
again won 4–2, but only after being forced into extra-time having thrown
away a two-goal lead with fifteen minutes remaining. Puskás spoke of his
pride at the ‘fantastic heart’ Hungary had shown in seeing off Uruguay’s
comeback, but the extra thirty minutes would take their toll. West Germany,
by contrast, eased past Austria 6–1.
The Germans call what happened on 4 July 1954 the Miracle of Berne, the
day on which a shattered nation re-emerged on to the international stage.
Hungarian football, though, has never recovered from the defeat.
The portents weren’t good. Hungary’s sleep was disturbed by brass bands
practising in the street for the Swiss national championship and their team
bus was prevented by police from entering the stadium, forcing the players
to battle their way through the crowds just to get to the dressing room. And
then there was the weather. It rained throughout the day before the final,
and then it rained heavily during the game, transforming an already soft
pitch into a quagmire that hampered Hungary’s passing game. On the
positive side – or at least, so it seemed at the time – Puskás was declared fit
and played.
The West Germany line-up featured only five of the players who had
played in the 8–3 defeat in the group stages. It is possible that was a matter
of chance, of Sepp Herberger serendipitously happening upon his most
effective eleven, but the theory has developed that the West Germany
coach, knowing his team would be too good for Turkey, the other team in
the group, deliberately fielded a weakened side for the first game, allowing
him to research Hungary while giving nothing away in return. It seems all
but incredible that a national manager could take such a risk, but West
Germany did beat Turkey comfortably both in the group game (4–1) and the
subsequent play-off (7–2), and Herberger’s assistant Helmut Schön, who
went on to manage West Germany to victory in the 1974 World Cup,
always insisted the story was true. As he pointed out, West Germany were
under less pressure for that tournament than they ever would be again: if the
gamble was the only chance they had of winning the tournament, the
minimal repercussions there would have been for a first-round exit made it
worthwhile.
As they had in every game in the tournament, Hungary raced into a two-
goal lead. (The early surge, in fact, was a constant feature of the golden
years, and it has been suggested that a contributory factor in their success
was the fact they took warming up far more seriously than anybody else.)
Puskás got the first after six minutes, tucking in the rebound after Liebrich
had blocked Kocsis’s shot, and Czibor added a second two minutes later.
Two minutes after that, though, West Germany pulled one back, Max
Morlock sliding in after József Zakariás had half-blocked a cross, and then
Grosics flapped at a Fritz Walter corner, allowing Helmut Rahn to volley an
equaliser. Less than quarter of the game gone and it was 2–2. As they had
against Uruguay, though, Hungary rallied. Hidegkuti was less effective than
usual thanks to the man-marking of Horst Eckel (a ploy beyond the English
imagination), but he still struck a post. Kocsis hit the bar and Toni Turek in
the German goal made a string of fine saves, but a third goal would not
come. Perhaps fatigue was a factor – the debilitating games against Brazil
and Uruguay, the injury to Puskás, the heavy pitch – and perhaps they
weren’t so fluent as usual, but fundamentally it was bad luck that denied
Hungary.
 And then, with six minutes left, Bozsik, hesitating uncharacteristically,
was muscled off the ball by Hans Schäfer. His cross was headed clear by
Mihály Lantos, but Rahn gathered the loose ball, created space for the shot,
and drove low past Grosics. In Germany it is known as the goal that made
the nation. It would not have been, though, had not the Welsh linesman
Mervyn Griffiths – a controversial, authoritarian figure – deemed that
Puskás was offside as he ran on to Mihály Tóth’s pass and slid the ball
under Turek with two minutes remaining. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Puskás
said. ‘It was almost a minute afterwards when he raised his flag. I could
have murdered him. To lose the World Cup on such a decision just isn’t
right.’
No game has been subjected to such agonised analysis. Kocsis and
Hidegkuti both mused afterwards on what would have happened had Puskás
not played, but as Puskás pointed out, he did score one and have one
controversially disallowed. Besides, a half-fit Puskás – and he was not a
player exactly noted for his work-rate even when fit – was still probably
better than a fully fit anybody else. His inclusion, though, meant a shake-up
of the front line, as Sebes brought in Tóth to play on the left-wing with a
brief to cover for Puskás, which meant Czibor switching to an unfamiliar
position on the right-wing with László Budai – excellent in the semi, but
generally out of form – stepping down. So ineffective were the wingers
perceived to be, though, that at half time, apparently under instruction from
Gyula Hegyi – the president of the National Physical Education and Sports
Authority, and thus his immediate superior – Sebes swapped them over.
Was Sebes, as many have bitterly suggested, determined to shuffle so that
he could claim the laurels as the master strategist? Did the pressure and the
speculation over Puskás cause him to overcomplicate things? Or, given he
had masterminded a run of thirty-two wins and four draws in thirty-six
games, including an Olympic title and two annihilations of the mother of
football, can we cut Sebes some slack, and accept that, but for outrageous
circumstance, his plan would have worked? Budai, after all, the Uruguay
game aside, had not played well for weeks, and in the first half Czibor’s
pace did (as Sebes always said it would) torment the West German full-back
Werner Kohlmeyer. Given that fact, it is hard to understand why Sebes
accepted Hegyi’s demand to switch the wingers; he was not, after all, a man
who readily accepted political interference. ‘It was our own fault,’ Puskás
said. ‘We thought we had the match won, then we gave away two stupid
goals and let them back into it.’
Back in Budapest, disappointment swiftly became anger. ‘The reaction in
Hungary was terrible,’ said Grosics. ‘Hundreds of thousands of people
poured into the streets in the hours after the match. On the pretext of
football, they openly demonstrated against the regime. The atmosphere was
so bitter it could be felt months later. In those demonstrations, I believe, lay
the seeds of the 1956 Uprising.’
The apartments of certain players and even some journalists were
attacked, as rumours circulated that the game had been thrown for a fleet of
Mercedes. It was suggested (ludicrously, given Sebes’s only daughter was
ten at the time) that Tóth had been selected because he was the coach’s son-
in-law. Rather more credible were the complaints about complacency in the
build-up to the final. Sebes had arranged for wives and girlfriends to travel
to Berne to watch, but had forbidden players to see them until after the
game. At least two players, and possibly as many as six, broke that curfew.
Czibor later revealed that ‘his room-mate’ had stumbled back in at six in the
morning after spending the night with a hotel maid, and complained of
having to work twice as hard to cover for him that afternoon. He never
named the player concerned, and, confusingly, neither of his room-mates,
Palotás and Ferenc Machos, played in the final. Czibor also let slip, though,
that the guilty party never represented Hungary again, a description that, of
the eleven who played, applies only to Zakariás.
Even now the defeat and the reasons behind it provoke furious debate. As
Nyilasi said, ‘It is as though Hungarian football is frozen at that moment, as
though we have never quite moved on from then.’
After spending a few days in Tata until the worst of the disturbances were
over, the Aranycsapat returned to Budapest. They went unbeaten in their
next eighteen games, but the mood had changed. Puskás was barracked at
Honvéd away games, Sebes’s son was beaten up at school, and Grosics was
arrested having been accused of ‘conduct incompatible with the laws and
morals of the Hungarian People’s Republic’. An erratic goalkeeper and an
eccentric character, he had always been a controversial figure, prone to
intense bouts of nerves, and such a hypochondriac he would wear a red
beret during training sessions because he believed it brought him relief from
a brain disease. He had been arrested in 1949 for attempting illegally to
leave the country, and felt he was always under suspicion. ‘I was born into a
religious family, and that wasn’t a good sign at all at that time,’ he
explained. ‘I never made any secret of what I thought about the
government. My family – especially my mother – had intended that I should
be a Catholic priest. I was raised in that spirit, and that was one of the
reasons I was not trusted.’
Grosics has a reputation as a loner, an intellectual who preferred to play
chess than to drink and watch Westerns with the rest of the squad, but he
was engaging enough when I spoke to him – admittedly through an
interpreter via telephone – in Budapest. For a man who had seen so much,
his outlook seemed remarkably benign. Late in 1954, he was exiled to
house arrest in the mining town of Tatabánya and, even fifty years later, he
was able vividly to recall the mixture of fear and pride he felt each week as
the large black car pulled up at his door to take him off for interrogation.
Through 1955 the structure with which Sebes had surrounded himself was
systematically dismantled. He was prevented from taking his place on the
bench at a match in Switzerland in the autumn; his secretary was sacked;
and his think-tank of coaches was dispersed: Pál Titkos was sent to Egypt,
Gyula Mándi to Brazil and Gusztav Hidas to Nigeria. Sebes himself was
finally sacked after a defeat to Belgium in March 1956, his place being
taken by a five-man committee headed by Bukovi, which recalled Grosics
to the team. As the Aranycsapat disintegrated, so too did Hungarian
optimism.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party denounced Nagy’s ‘New
Course’ in March 1955, and Nagy himself was deposed a few weeks later.
By the end of the year he had been expelled from the party altogether. He
was replaced as Prime Minister by András Hedeg s, but he was little more
than a puppet for Rákosi and the other hardliners. Their position, though,
was undermined by a continuing process of de-Stalinisation, something that
found its symbolic manifestation in Moscow, in September 1956. The
players have always denied any political pressure was put on them to
underper-form against the USSR, but when a goal from Czibor in the Lenin
Stadium (now the Luzhniki) gave Hungary their first ever victory over the
Soviets, it was widely seen as evidence of Budapest’s increasing
independence.
 Khrushchev denounced Stalin in the ‘secret speech’ in February 1956,
and, that same month, the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun, who had led a
brief Bolshevist revolution in 1918 and been executed in Moscow twenty-
one years later, was exonerated. By June, the widow of László Rajk, killed
in 1949 for supposedly plotting with Tito, publicly demanded that her
husband should also be rehabilitated and his body returned to her for proper
burial. The authorities acceded, and, on 6 October, as a gesture of goodwill
ahead of an official visit to Yugoslavia, Rajk was reburied in the Kerepesi
cemetery. The ceremony rapidly became a political event, with numerous
speakers condemning the regime. Even more surprisingly, almost 200,000
marched through Budapest to show their solidarity with the liberal values
Rajk was seen to represent (although he had actually been just as committed
a Stalinist as Rákosi). Within a week, Nagy was readmitted to the party, and
a mass demonstration demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, a free
press, and free elections was called for 23 October.
By 6 p.m. that day a quarter of a million people had gathered in
Parliament Square, demanding the reinstatement of Nagy. A statue of Stalin
was broken off at the knees by workers using acetylene torches, who then
filled its head with petrol and set it alight. The AVH began shooting at the
protesters, and, that night, as the violence escalated, the Hungarian
government called on the Soviet army to step in. At the time, the Hungary
squad were training in Tata preparing for a match against Sweden,
desperately trying to follow events in the capital on the radio, and when that
game was called off, most returned to Budapest. Grosics, inevitably, was
the most active. He was there by the statue of St Imre on Gellért Hill when
troops again opened fire on demonstrators, and subsequently allowed his
house to be used as an arsenal by rebels. ‘I had a lot of problems getting rid
of the arms afterwards,’ he said. ‘Fortunately I had a good friend in the
army, a captain, who came in a small truck and took the weapons and
grenades away. That was my small contribution.’
It did not last long. Honvéd, initially using the excuse of a European Cup-
tie against Athletic Bilbao, took their players on a European tour, and MTK
soon did likewise. Soviet tanks entered Budapest in early November,
crushing the rebellion, and, as reprisals began, Honvéd accepted a long-
standing invitation to play a series of exhibition games in Brazil and
Venezuela, taking with them a number of guest players including Grosics.
The Hungarian FA and FIFA both declared the tour illegal, and, facing
suspension and possibly worse, Puskás, Kocsis and Czibor decided not to
return, all three eventually continuing their careers in Spain. Guttmann, the
brilliant but irascible dandy who led the tour, was something of a wanderer
anyway, but he never worked in Hungary again, denying the country of his
birth the coaching talent that won two European Cups for Benfica. The
national Under-21 team, who had been playing at a UEFA tournament in
Belgium when the Uprising began, defected en masse. Hungary were never
so good again.
So weakened were Honvéd that they would have been relegated in 1957,
had not the Hungarian FA decided to spare them the embarrassment by
enlarging the first division. In 2003, though, nothing could save them, and
Kispest-Honvéd, as they were by then known, slipped out of the Hungarian
top flight. If that seemed symptomatic of the wider decline, worse was to
follow. The club was promoted at the first attempt, but, owing tens of
millions of forints in taxes, Kispest-Honvéd Sports Circle Ltd, the company
that had owned the club, went into liquidation in October 2004.
The problem, Zsolt Kiss, who had owned 10 per cent of the old company,
explained, was that the players had been on entrepreneurial contracts: that
is, they were technically not employees, but contractors hired by the club,
something that significantly reduced the club’s tax burden. The tax
authorities protested, and were supported by the courts, leaving the club
with arrears they had no means of paying. What followed was a familiar
story of infighting and intrigue. Kiss accused another co-owner, Attila
Kovács – a former head of the Hungarian FA who had been forced out of
office when his personal tax affairs were investigated – of reneging on a
deal to pay his share of the debt, and so, in 2003, they and the majority
owner Massimiliano Bottinelli, a representative of the Italian meat tycoon
Piero Pini, turned to the league for arbitration.
The league came upon the idea of simply setting up a new club, Honvéd
FC, which they would allow to take Kispest-Honvéd’s place in the first
division, provided all ‘football-related debts’ – that is, player contracts and
the outstanding repayments on a loan from the league – were paid off. By
the time Kispest-Honvéd Sports Circle went into liquidation, it was little
more than a shell. As if that situation weren’t tawdry enough, Honvéd
began the 2004–05 season with their new coach, György Bognár, being
sued by his former club Sopron over allegations he ‘borrowed’ money from
club funds, and gambled it at a casino. He left the club that winter.
To blame Hungary’s fall purely on the post-1956 drain, though, is
oversimplistic. By the time of the Uprising, the Aranycsapat was probably
past its peak anyway. Defeat to Turkey in February 1956 was only their
third since the war, but it heralded a run of five games without a win,
something that reflected and perhaps exacerbated the general mood of
discontent. That said, the defections had an undeniable impact, and
Hungary, distracted by events back in Budapest, were eliminated at the
group stage of the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. Nagy was executed on 16
June, the day after a 4–0 victory over Mexico and three days before a 2–1
play-off defeat to Wales. The referee that day, by a grimly appropriate
quirk, was Nikolay Latyshev, a Russian.
Latyshev was the referee again, four years later, when Hungary, led by
Flórián Albert, lost in the quarter-finals to Czechoslovakia, and then it was
the Soviet team that eliminated them in the quarter-final in England in
1966, only a dramatic goal-line clearance from József Szabo denying them
extra time at Roker Park. That at least is how Szabo remembers it; my dad,
who was at the game, has no recollection of the incident, although he does
remember that the ball burst (this concern with material loss, perhaps, why
he became an accountant rather than a sports journalist). Few allege
conspiracy – John Charles, in his autobiography, even suggested Latyshev’s
performance in Stockholm was an apology to Hungary – but the
coincidence symbolically delivers a clear message: the Soviets ended
Hungarian football. Nonetheless, Albert stands among the greatest centre-
forwards the world has known, and Hungary in the sixties were good
enough, twice, to reach the last eight of the World Cup.
Hungary’s club sides, similarly, flickered towards success. MTK, Újpest
Dózsa and Videoton all lost in European finals, but it was the USSR that
remained Hungary’s bêtes noires. Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv
beat Ferencváros in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final in 1975, and then a young
and highly promising Hungary were thrashed 6–0 by Lobanovskyi’s USSR
in the group stages of the 1986 World Cup. They have not qualified for a
major tournament since. Each generation, it seems, has been burdened with
the knowledge that they were not so good as the last, and have suffered
public resentment as a result. Eduardo Galeano has traced the mentality in
Uruguayan football, and David Winner in English, both suggesting that
progress is stymied by the constant harking back to a mythical golden age.
‘We were always criticised because people compared us to Puskás’s team,’
Nyilasi said. ‘But people would love to go back to that time now.’
There are those who believe that nationalisation itself was to blame, that it
brought the short-term gains that Sebes exploited, but in restricting
competition hindered the development of young talents from outside his
system. Certainly the habit Sebes’s successors had of drawing up long-term
plans and focusing their efforts on one competition has rarely brought
sustained success wherever in the world it has been tried.
Others blame in-fighting between various factions within the regime, and
perhaps for a time it did mean more to Mihály Farkas, the head of the army,
for Honvéd to beat MTK (the team of his son Vladimir, the head of the
secret police) than for Hungary to prosper in international competition, but
in other countries – most notably Romania – such rivalries provided a
stimulus for improvement. As Várhidy, who went on to win nine league
titles as coach of Újpest, put it, though, football in Hungary in the final
thirty years of Communism was not so much different to anywhere else, it
just felt worse because of what had gone before.
That at least was true until the nineties, when financial deprivation
brought genuine problems. It was only in 2002 that Hungary’s GDP
returned to the levels of 1989, and private capital does not finance football
as the state once did. When something in Hungary is really bad, it is said to
be a béka segge alatt – under the belly of a frog. Its football is lower now
even than that. I went to the Budapest derby between Újpest and
Ferencváros in October 2004, having been told repeatedly that the fixture
was the biggest of the Hungarian season. Újpest and Ferencváros are the
two most successful teams in Hungarian history, they are the only clubs to
boast a nationwide support and both, at the time, had realistic championship
ambitions, yet the crowd was only 4,520. Yes, the weather was appalling
and, yes, the game was played at 11.30 on a Sunday morning (although not,
as I initially thought, on police advice, but because Hungarian TV demands
its live Sunday football broadcast be over by the time the Formula One
starts), but that turnout truly was pathetic. What would Antal Végh call a
book were he to write one now? Last Rites, perhaps, or Requiem?
 Watching that game – a dire 1–1 draw – was an odd experience. It was
rather like stepping back into an English ground of the late eighties, albeit
one that had gone prematurely all-seater. Both ends were near enough full,
and the fans filling them impressively vociferous – a reminder of just how
tame so many modern English stadiums can be, even when packed – while
the long stands were virtually empty. There were even four Union flags, on
each of which was written either ‘hooligans’ or ‘hools’. (This is a matter
that is taken weirdly seriously; on one of the many websites devoted to
Ferencváros fans it is noted that they dropped the word ‘hooligan’ in 1997
and replaced it with ‘hool’, although nobody quite seemed able to tell me
why.) The prevailing feel, though, was more Italian, not just in the banks of
empty seats, but also in the use of coloured smoke bombs, the style of the
chanting and the spinning of scarves above heads. Újpest’s fans, indeed,
have a conscious link with Fiorentina – the mutual bond of those who wear
purple – describing themselves as the Viola and visiting the Artemio
Franchi twice a season. Around the ground, the graffiti scrawled on garages
and walls was written in a strange mix of Italian and English: ‘Viola
Fidelity’, ‘Gruppo anti Ferencváros’.
Few in numbers they may be, but there was no lack of passion among the
fans, and there was a real edge, that increasingly rare sense that, with the
right trigger, it could all go off. When Ferencváros took the lead just before
half time, Újpest fans hurled drinks cans, sandwiches and stones at their
celebrating players, and the game was briefly held up in the second half
when they took to pelting the Ferencváros goalkeeper Lajos Sz cs. He was
always a likely target, having left Ferencváros for Újpest several years
earlier, only to return to Ferencváros after two seasons in Germany with
Kaiserslautern. Clearly nobody deserves to be bombarded with half-bricks
when taking goal kicks, but it must be said that Sz cs is hardly the most
sympathetic figure, having himself been at the heart of the disgraceful
denouement to the 2002–03 season.
Ferencváros went into their final game a point clear of MTK, and were
widely expected to beat their opponents Debrecen, who were severely
debilitated by injury. Given MTK faced a tough away game at Újpest,
Ferencváros had reason to be confident, and prepared lavish title
celebrations, even arranging for hot-air balloons to float overhead bearing
banners reading WELCOME TO THE CHAMPIONS. With ten minutes
remaining, though, Ferencváros hadn’t scored, while MTK led at Újpest
through a thirty-fifth-minute Roland Juhász header. As frustration mounted,
Ferencváros’s managing director József Szeiler ordered that the gates in the
perimeter fence should be opened, allowing the crowd to swarm on to the
edge of the pitch. The referee, reasoning that an abandonment was only
likely to lead to further trouble, played on, but when he blew the final
whistle with the game still goalless, fans attacked players from both teams.
The Debrecen coach Lázár Szentes was knocked to the ground and suffered
such a kicking that he ruptured a kidney. As police tried to restore order, Sz
cs could clearly be seen standing on a balcony throwing an aluminium
dustbin at officers in riot gear.
After the derby, I spoke to the former Újpest player András Tóth, who,
like so many ex-players, was only too delighted to explain why things were
better in his day. ‘In the seventies, I played a lot of games against
Ferencváros in the Népstadion, because at that time all the important games
were played there,’ he said. ‘In those days we didn’t have any conflicts with
each other. People would come about an hour before the game to see us
warm up outside the stadium, crowds supporting both clubs, and they would
do it side by side. You would have Újpest and Ferencváros supporters next
to each other and there would be no problem.’
So why the change? ‘Violence is characteristic of other parts of Europe,’
he explained, ‘and now we have joined the EU, we have got the kind of
trouble you see at Ajax v Feyenoord, or at Austria Vienna v Rapid Vienna,
or in Germany.’ Only my Englishness, I presume, stopped him naming
England.
His argument seemed at first nonsensical – and in the form in which he
expressed it, of course it is: violence had been a regular feature of
Hungarian football for at least a decade before Hungary joined the EU in
May 2004. There is, though, a kernel of truth in there; the increase in
hooliganism does correlate with a westward shift in Hungary’s perspective.
A metaphor I heard regularly in Budapest sees Hungary as a statue that was
for years covered in a dustsheet. People believed the statue to be beautiful,
but when the cloth was finally removed, it was revealed to be ugly, cracked
and dirty. More than most, Hungarians seem to have struggled with their
changing national identity since the collapse of the USSR. For many, it is a
feeling of dislocation among young working-class Hungarians that has led
to the rise in hooliganism, a need both to forge an identity through
association with a club and then aggressively to assert it.
For centuries Hungary stood as the frontline of the Christian West, seeing
off attempted invasions by the Tartars and the Ottomans, and then, under
Communist rule, Hungarians took pride in being the most ‘western’ of the
Soviet bloc – geographically and mentally. Allied to that was a nationalistic
pride, a sense of being chosen border people whose specialness was
demonstrated by the country’s disproportionate numbers of Nobel laureates
and Olympic gold-medallists – and, of course, by the Aranycsapat.
According to János Bali, a lecturer in ethnological studies at Budapest
University, by joining the EU, Hungary has lost its unique role. It is now
merely an eastern satellite of Brussels or Strasbourg, a cheap destination for
stag weekends with a happy chocolate-box capital to draw the tourists,
something that has led, in Bali’s words, to an ‘inferiority complex and a
sense of peripheral status nationally’. There is, of course, an inherent
paradox in that the form of expression by which these dislocated
Hungarians assert their identity as something distinct from western Europe
– the ultra groups that consciously ape their Italian and English forerunners
– is itself drawn from western Europe, but such, I suppose, is the nature of
globalisation.
Ferencváros remain the most popular side, something that seems not
merely the result of their recent history of success, but also because they
have always been the most ‘Hungarian’ of clubs, the nationalism of their
fans having first become evident in the 1920s. Hungary held its first secret
ballot elections in 1920, voting, perplexingly, for a monarchy. There being
no king was a problem, but Admiral Miklós Horthy was appointed (his
experience leading the navy of a land-locked country apparently fitting him
for the equally paradoxical role of elected king). The early years of his
reign saw Hungarian society become increasingly bourgeois, something that
led to tension between the new wealth and those who felt they were being
left behind. The district of Ferencváros, to the south of the centre of Pest,
has always been a working-class area, and it was there that the
dissatisfaction was at its strongest.
As the historian Tamás Krausz put it, ‘foreign money, i.e. “Jewish capital”
and “foreigners” in general, was considered the main obstacle in the way of
Hungarian prosperity.’ The early years of Horthy’s reign also saw the White
Terror, by which he persecuted those who had been involved in Kun’s
Bolshevist regime. As many of those targeted were Jewish, his reprisals
both fed off and propagated the more general anti-Semitism.
The Treaty of Trianon, drawn up by the Allies in 1920, was also a source
of resentment. Hungary, having fought the First World War on the side of
Germany, was reduced to a third of its previous size as land was ceded to
Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. It was in the belief that that
ground could be recovered that Horthy threw in his lot with Hitler during
the thirties, becoming increasingly hard-line and eventually banning Jewish
sporting clubs. When Ferencváros protested at the dissolution in 1940 of
MTK, a club with long Jewish associations, the twelve Jews among their
leadership were dismissed, and Andor Jaross, the Minister of the Interior,
made club president. Jaross was later responsible for the deportation of
400,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, and was executed as a war criminal
in 1946. That, though, only completed an ongoing process, Ferencváros
having been one of the major sources of support for the pro-Nazi Arrow
Cross party, which took power in 1944 after Horthy’s failed attempt to
negotiate a separate peace with the Allies.
Little wonder that when Rákosi and his Stalinists took power in rigged
elections in 1947, they sought to run Ferencváros down, and it is equally
unsurprising that Ferencváros fans were at the forefront of the 1956
Uprising, perhaps not in quite the obvious and organised manner of Red
Star fans in Belgrade forty-four years later, but a significant factor
nonetheless. Many of those who fought in the Uprising came from the
slums of Angyalföld and Ferencváros, motivated, it is now widely accepted,
less by political conviction than by what the historian Bill Lomax called
‘the sport of the fight’. Half a century later, the sport of the fight is to be had
with opposing fans.
After the derby I spoke to the gregarious István Sálloi, who at the time
was Újpest’s sports director. He was relatively relieved at the way the derby
had gone, but our conversation was generally depressing. I’d first met Sálloi
the previous year when he was sports director at Balaton FC, a team based
in Siófok. They finished second in the 2003–04 season, a remarkable
achievement given they were so poor that they had no training facility, and
practice sessions took place either in the stadium car park or on the verges
of the pitch. Twelve months later, they no longer existed, a victim of the
chaos that hits Hungarian football each summer, leaving some clubs with
new owners, some with new homes, some with new names, and some with
nothing at all.
In the summer of 2004 – shortly, cynics would note, before FA elections –
the first division was increased from twelve to sixteen teams, with the top
four of the second division being promoted and the bottom two of the first
division playing off against the fifth- and sixth-placed teams from the
second. Both first division sides won, but one of them, DVTK, ran out of
money, were unable to present a balanced budget and so were denied a
licence. The FA then turned to the team who had finished seventh in the
second division, Nyíregyháza, and, with only two weeks remaining before
the start of the season, asked them to step in. The club requested a
fortnight’s grace to prepare their squad, but were turned down; not
surprisingly, it was not until their twelfth game of the season that they
recorded a victory.
Balaton’s owner István Kuti, meanwhile, announced that as money was
tight he wanted to move to a town where either the council or local
businesses would help out with costs. At first it seemed they would move to
Pápa and merge with the local second division team, Pápai ELC, but at the
last minute they instead agreed a deal with Lombard-Haladás from
Szombathely. It later transpired that Lombard, a firm of pawn-brokers that
sponsored the team, had fallen out with the Szombathely city council. That
left Balaton without a home, but on the eve of the season, bankrupt and
with only four registered players, they agreed a merger with Diósgy ri
VTK, a club based in Miskolc, around 300 miles from Siófok. It is perhaps
not surprising that few fans bother investing much emotional energy in their
teams.
The poverty is perhaps best summed up by an incident in 1999, when a
hoax call was made to Dunakeszi warning of a bomb at their ground. The
hoaxers could not call the club direct, though, having to leave a message
with the factory next door as Dunakeszi’s phone had been disconnected.
Given such a background, I asked, what hope was there for Hungarian
football? Sálloi rolled his eyes and spoke of the need ‘for an Abramovich’.
That, I suggested, was a forlorn thought, that there could be no plan for the
future other than to hold out desperately, praying that from somewhere a
billionaire benefactor would ride to the rescue. ‘The problem is money,’ he
said. ‘We can’t afford players and we lose any good young players
immediately. A lot of young players are going to the fifth or the sixth
division in Austria and getting better money than they would here. Sponsors
are difficult to find, because they don’t want to spend money here, because
they think it’s not a good level. If the level rises the money will come, but
without money we cannot raise the level.’
Less than a month later, defeated by the catch-22, Sálloi resigned.
 4 THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
Ever Decreasing Circles

i Serbia-Montenegro
There was a time when Yugoslavia was the Brazil of Europe. So obsessed
were Yugoslavs by the belief that they were the representatives of free-
flowing samba football in the old world that Red Star Belgrade’s ground is
known as the Marakana, after the great stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
Ludicrous as it may at first seem, Brazil having won five World Cups and
Yugoslavia none, there is some truth to the claim, and Brazil had enough
respect for their European counterparts that it was Yugoslavia they chose as
their opponents in a testimonial match for Pelé in 1971. 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.
Three times in succession Yugoslavia reached the Olympic final, and three
times they walked away with silver. They lost also in the final of the
European championships of 1960 and 1968, while Partizan Belgrade were
beaten by Real Madrid in the 1966 European Cup final and Red Star lost to
Borussia Mönchengladbach in the 1979 UEFA Cup final. Then there are the
five European semi-finals lost by Serbian clubs and Yugoslavia’s defeats in
the World Cup semi-finals of 1930 and 1962. On all but two occasions,
when it came down to it, when it really mattered, when the greatest prizes
came within their sight, Yugoslav teams collapsed. Yes, the national side
won gold at the 1960 Olympics, but it is all too appropriate that Yugoslav
football’s greatest glory, Red Star Belgrade’s penalty shoot-out victory over
Marseille in the European Cup final in Bari in 1991, came after a game
rendered sterile by mutual paranoia. A characteristic performance brought
an uncharacteristic result, but, by then, Yugoslavia barely existed. In this
case, the brightest hour came before the night.
It was on April Fool’s Day 1992 that Yugoslav football finally expired. It
was not even afforded the dignity of dying at home: EU sanctions forcing
Red Star out of the Marakana, out of Yugoslavia, for games against foreign
opposition. Going into their penultimate match in the European Cup’s
inaugural group stage, at ‘home’ to Sampdoria in Sofia, Red Star topped the
table, and when they took a nineteenth-minute lead through Siniša
Mihajlovi , they looked on course for a second successive final. But then
the Slovenian Sre ko Katanec, once of Red Star’s eternal rivals Partizan,
equalised, and before half time Goran Vasilijevi had put through his own
goal – in Yugoslavia, the danger always came from within. Roberto
Mancini added a late third, and, a fortnight later, Red Star lost to Anderlecht
in Brussels to exit the competition. ‘Red Star had a great team at the time
and it would have been very different at the Marakana in front of 100,000
people,’ Katanec acknowledged. No eastern European team has reached the
final since, and it was not until twelve seasons later that Partizan were the
next Serbian representatives in the group stages.
The goalkeeper and captain of Red Star’s European Cup-winning team
was Stevan Stojanovi . I met him in Novi Sad at a game between Vojvodina
and Sartid Smederevo that he was watching in his role as a scout for an
agency based in Belgium. He is one of those huge men who projects an aura
of great calm, a welcome attribute given that we’d barely ordered our half-
time espresso when some local schoolchildren lobbed a tear-gas canister
into the home end, prompting a panicked evacuation. Serbia retains that
kind of feel – a place slightly on edge, not quite at ease with itself. The
scars of the NATO bombing are still obvious in Belgrade, and, when I was
there, Novi Sad was still accessible only by a temporary bridge, the original
lying in ruins, a casualty of war.
In that context, there was something disconcerting when Stojanovi leant
forward and said, ‘The tragedy is that we will never know how good we
could have been.’ In a land that played its part in the bloodiest European
conflict since the Second World War, the term tragedy seemed dreadfully
exaggerated. In a strictly dramatic sense, though, there probably has been
no club so tragic as Red Star, a great side brought down by the fatal flaw in
its make-up: the nationalism of its fans. For me, that Red Star team of 1991
remains the apogee of football: not the best side I have ever seen (although
I maintain they are generally underrated), but the one that best combined
the elements I would most want to see in a team I supported: technical
brilliance, fluidity, a capacity for moments of staggering flair, supreme
organisation, cynicism, and a pervading sense of mental fragility.
Take the semi-final victory over Bayern Munich. Their equaliser in the
first leg in Germany is as close to perfection as any goal can be. In first-half
injury time, Brian Laudrup was beaten to an Olaf Thon through-ball by
Slobodan Marovi , a butcher of a defender who had been hacking lumps out
of the Dane all game. Although tight by his own corner flag, Marovi
played a delicate pass to the right-back Duško Radinovi , who flicked it
inside to Miodrag Belodedici. The Romanian, still in his own box, helped
the ball on to Robert Prosine ki, who glanced up and curved a sixty-yard
pass down the line for Dragiša Bini to chase. He outpaced Hans Pflügler,
and whipped a low cross between Jürgen Köhler and the goalkeeper
Raimond Aumann for Darko Pan ev, arriving at the far post, to slide home.
Everything was controlled, precise, and yet, because of the pace of the
move, it was virtually undefendable.
When I spoke to Bini about it, though, he was frustratingly dismissive.
‘We scored a lot like that,’ he said. ‘We were a quick team, so we played on
the counter.’ The speed was the key, Bini was keen to stress, because that,
you see, was the bit that involved him. I have interviewed few more voluble
players, and I have interviewed none so voluble on the subject of
themselves. The only thing that saved him from being an insufferable
egotist was the occasional suggestion that his self-aggrandisement might
have been ironic in intent. ‘I was the fastest player in Yugoslavia,’ he said,
with a flourish of his cigarette. ‘I was the fastest player in Europe. I’m still
the fastest man in Yugoslavia, and I’m faster than any English player in a
one-off sprint, even though I began smoking three years ago. It was well
known that I was fast. I could run a hundred metres in ten point five
seconds. There was a stunt for the newspapers and I ran against a Yugoslav
sprinter. I was wearing my boots, and he had spikes, but I was faster from
the start and led until seventy metres, and then he eased past me, but in
football you don’t have to run a hundred metres. When Carl Lewis came to
athletics meetings in Belgrade, I wanted to run against him.’ Hans Pflügler
didn’t have a prayer.
Red Star’s second also came on the break, Dejan Savi evi racing on to
Pan ev’s flick before smacking a superb low finish past Aumann. I once
arranged to interview Savi evi in his brief time as national manager of
Serbia-Montenegro. I’d fixed a date with his secretary, but she asked me to
phone the day before to confirm a time. When I suggested meeting in the
morning, she tutted loudly. ‘He is a Montenegrin,’ she said. I thought at first
this was just a slightly disrespectful joke, the stereotype of a Montenegrin
being of a layabout who spends his life dozing under trees, but then she
agreed to pencil me in for his first appointment of the day – at noon. He was
over an hour late even for that. Sublime he may have been as a footballer,
but as an interviewee he was hopeless: tick the box marked ‘unreliable
genius’ and move on.
The general rule seems to be that the better the footballer, the worse they
will remember their greatest moments – an indication, perhaps, of how the
best football stems from unconscious instinct – but Savi evi , after
mumbling about how ‘I just hit it and it went in’, did vaguely recall that
there was a degree of complacency about the crowd in the Marakana for the
second leg. When Mihajlovi scored with a deflected free-kick midway
through the first half, the tie seemed won, and that was when the doubt
kicked in. The composure that had marked their performance for the first
three-quarters of the tie disappeared, and Red Star conceded twice in the
space of four minutes. ‘Klaus Augenthaler scored a goal that went under
Stojanovi – a mistake,’ Bini said. ‘The Germans started running for
everything, and suddenly it was 2–1 from Manfred Bender. We were very
tense because the momentum had turned against us. The Germans hit the
post and if it had gone to extra-time we probably would have lost, but in the
last minute we had a counter-attack. Mihajlovi crossed from the left. He
had me in the middle and Pan ev just behind, but he hit a bad pass. It was
low, and Augenthaler …’
Even Bini was unable to find the words for it, perhaps dreaming of the
volley he would have creamed into the top corner if only Mihajlovi hadn’t
miskicked. With his hands, cigarette still clamped between his fingers, he
traced the loop of the ball as Augenthaler, in attempting to clear, scooped
the ball backwards, so it hung, and, spinning cruelly, dipped with languid
perfection over Aumann and into the far corner. ‘Luck is very important in
football,’ Stojanovi said with a grin, ‘and at that moment it shone on us.’ It
was just as well it did, because mentally they were shot. That brittleness,
though, was part of their beauty.
Yet it was Red Star who held their nerve better in the final, beating
Marseille in a penalty shoot-out after a dire 120 minutes of anxious
goallessness. That said, with Manuel Amoros, Chris Waddle and the former
Red Star hero Dragan Stojkovi in their line-up, Marseille had gathered a
squad of players with a history of suffering penalty trauma. Stojkovi
declined to take one, less because of his failure in the 1990 World Cup
against Argentina than because he could not bear to down the club where he
was so revered. So too did Waddle, the memories of West Germany and
Turin too fresh. Amoros, the French full-back, having had nine years to get
over the World Cup semi-final defeat against West Germany, volunteered to
go first, only for Stojanovi to save. It was Pan ev who converted the final
kick, winning Red Star a trophy they fully deserved – even if the final was
the worst in the competition’s history. That anticlimax will always cloud the
perception, but it is a measure of how good they were that when the
Rangers manager Graeme Souness sent his assistant Walter Smith to scout
Red Star before the sides met in the second round that year, he is said to
have returned with a two-word report: ‘We’re fucked.’
Yet admire them as I do, it is impossible to discuss that Red Star side
without reference to atrocity. Nowhere was football so entwined with the
disintegration of the Communist regime, and nowhere was the
disintegration so prolonged and so bloody. Their fans – the Delije as they
are now called – are widely condemned, pariahs of the European game, and,
to an extent, their reputation is deserved. Some of them are racist, some of
them do fight, and some of them did commit war crimes, but the
organisation itself has a warmer side, and the draw it holds is readily
understandable.
Before a Partizan–Red Star game in 2002, I had lunch with Milena and
Ljiljana, two journalist sisters, in a small restaurant opposite the Marakana.
The place was packed with Red Star fans, preparing for the short walk to
the Partizan Stadium, but the atmosphere was far from raucous. Showing
people to their tables, instead of a maître d’, was a tall, slightly balding man
in his thirties, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. Occasionally, with great
politeness, he would ask diners to move tables or to shuffle up to make
room for another guest. He was, Milena later told me, one of the leaders of
the Delije. Older fans, some barely able to walk unassisted, were invariably
treated with great deference. It took me a while to work out why everything
felt familiar, but then I realised that the scene was a staple of gangster films,
the extended mafia family coming together over dinner.
The day before, after a press conference at the Marakana, I chatted briefly
to the doorman, whom everybody knew by the nickname Mile Šnuta. He
was probably only in his sixties, but he looked older, his face yellow and
wizened. ‘I was one of the chant-leaders,’ he told me, his voice scarcely
more than a croak. ‘Everywhere Red Star went, I went too. But now my
heart is too weak, so my doctors have told me I cannot go to games,
because I get very excited.’ I asked if he would watch the derby on
television. ‘No,’ he said, smiling toothlessly. ‘I will be in the stand if it kills
me. To die for Red Star would be an honour.’
I later learned it was the Delije that got him his job. That afternoon I met a
younger fan, his legs twisted horribly inwards, who propelled himself on a
pair of sticks. The Delije, he told me, helped him out, even took him to the
odd away game. They may be violent and anarchic, but the Delije are also a
community. Milena and Ljiljana both have tales to tell of how the Delije
have spirited them away from trouble. They look after their own, and their
own are often those members of society least able to look after themselves:
from that point of view, their appeal is obvious.
Red Star were founded at Belgrade University in 1945. So impoverished
were they that they might never have got off the ground had Obili and FK
Slavija not donated footballs they’d protected through the war. In their first
game Red Star beat a Yugoslav army team 3–2 in front of a crowd of over
3,000, and, as they embarked on a twenty-match unbeaten run, they
gathered a devoted following. ‘These guys,’ the Delije’s website says, ‘had
something special, because they represented the very soul of our capital.
Mostly they were rough guys or bohemians, young Belgradians who did not
like the army or the Communist system, which had already begun to rot.’
The claim bears a degree of self-serving revisionism – it is scarcely credible
that a team founded by Communists and whose very name is a Communist
symbol should have harboured a significant anti-Communist support – but,
even allowing for that, Red Star have always been a club for the poor and
the disaffected, and thus for anti-Titoist and anti-federalist feeling.
By the seventies, thousands of fans would gather on match days in central
Belgrade, before marching to their home on the North Stand – the
‘Epicentre of Craziness’, as a famous graffito dubbed it. ‘If, by chance,’ the
website says, ‘they met opposing fans, clashes were inevitable.’ Seizing the
banners of rival groups became such a common practice that legislation was
passed outlawing flags above a certain size. Mocking the humble origins of
most of Red Star’s support, opposing fans taunted them with chants of
‘Gypsies’, a term that was swiftly appropriated. ‘We are Gypsies,’ they
would return. ‘We are the strongest’. In the eighties, as attendances and
ethnic tension boomed, Red Star’s support split into two major groups – the
Ultras, who were concerned mainly with choreographing displays of flags,
and the Red Devils, who ‘adopted Serbian habits mixed with English
habits’, as the website puts it: ‘drinking to death, beating rivals and
consuming marijuana’. As with their English counterparts, the general
violent nihilism coexisted with an extreme right-wing philosophy. Red
Star’s fans, though, always insisted on their independence from any
political body, stressing that the people they really hated were fans of
Partizan. Similar groups in Croatia, by contrast, allied themselves to Franjo
Tudjman’s ultra-nationalist Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) party.
The rivalry with Partizan extends even into international fixtures. I went
to see Yugoslavia play Finland at the Marakana in one of their final games
before they ditched the pretence and became Serbia-Montenegro in
February 2003. Four days earlier Yugoslavia had earned a surprising draw
against Italy in Naples, but there was little of the optimism I had expected.
Red Star fans, wearing their club shirts and occupying the North Stand as
they would for a league game, jeered the Yugoslav anthem, chanted ‘Serbia,
not Yugoslavia’ and sang Serbian folk songs. When the former Partizan
forward Mateja Kežman — a particular hate figure for Red Star, having
scored against them in each of the five Belgrade derbies in which he played
– misplaced an attempted backheel, he was mercilessly jeered, and faded
from the game. It was as though the match itself – which, after an iffy first
half, Yugoslavia won 2—0 – was an irrelevance, merely a stage on which
Red Star fans could express their continuing commitment to Serbian
nationalism, while at the same time deriding the wishy-washy federalism of
Partizan.
Such has been the victory of nationalism that Partizan, these days, is a
club in search of a role. Named after the guerrillas with whom Tito battled
Nazi occupation, in Communist times they were the team of the army, and
so represented everything hard-line Serb nationalists opposed. To start with,
Tito was half Croat, half Slovene, born in Kumrovec, Croatia, and his
Partizans, as well as battling German forces in the Second World War, also
clashed with the Chetniks – right-wing Serb guerrillas. After the war, with
Tito in power, the army, quite aside from symbolically representing the
federal ideal of Yugoslavia, suppressed the Serb Orthodox Church, pictures
of whose saints Red Star fans took to brandishing at matches in the eighties.
Partizan’s black-and-white colours are even the result of a decision taken by
Tudjman during his unlikely stint as club president in the late fifties. It is
too simplistic, though, merely to define Red Star as a Serb team. The side of
1991 contained several non-Serbs: Robert Prosine ki was a Croat, Refik
Šabanadževi a Bosnian Muslim, Marovi and Savi evi Montenegrins, Ilija
Najdoski and Darko Pan ev from Macedonia FYR. That said, in the famous
photograph of the Red Star players celebrating their victory on the running
track in Bari, it is noticeable that while eight players are clearly extending
the two-fingers-and-a-thumb Serb salute – signifying the Trinity and
affiliation to the Serb Orthodox Church and, by extension, Serbia itself –
Prosine ki, pointedly, is not.
At another time their victory might have galvanised federalist feeling, but
in May 1991 the cracks in Yugoslavia were so wide as to be irreparable. It
is debatable at what point war became unavoidable, but it was arguably
from the moment of Tito’s death in May 1980. The Albanian Communist
Mahmet Bekalli, for instance, wrote of his funeral, ‘Little did we know we
were also burying Yugoslavia.’ Certainly by 1988 preparations were at an
advanced stage. In August that year I went on holiday with my parents to
Žabljak, a dusty village high in the mountains on the Montenegro—Bosnìa
border. We were supposed to make our return to the airport at Budva Tivat,
seven hours away on the Adriatic coast, by bus, but the fan belt broke,
leaving us frantically to arrange a taxi. Behind schedule, the driver raced
along a series of side roads, and we seemed to be back on track when we
turned a corner and came upon a military roadblock. I was only twelve at
the time and so my memories are perhaps not to be relied upon, but my
parents confirm a long conversation took place between the driver and a tall
figure in a greatcoat (given it was August this detail seems unlikely, but I
suppose we were high up). He eventually let us pass and for several miles
we drove through what was clearly a military training area. Most striking –
and again I’ve checked this with my parents – was the sight of a group of
soldiers with bazookas propped on their shoulders. When we at last reached
a checkpoint at the far end of the valley, the driver turned to us and
explained, ‘They are getting ready for the war.’ It seems bizarre – an
indication, I would suggest, of how underplayed the situation was in the
Western media – but the next year we happily went back to Bohinj in
Slovenia, and, two years after that, were booked to go to Rogla near
Maribor.
By 1991, Slovenia and Croatia had both declared themselves to be
sovereign states and announced their intention of declaring independence,
while Serbs in Krajina, an area of Croatia with a Serb majority, had begun
their rebellion. Tensions were such that on 16 March Slobodan Miloševi
admitted, ‘Yugoslavia is finished.’ The first casualties of the war fell on 31
March as Croat troops clashed with Serb militia, to the horror of a large
group of Italian tourists, in Plitvi e National Park. In April, between the two
legs of Red Star’s semi-final victory over Bayern, a group of extreme Croat
nationalists fired three Ambrust missiles into Borovo Selo, a village near
Vukovar, and, at the beginning of May, twelve Croatian policemen were
killed and twenty wounded in a failed attempt to free two colleagues
captured in a senseless earlier raid on the town. The European Cup was won
on 29 May; within a month, Slovenia had declared independence and the
federal Yugoslavia was dead.
Prosine ki, asked about the wider context of Red Star’s victory, was
uncomfortable and defensive, insisting that the players were focused simply
on the football. ‘We had a great generation,’ he said. ‘Politics has nothing to
do with it. I can’t talk about things I haven’t felt. Perhaps there were some
at the club who thought that way, but I really don’t know about it.
Sportsmen are people who aren’t preoccupied with politics.’ Maybe so, but
he was the only member of the side who did not return to Belgrade in 2001
for celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the victory in Bari, citing prior
commitments.
Politics, anyway, cannot be so easily separated from sport. Seven months
after the victory, the nationalism hinted at by the salutes in Bari was shown
undisguised in the Marakana as Red Star celebrated victory in the
Intercontinental Cup. By then Slovenia was officially independent, Vukovar
had fallen to the Serbs after weeks of bombardment and the siege of
Dubrovnik had begun. That August, when the Krajina Serbs had taken the
Croatian town of Kijevo and instigated the first act of ethnic cleansing of
the war, General Milan Marti , the head of their police force, had
symbolically ripped down a signpost in Latin script; at the Marakana, after
the victory over Colo Colo of Chile, the crowd were brought to a frenzy by
Arkan, the head of their fan club, similarly brandishing a street sign he had
stolen in Croatia. In that act, redolent both of a general displaying the
standard of a vanquished enemy and of a hooligan showing off the colours
of a rival fan he has beaten, football’s part in the Balkan horrors is laid bare.
In the eyes of the Delije, it was they who fought the war’s first battle,
during a league game against Dinamo Zagreb. Dinamo’s ultras, the Bad
Blue Boys (BBB), seem to agree. Outside the Maksimir Stadium in Zagreb
there is a statue of a group of soldiers, and on its plinth is written: ‘To the
fans of this club, who started the war with Serbia at this ground on 13 May
1990.’ Tudjman, as leader of the HDZ, had been elected president of
Croatia on a nationalist ticket a fortnight earlier. His use of the šahovnica,
the red-and-white chequer-board emblem that had been a symbol of the
Ustaše, the Croatian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis and
slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs during the Second World War,
seemed deliberately provocative. Unsettled Serbs could hardly have been
encouraged when he commented, ‘Thank God my wife is not a Jew or a
Serb.’ As Croatia simmered with nationalist fervour, Tudjman invited back
several emigré Croats, many of whom Serbs considered war criminals, and
vowed to lead the republic to independence. When a Serbian team whose
fans were themselves avowedly nationalist went to play against a team
whose fans had pledged allegiance to the HDZ, violence was unavoidable.
There are as many different accounts of the subsequent battle at the
Maksimir as there were people there, but what seems clear is that the
conflict was to a large degree premeditated. Rocks had been stockpiled,
while fans used acid to burn away security fences. The Delije, it is said,
even brought huge numbers of Belgrade licence plates with them and fixed
them over the Zagreb plates on local cars, tricking the BBB into attacking
Croatian vehicles. Zvonimir Boban, the Dinamo captain who went on to
play for AC Milan, became a national hero in Croatia by launching a flying
kick at a policeman who was beating a Dinamo fan, while Red Star players
had to be rescued from the rioting by police helicopters. In all, seventy-nine
police officers and fifty-nine fans were injured that day, and hundreds were
arrested. Among them, one name stood out: Arkan.
Arkan – or Željko Ražnatovi , to give him his original name – was the son
of a colonel in Tito’s air force, but he soon rebelled, dividing his time
between studying at catering college and purse-snatching in Kalemegdan
Park. When he was seventeen he was arrested for the first time and
sentenced to three years in a juvenile detention centre. It seems that when
he was released, his father, in an attempt to straighten him out, put him in
touch with contacts in the Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA). Arkan,
though, moved to western Europe and took up a career as a bank robber. He
was jailed in Belgium in 1974, but escaped; he was jailed in Holland in
1979, but escaped; and he was held in a prison hospital in West Germany
after being wounded in a raid, but escaped. Insouciant and seemingly
unimprisonable, he became an almost mythic figure, on one celebrated
occasion strolling into a courtroom in Sweden where an associate of his was
on trial and securing his release by pointing a gun at the judge. It now
seems likely that he was at least in part aided by the UDBA, by whom he
was probably employed as a hit man. It wasn’t just his slipperiness that
made his name, though. Where other gangsters revelled in excess, Arkan
was noted for his abstemiousness. One story has him standing by an open
window going through his exercise regime while behind him his associates
celebrated a successful raid with whisky, cigars and prostitutes. Then, in
1986, he returned to Belgrade, opened a patisserie just over the road from
the Marakana, bought a pink Cadillac and began working more overtly for
the UDBA.
That was also the year in which members of the Serbian Academy of
Sciences and Arts published their memorandum expressing discontent at the
Serbs’ position within the Yugoslav constitution, and the year in which
Slobodan Miloševi became leader of the Serbian Communist Party. The
following year, after a riot among Serbs in Kosovo had alerted him to the
political capital to be made from nationalism, Miloševi replaced Ivan
Stamboli as president of Serbia. Red Star fans, who had taken to holding
aloft pictures of the dissident novelist Vuk Draškovi , leader of the Serb
Renewal party, were largely supportive of his right-wing agenda, but
Miloševi knew their anarchic passions could soon turn against him – as,
eventually, they did. Accordingly, he asked Arkan to take them in hand.
‘We trained fans without weapons,’ Arkan said. ‘I insisted on discipline
from the very beginning. You know our fans – they’re noisy, they like to
drink, to joke about. I stopped all that in one go. I made them cut their hair,
shave regularly, not drink. And so it began, the way it should be.’ Under his
tutelage, the Gypsies became the ‘Delije’ – the ‘Strong Ones’ or ‘Heroes’.
They had been one of the most feared hooligan firms in Europe, but under
Arkan the Delije became something more sinister, as he drew from their
ranks to form his Tigers. Weeks after the victory in Bari – when there was
‘choreography Europe will never forget’, as one fan told me – the Tigers,
chanting the songs they had sung from the North Stand, marched to the
front. They were there in Vukovar in 1991, when hundreds of Croat patients
were herded from a hospital, packed into trucks and shot in a field, and they
were there too the following year in Bijeljina, killing Muslims or chasing
them from their homes at the onset of the conflict in Bosnia.
When the Croat counter-offensive began in 1995, Arkan was back in
Belgrade with his new wife, the pop star Ceca, whom he had met in
October 1993 at a celebration to mark the third anniversary of the formation
of the Tigers. (Their wedding was an orgy of kitsch on the theme of the
1389 Battle of Kosovo, Arkan dressing as a warrior and Ceca as one of the
women who had tended the injured. He rode up to her parents’ house on a
white charger and, as was customary in the fourteenth century, was asked
by her father to prove his worthiness by shooting an apple off the top of the
door with a crossbow. His first effort missed, as did his second, and his
third, so, before it got too embarrassing, he nodded to his henchmen, who
blew it to pulp with Kalashnikovs.) Arkan watched on television as the
Croats retook land he had helped conquer, and, if legend is to be believed,
was so enraged that he donned his uniform again and made a phone call to
the Delije. Within half an hour, his Tigers had gathered outside the
Marakana, ready to return to war. In Bosnia, there were more atrocities. It
became not simply about land, but also about financial gain. It was said that
you could always recognise the Tigers because they had soil under their
nails from digging in the gardens of houses they had looted, looking for
hidden jewellery. The war made Arkan notorious, but it also made him rich.
Arkan built a house near the Marakana, and tried to take over Red Star,
but the club’s then president, Dragan Dzajic, rebuffed him. So, in 1996,
Arkan took charge of Obili , one of Belgrade’s oldest clubs, but not one of
its most successful. The attraction to him, though, is obvious. Obili are
named after Miloš Obili , the knight who supposedly killed the Turkish
sultan Murad at Kosovo. The defeat suffered at the hands of the Ottoman
Empire then remains central to the Serbian psyche: they are the wrongly
oppressed but glorious losers. What better for Arkan than to cast himself as
a latter-day Obili , scourge of the infidel.
Obili ’s rise was astonishing. Promoted in 1996–97, they lost just one
game the following season to win the first championship in their history.
They might have won a second the following year, having gone twenty-four
games unbeaten from the start of the season, but the league was suspended
on 14 May when the NATO bombing began. This was not, though, anything
like the rags-to-riches fairy tale the club likes to present.
Referees arriving at the Obili stadium would be greeted by heavies in
fatigues, opposing players would mysteriously withdraw hours before
matches, and the Tigers, many carrying guns, packed the terraces, a visible
warning to any team tempted to try too hard. And then there were the
rumours that sedative gases were pumped into the away changing room
before kick-off; implausible perhaps, but taken seriously enough that when
Red Star played there, they changed in the car park. And even if there were
no gas, there was always the possibility that Arkan might pay a visit to the
away dressing room at half time. On one occasion, according to a common
tale, he threatened to shoot an opposing centre-forward in the knee if he
scored in the second half.
 Thanks to such shenanigans, and an admittedly impressive defence, Obili
approached their final game of the season two points clear of Red Star at
the top of the table. Both faced away games against sides threatened with
relegation, Red Star at Železnik and Obili at Proleter. A few days before
the games, Železnik’s president Juša Buli was shot in a Belgrade bar in
what appeared to be an underworld hit. Suitably encouraged, Železnik won
2–1. Obili ’s game, curiously, started slightly late. They led 1–0 when the
news came through that Red Star had been beaten, meaning they only
needed a draw for the title. Proleter promptly equalised, and so got the point
they needed to avoid a relegation play-off.
UEFA, though, weren’t keen on the idea of an indicted war criminal
leading a team in the Champions League, so Arkan stood down as
president, allowing his wife to take over. He remained in an advisory
capacity until January 2000, when he was shot thirty-eight times in the
chest as he sat drinking a coffee outside the Intercontinental Hotel in
Belgrade. His killers have never been caught, and theories abound as to
why he was assassinated. Some say his murder was ordered by Miloševi ’s
son, Marko, jealous of Arkan’s stranglehold over the black market; some
say it was the secret police, afraid of what he might reveal if he ever
reached the Hague for questioning; some say it was a simple gangland turf
war; there are others, though, romantics perhaps, who suggest that his
partners at Obili were resentful of how much money he siphoned from the
club, and that, in the end, it was football that destroyed him.
Arkan’s legacy lives on in the cosmetically enhanced figure of Ceca. I
went to Belgrade in the summer of 2003 having made preliminary
arrangements to interview her. Unfortunately, she was unavailable, having
been arrested in connection with the assassination of the Serbian prime
minister Zoran Djindji a few weeks earlier. As excuses for skipping
interviews go, being in solitary confinement is pretty much beyond
reproach. From the VIP lounge in the main stand at the Obili stadium,
looking out over the trees that line the street behind the other stand, I could
see the red roof of the prison where she was being held, but that was as
close as I got. Instead I ended up interviewing Bini , her acting president,
but, forthcoming as he was on himself, he was reluctant to discuss either
Ceca or anything to do with the club’s recent past.
 We met in her office, on the wall of which were three framed
photographs: one of the 1997–98 championship-winning team, one of Ceca
in concert in front of a 100,000 crowd at the Marakana, and one of Arkan,
in full combat gear, emerging from billowing smoke and firing a machine-
pistol into the air. Down in the lobby, there was still a bronze bust of Arkan,
standing alongside a plastic model of the proposed redevelopment of their
stadium. The two long stands, all stainless steel and blue plastic, have
already been built, and are hugely impressive, but as Obili ’s average home
gate is under 2,000, they are also largely pointless. Given finances at the
club are such that they took a decision in 2003 only to field Under-21
players, it is highly unlikely that the project will ever be completed, and so
the half-finished stadium will remain as a monument to the madness of the
1998 league title.
Whether or not it was football that did for Arkan, it was not long after his
death that it turned against Miloševi . Otpor, the student opposition group,
and the NATO bombing certainly played their parts, but, as far as the Delije
are concerned, it was they who led the internal opposition, they who
enacted Serbia’s anti-Communist revolution. Defeat in Bosnia and the
hardships brought about by sanctions and the NATO bombing had hardened
feeling against Miloševi , but, beyond a few student demonstrations, fear
kept outright public dissent in check, until 26 July 2000 when Red Star
played Torpedo Kutaisi of Georgia in the second qualifying round of the
Champions League.
‘I was there,’ Ljiljana told me. ‘What happened was unbelievable. You
have to understand that before that day, even if we didn’t like Miloševi , we
wouldn’t dare say that.’ As Red Star romped to a 4–0 win, the Delije
shouted, ‘Do Serbia a favour, Slobodan, and kill yourself’ – a taunt with a
particular barb given the history of suicide in Miloševi ’s family. The police
weighed in, but the Delije fought back. A Red Star banner was seized, and
two policemen trampled on it. As they did so, though, they were
approached by the Red Star coach, Slavoljub Muslin, who persuaded them
to give him the flag, and threw it back over the restraining hedge and into
the crowd. Symbolically, Muslin, and thus Red Star, were seen to have
joined the protest.
Dissent spread to other stadia. Virtually every game became an anti-
Miloševi rally. On 24 September, Miloševi suffered a humiliating election
defeat to Vojislav Koštunica. Still he tried to cling to power, first
demanding a second round of voting, and then securing through the courts
an annulment of the election. This time, though, the movement against him
was too strong. There was a general strike. Pockets of protest began to
spring up across Serbia. In a ak, sixty miles south of Belgrade, Mayor
Velja Ilji , a hard-line Miloševi critic, gathered opponents of the regime
and marched on the capital. By the time his column, a bulldozer at its head,
reached Belgrade, it was 10,000 strong. Once there, Ilji ’s forces were
joined by Otpor and the Delije. Chanting ‘Do Serbia a favour, Slobodan,
and kill yourself’, they smashed down the doors of the state television
station, and set the building on fire. ‘We were sick of watching state
television,’ said Ilji . ‘We got fed up with living in Miloševi ’s Serbia. I
planned it all with my mates. It was a ak’s humble contribution. We got
sick of the way the opposition was going. It was useless. We’d march,
criticise Miloševi and then everybody went home and he was still there.
We decided, “We are men, let’s do it.”’
And so the crowd moved on to the parliament, which by then had been
ringed by police. The chanting continued, and tear gas was fired. The
Delije, though, were used to clashing with police, and, despite Ilji ’s appeals
for calm, refused to be dispersed. The police line broken, the protesters
surged into the building, ransacking it as they looked for evidence that
Miloševi had attempted to rig the elections. It didn’t take long to find, and
soon the air outside was filled with ballot papers, each marked with a cross
next to Miloševi ’s name. Studio B, once an independent channel that had
been turned into a propaganda outlet for the government, went off air, only
to return a little later as its old self, referring to Koštunica as the elected
president. Shortly after, Koštunica appeared before the parliament, and
began his address to the rebels with the words: ‘Good evening, liberated
Serbia.’
A week later Red Star faced Partizan at the Marakana. It could have been
a day of glorious celebration in which rivals put aside their differences and
recognised the contribution each had made in dethroning a tyrant – several
Partizan fans had played a prominent role in the storming of the parliament
– but it became a riot. Partizan’s then chairman was Mirko Marjanovi , the
Serbian president and a close ally of Miloševi . In the eyes of Red Star fans,
they were facing the same enemy they had overthrown a week earlier. The
banners in the North Stand made their feelings clear. ‘Mirko to jail; Partizan
to the second division’, said one; ‘The sun of freedom rises on our victory’,
read another.
Before kick-off, chants went up from the Partizan end calling for the
resignation of Marjanovi and his cronies. Gradually the protests became
more violent, and seats and fireworks were thrown at police, who also in
some way represented the old guard, and who had, after all, for several
months brutally suppressed dissent. Three minutes into the game, Red Star
fans, angered by the destruction of their stadium, charged. As hundreds of
fans poured on to the pitch, even the players became involved in scuffles.
The journalist Dejan Nikoli was in the North Stand that day. ‘The surge
was immense and there was no point trying to fight against it,’ he wrote.
‘You had a choice: either run with the crowd or be trampled on by several
hundred fans. All around people were losing their balance and disappearing
under the stampeding crowd. One fan said to me, “They were never in the
front line during any of the demonstrations. They never fought with the
police – at least not while wearing the Partizan colours. Now suddenly here
they are, claiming all the credit – we’ll not let them do that.”’
Two years later, the atmosphere was calmer, but not much. As Red Star
fans were herded through the city from the Marakana to their tribune at the
Partizan Stadium, they were pelted with coins, but nobody seemed too
bothered. That was just what happened at derbies. Just behind the away end
is a small, almost quaint, church, surrounded by the cemetery from which
the Partizan fans took their name, ‘Grobari’ – ‘Gravediggers’. The group
was officially shut down several years ago after an incident in which a
rocket fired from the home end killed an eight-year-old Red Star fan – the
Delije continue to leave his seat empty – but several banners in and around
the ground still bear the Grobari name.
There were checkpoints and searches every few yards on the approaches
to the Partizan Stadium (so thorough that I had a packet of Lemsip capsules
confiscated), but fans still managed to smuggle hundreds of flares into the
ground. Up in the press box, a rickety wooden structure perched like a
pigeon loft on the top of the main stand, though, it all felt very safe, mainly
because there was nobody anywhere near me. Away to the left, Red Star
fans held up large sheets of red card, to the right Partizan fans twirled black
bin liners above their heads, for the derby, of course, is not just about
fighting, but also about choreography. Immediately below me, though, the
stand was virtually empty. There was a scattering of red-and-white shirts
and a scattering of black-and-white, but they paid each other little attention.
The hostility, it appeared, was reserved for those who wanted it. Police
ringed each end, but despite the occasional scuffles and the showers of
flares, they made no effort to intervene. The reasoning seemed to be that
those who go in the ends surrender themselves to the ends. Serious trouble,
indeed, broke out in a UEFA Cup-tie between Red Star and Chievo in 2002
when police broke the unwritten rule and entered the North Stand at the
Marakana.
Straddling the fence at the front of the Red Star fans, I saw Petja, a Delije
member I had met the day before. His response to my question about why
he supported Red Star led me, not for the first time, to wonder if the
ideology were not all a bit of an excuse. (Miloševi used nationalism to
retain political power; Arkan used it to make money; the Delije use it to
give a logic to the violent assertion of their identity as Red Star fans.) ‘We
are normal people,’ Petja said. ‘We are students or people who go to work.
Partizan fans are cattle or geese.’ There is a sense in which you just are red-
and-white or black-and-white. Without exception, every player to whom I
spoke insisted he had been a lifelong fan of the club for which he played.
This is a common enough claim the world over, of course, but given that
only seven players have played for both clubs, it has more credence in
Belgrade than most places. It helped that at the time every player was a
Yugoslav, but even those who were born far from Belgrade supported one
or the other. The then Red Star forwards Mihjalo Pjanovi and Branko
Boškovi both insisted they would rather not play football at all than play
for Partizan. ‘From the youngest age you choose Red Star or Partizan even
if you are not from Belgrade,’ said Pjanovi , who is from Prijepolje. ‘I
remember coming to the European Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich
in 1991. I had relatives we came and stayed with in Belgrade, so I first
came to a game when I was very young.’ Boškovi is from even further
away. ‘Red Star is like Manchester United,’ he said. ‘You choose at a very
early age to support them. I lived in Montenegro so it was too far to come to
games when I was younger, but I was a Red Star fan.’
There is a TV studio in the Marakana, but the Partizan captain Saša Ili
has vowed never to do any interviews there, insisting the cameras come to
him, while Ljubisa Tumbakovi , who coached Partizan to six league titles in
the nineties, hated Red Star so much that he once hurled a cup of coffee
across a restaurant because it was served with a red spoon.
The day before that game, which ended 2–2, I met Red Star’s marketing
manager, the frighteningly ebullient Zoran Avramovi . 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. ‘The smaller sides have to build their
schools and try to catch us up. These days people go home from work on a
Friday, they sit in a chair and drink a beer, and over the weekend they can
watch seven or eight games from across Europe on their televisions, free of
charge. But if our league is competitive, people will want to watch that.’
In the financial problems that struck the larger Western leagues in the
earliest years of the twenty-first century, though, he saw hope. ‘How can we
develop if we keep on selling our stars?’ he said. ‘At Red Star we have
worked on creating a stable financial situation so we do not have to sell our
players, and because there are not so many transfers in England and Spain
and Italy at the moment, we can hold on to them for two or three additional
years. But still, a time will come when a player is offered ten, twenty, fifty
times what we can offer, and then we cannot expect players to stay,
however much they love Belgrade. We have been through a difficult spell.
It has taken everybody a long time to adjust, and the gap is still huge, but
perhaps now at last there is a little hope.’ Avramovi is a man who would
talk excitedly about the future even as the noose was slipped around his
neck, but there is perhaps a suggestion that things are improving.
For much of the nineties, Serbia was a gangster economy, dominated to
such a degree by Arkan that Belgrade’s major shopping centre was known
jokingly as Arkansas. Not surprisingly, football was similarly dominated by
organised crime taking advantage of the system of so-called ‘private
contracts’ which were finally outlawed in 2001. The arrangement, by which
individuals owned players and paid their wages, leasing them to clubs in the
hope of being able to sell them abroad at a profit, initially suited everyone.
Players enjoyed more benefits and better conditions than the clubs could
have offered them, the clubs were relieved of the financial burden of
satisfying top players, and the FSJ saw young Yugoslav talent stay in the
country longer before departing for bigger wages abroad. And then
organised crime took over.
I have spoken to several players about the issue; all of them asked me not
to name them. For some, the injustice was simply financial; one player, for
instance, discovered his agent-cum-owner was taking 80 per cent of his
salary. The testimonies of others told of an all-pervading corruption. ‘I was
in a youth squad of Partizan when I signed a private contract,’ one player
said. ‘I needed to play somewhere else because, being realistic, I knew I
had no chance next to the great generation of players that emerged at the
club at the time. I just wanted a chance to play first-team football, so I
signed a contract that guaranteed no money or other payments to me, but
only an agreement from my new manager, who was a respectable
businessman, that he would find me a club where I would be able to play.
He arranged for me to move to a smaller club, but soon he fell out with the
club officials and he gave up on me. A powerful local figure picked up my
contract from him. Then it became messy. He first arranged for me to be
loaned to a minor league team. He just told me over the phone that I had to
pack my things and go two hundred kilometres from Belgrade the next
morning. I was to play twelve games and then return to my club. The two
best players from that little team went the other way.
‘I was the great hope for that club in a fight for survival. I played one
game, scored twice and then my manager called and told me that I had to
get injured. I tried to tell him that I was doing all right but he just said that I
had to think of a way to get on the injury list or he would put me on it.
What could I have done? I faked stomach troubles and got myself off the
team. They lost three consecutive games and became certain to be
relegated.’
Another, a young goalkeeper, admitted that he had been lured in by
thoughts of the high life. ‘My father’s friend saw me playing at school and
suggested that he would try to get me a trial with a big club from Belgrade,’
he said. ‘My father and I signed a contract, and in return I got a mobile
telephone and a place of my own. My manager was to receive 20 per cent
of my salary at the club as well as 15 per cent of the fee from any transfer
that occurred in the following five years. Although I wasn’t in the first
team, I was considered to be talented and had special training with a
goalkeeper’s coach. After a while I was loaned to a smaller second division
club. I was told that it was necessary for me to gain experience.
‘But one day, my manager called and said that I had to do something for
him that would mean a lot to my career. I had to concede four goals in a
game that had no meaning for the other club, but was very important to us.
Those three points could have proved decisive in a race for promotion to the
first division. I objected, and knowing that he was my father’s friend, I was
pretty sure that nothing bad would happen. The day before the game, he
called and asked me to return to Belgrade to discuss my decision. I agreed,
and went to the house where he had told me to meet him. He was not there
but there were four men who told me they were his friends and that he
would arrive shortly. I was kept there for two days but my manager never
showed up. I missed the game, which we lost 4–1. When I returned to the
club no one asked me where I had been. They acted as if nothing had
happened. My manager called me the day after and told me that the next
time I had better do what he asked voluntarily. I really wanted to get back to
Belgrade and play in the big league, so I obeyed. During the next season, he
asked similar favours from me several times.’
Private contracts may have been outlawed, but the underlying problem
they initially addressed remains. ‘Red Star and Partizan are not what they
used to be,’ Katanec explained. ‘They can’t be what they used to be,
because as soon as they produce a decent player, he thinks, “Great, off we
go,” They have to take the millions that they’re being offered. And they
aren’t the worst off; other clubs have to sell for even less, and when you
start selling your boys for extremely small amounts of money, it’s a dead
end.’
This, of course, is an issue throughout eastern Europe. The problem is not
just that the domestic league is weakened when young talents leave,
lowering attendances and thus advertising and sponsorship potential, but
also that the players themselves, elevated too soon and thrust into an alien
environment, find their own development impaired. There are those who
have succeeded: Dejan Stankovi was nineteen when he left Red Star for
Lazio, for instance, and became a regular almost immediately, but for every
player like him, there are dozens who fail. ‘I played well in my first season
at Lazio because I was euphoric,’ Stankovi explained, ‘but I struggled for
the next two seasons. It’s very different to Serbia, because you have to sort
yourself out. Nobody asks how you are, or pushes you to train harder.’
Stankovi speaks as a genuinely top-class player, but a significant number
of those who are traded are simply not top class, and many deals are done
for the benefit of the agent rather than the player, even after the abolition of
private contracts. I inadvertently became involved in blocking one such deal
in 2003, when an official from the Ukrainian club Karpaty Lviv asked me
what I knew of three players his club were considering signing from OFK
Belgrade. Karpaty were under the impression that all three were first-team
players, but when I asked Milena to check, she replied that only one had
ever featured in a senior game.
In Communist times, players were forbidden to move abroad until they
were twenty-eight, a system pretty much everybody I’ve spoken to in
eastern Europe – players excepted, of course – would like to see
reintroduced in some form. ‘The small countries have to find a mechanism
to stop all this talent from flying away and instead concentrate the quality of
the area in their own league,’ said Katanec. ‘How do we do that? Either by
having rules that are strong enough to stop the kids from going away, or by
having sponsors who are rich enough to keep them. But I’m speaking
hypothetically. The EU, FIFA and UEFA would immediately come in and
say we couldn’t have such a rule, and sponsors here simply can’t compete
with sponsors from the big countries.’
The market has such countries as Serbia trapped in a vicious circle.
Players leave to make more money, making their league less attractive,
making it harder to raise funds to keep other players. Yet Avramovi ’s
optimism is perhaps not entirely misplaced. In 2004 Serbia-Montenegro
finished as runners-up in the European Under-21 Championship, and that
generation of players is generally recognised as the best from the region
since the majestic Yugoslavia team that won the World Youth Cup in Chile
in 1987. Players such as Simon Vukcevi , Boško Jankovi , Marko Perovi
and Dušan Basta augur well for the future of Serbian football, and, while
Vukcevi has certainly been distracted by the money he has been offered,
there at least seemed a general willingness on the part of their clubs to resist
the temptation to make a quick profit. Red Star, it was reported, turned
down a £4m offer for Jankovi from Porto. ‘Red Star need Boško Jankovi ,’
his coach Ratko Dostani explained. ‘We want to make a strong team
capable of competing in Europe. Every club depends on money received
from selling players, but we will not sell players we need. Every player,
Jankovi included, should think about winning trophies rather than about
transfers.’ Jankovi himself spoke of having plenty of time, of having more
to achieve in the red-and-white shirt.
Noble sentiments, for sure, and Red Star is a club with an exceptional
emotional pull, but Serbia has been holding a fire sale since 1990. Even if
the exodus is slowing down, clubs and players, no matter how great their
mutual affection, never resist the market for long. It says much, anyway, for
the decline that fourteen years after winning the European Cup Red Star
were celebrating simply because a young player had decided to stay with
them for another season.

ii Slovenia
In one chair Sre ko Katanec slumped, his tie still neatly positioned over his
top button, but his face betraying his exhaustion. In the other sat Rok
Tamše, a bright-eyed TV interviewer in a rumpled brown shirt. Slovenia
had just lost their first game of the 2002 World Cup 3–1 to Spain in Jeju,
and Tamše was clearly anticipating difficulty drawing post-match
comments from a man notorious for his disregard for the media. Katanec,
though, was not his usual prickly self. The interview began ordinarily
enough: how did he feel it had gone? What if the referee had given that
penalty for the trip on Sebastjan Cimeroti ? Was the penalty that Spain won
justified? With hindsight, though, in Katanec’s tired answers, there were
clues to what had really gone on. ‘We have two more games,’ he said, ‘and
then the cycle finishes …’ A careless phrase? An admission that Slovenia
would not get through the first round? Or an indication that he already knew
he was going to resign?
‘Certain players haven’t done anything in attack,’ he muttered a few
minutes later; an assault, surely, on Zlatko Zahovi , the great star of the
team, but Tamše let it pass unchallenged. And then, apparently accidentally,
Tamše asked a question that struck at the heart of the issue: ‘What is going
on behind the dressing-room door?’ Given the tenor of the rest of the
interview, it was probably meant as a simple what’s-the-mood-like inquiry,
but there was just a moment when Katanec clearly wondered if Tamše
knew, as he glanced sharply to his right, his features snapping from their
habitual droop into the hard profile of an Easter Island statue. ‘I will not be
talking about that,’ he said, ‘but in the next few days I will tell you what
happened behind the dressing-room doors after the game.’ An oddly
intriguing answer to a straight question, but Tamše failed to pursue it, and
went on to discuss the fact that the next game, against South Africa, would
be played during the heat of the afternoon.
Given the furore that followed, it is hard now to assess just how much
people did know at the time, but it seems probable that nobody had any
inkling that there was anything badly amiss. Slovenia had played
reasonably well, had been a little unlucky to lose 3-1, and, for all Katanec’s
pessimism, still had a realistic chance of reaching the second round.
Two days later, though, the news broke. I am fortunate that Aleš Selan,
once onefootball’s correspondent in Slovenia, chose to video every mention
of the incident on television in the hours that followed, creating through the
agonisingly fragmented detail of rolling news a comprehensive record of
Katanec’s final battle.
24ur, the main evening news programme of POPTV, Slovenia’s largest
commercial channel, began with footage of Zahovi being substituted
against Spain. ‘Shocking news from South Korea,’ came the headline,
‘where it is reported that there has been a row between Katanec and Zahovi
.’ The picture changed to show France Arhar, a former governor of the
Banka Slovenije: ‘France Arhar will run for office …’ The rupture was
deemed a bigger story than a senior politician announcing he would stand
for the presidency: a revealing set of priorities anywhere, but extraordinary
in Slovenia. For much of their history, they hadn’t been particularly good at
football, and hadn’t really seemed to care. They were a nation of skiers, and
football was something with which the southern republics (‘Bosnians’ as
they dismissively lumped them together) concerned themselves. By the
time of the World Cup, football was important enough for the president
Milan Ku an to write a letter urging the warring parties to find a peaceful
solution, having arranged to meet the players in their first official
engagement on their return.
Football has been hugely important in Slovenia’s self-definition as an
independent nation. Many probably still do confuse it with Slovakia, but far
fewer than did before Euro 2000. ‘The results were achieved at an
important time for our country,’ Katanec said. ‘We were adapting to Europe
and trying to get into the European Union. The football team was a way of
promoting the country. With the European Championship and the World
Cup, we qualified in the November, so there were six or seven months of
presentations about Slovenia on television all over the world. You can’t buy
that kind of advertising. When we arrived in South Korea, for instance, they
ran an hour-long film about our country, showing Lake Bled and all the
other gorgeous features. Imagine how much it would have cost if we’d had
to pay for it …’
Katanec is right to emphasise his achievement. This book has largely been
a tale of disappointment and decline, but Slovenia’s qualification for Euro
2000 and the World Cup two years later represented an intoxicating,
unimaginable success. In 1998, Katanec took over a side that had taken just
one point from eight games in failing to qualify for the France World Cup, a
dire record about which nobody was particularly bothered or surprised.
Aleš, the unacknowledged archivist of his world, has every match Slovenia
have ever played taped and neatly catalogued – where possible with both
Slovenian and English commentary – as well as the scenes of manic
jubilation at Ljubljana airport when Slovenia returned from Kyiv having
beaten Ukraine in the qualifying play-off for Euro 2000.
It is probably the first leg of that game that provided the greatest moment
in Slovenian football history. It is a goal I know well, because every time
I’ve been in the Loški, the bar over the road from Aleš’s house in Škofja
Loka, they’ve insisted on putting it on the big screen for me. The Ukraine
goalkeeper Oleksandr Shovkovskyi rushed from his goal towards the corner
flag to clear, but scuffed his kick, which was gathered by Milenko A imovi
just inside the Ukraine half. As Shovkovskyi, realising all too late what was
going on, hurtled back across his box, A imovi lofted the ball goalwards. It
pitched on the six-yard line and, a fraction ahead of Shovkovskyi, slithered
into the netting just inside the post. ‘David Beckham,’ roared Dave Farrar
on Eurosport, ‘where are you now?’ It has become the catchphrase of a
generation.
Only seven Slovenians ever played international football for Yugoslavia,
and it wasn’t until 1974 that Brane Oblak became the first Slovenian to play
at a World Cup. Even his call-up, he admitted, was probably politically
motivated: ‘There was a key, and it said there had to be one or two
Slovenians in the squad, two Montenegrins, five Croatians, ten Serbians, a
few Bosnians, but because I was good, I stayed in the team. If I’d been
rubbish, they’d have dropped me and called up another Slovenian. They had
to include one because that way everybody kept quiet and there’d be no
problems. That was just the way things were done in the old times.’
Such a system of quotas sounds in keeping with Tito’s general policy of
suppressing nationalism and promoting federalism wherever possible, but
Katanec, who came into the side a decade later, after Tito’s death, insisted
there was no such system in his day, and seemed doubtful there ever had
been one. ‘If you were crap, the coach wouldn’t just “use the key” and pick
another Slovenian,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that. Nobody would keep you
in the team of you weren’t of a high enough quality. Oblak played at the
same time as Danilo Popivoda, so that was two Slovenians in the national
team, and that’s because they were both top class. If there’d been more top-
class Slovenians I’m sure there’d have been three or four in the side.’
Whether there for quota reasons or not, Oblak made the most of his World
Cup opportunity, hitting the bar in Yugoslavia’s opener against Brazil with a
header so powerful it rebounded out of the box, and having a good enough
tournament to come fifth in the vote for player of the World Cup, behind the
illustrious quartet of Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Kazimierz Deyna
and Johan Neeskens. After drawing that opening game 0–0, Yugoslavia
hammered Zaire 9–0 – still the record margin of victory in the finals –
before a draw with Scotland saw them top their group on goal difference.
‘We’d prepared very hard for the game against Brazil,’ Oblak said, ‘which
cost us eventually because we hardly knew about anybody else, and also we
hadn’t sorted anything out regarding bonuses. When we qualified for the
second round, we wanted money. There was a dispute, and everything was
really in the balance …’
A Balkan side in dispute? So far, so familiar, but then Tito came to visit,
and solved the problem with typical verve. First he lightened the mood at
the official photoshoot by suggesting his wife Jovanka should join the
players kneeling in the front row (no translation can quite capture the crude
pithiness of the original: ‘Ajde Jovanka, u ni i ti’), then he suggested that
as the players were doing well, it might be an idea for them to be paid a
little extra. With Tito watching in Düsseldorf, though, Yugoslavia lost their
first game of the second group phase 2–0 to West Germany, which
effectively ended their hopes of a place in the final even before defeats to
Poland and Sweden. ‘You know how things are,’ Oblak explained. ‘You get
the money, somebody goes shopping …’
For all Tito’s efforts, ethnicity was always an issue. ‘Back then we had
some problems with the nationalities,’ Oblak said. ‘It was tough for me
because I didn’t know very well the differences between certain words in
the Serbian and Croatian languages, which are usually very similar. They
have slightly different words for “coffee” and for “soup”, for example, and I
didn’t know that. But they put up with me because I was a Janez [the
stereotypical Slovenian name is often used to denote a Slovenian], so they’d
just say “fuck it, he hasn’t a clue anyway”. Sometimes in the old national
team, though, watching Serbs and Croats deal with each other wasn’t pretty.
When we played well, these things wouldn’t happen, but if we didn’t play
well, it quickly showed.’
Slovenians may have been virtual bystanders in that dispute, but since
secession the relationship between the capital Ljubljana and the eastern
region of Styria has rapidly deteriorated. As so often, the ill-feeling
manifests itself most clearly in football, and clashes between fans of
Maribor, the main club of the Styria region, and Olimpija Ljubljana have
become commonplace. ‘You have to have rivalry,’ Oblak said. ‘And if there
isn’t any other way, you have to create it artificially. Now, though, perhaps
between Olimpija and Maribor it has gone too far.’ When I first went to the
Loški, it was frowned upon to drink Laško, the Styrian beer (nicknamed
‘Goat’ after their logo), rather than Union (from Ljubljana, nicknamed
‘Piss’). Now Laško, sponsors of Maribor, own both breweries.
For four years, though, Katanec held that rivalry at bay, and the Ljubljan
an with his Styrian playmaker performed minor miracles. And then Jeju. In
that first news bulletin, nothing was entirely clear. There were rumours that
the two had had to be pulled apart as they squared up to each other. It all
came to a head, it seemed, when, after sixty-three minutes, Katanec
replaced Zahovi with A imovi . The same clip was replayed over and over
again: Zahovi walking from the pitch, slapping hands with A imovi , and
then, out of focus in the background, kicking out at a bottle of water.
Katanec and Zahovi may have been the two architects of Slovenia’s
unexpected success, but they had never got on. Irrespective of the
Ljubljana–Styria issue, they were never likely to. Katanec was disciplined,
ascetic, a believer in the primacy of the team; as a player he had represented
the characteristic Slovenian virtues of solidity and industry (although both
his parents were Croatian). Zahovi , by contrast, was a free spirit,
technically gifted, individualistic. Both carried unhelpfully large egos.
POPTV turned to the usually forthright Oblak for his views. Recognising
that he was probably among the leading candidates to replace Katanec,
though, he trod what for him was a fine diplomatic line, concerned to
alienate neither Zahovi nor the Slovenian Football Federation (NZS). ‘We
know the first guy, and we know the second guy,’ he said. ‘I have worked
with both of them, and I have had problems with both of them.’ He
acknowledged, though, that the substitution was probably a mistake,
recalling a World Cup qualifier against Yugoslavia in which Zahovi had
done nothing all game and then scored the equaliser four minutes into
injury time.
At midnight Korean time, the NZS held a meeting to decide whether to
send Zahovi home, but, back in Slovenia, the exact nature of the dispute
remained unexplained. Katanec and Zahovi , the news went on, happy to
have some bona fide facts backed up with archive footage, had clashed
before, most notably in August 2000, when Katanec said in an interview
with the Slovenian sports paper Ekipa that Slovenia lacked a true leader, an
obvious dig at Zahovi , the leading goal-scorer, leading assist-maker and,
blatantly, best player, presumably designed to provoke him into working
harder at training. Zahovi , though, spoke of being ‘very hurt’, went into a
sulk and was dropped for a friendly against the Czech Republic. As insults
were traded through the media, the president of the NZS, Rudi Zavrl, forced
the two to get together and talk through their differences. That seemed to be
that as Slovenia went unbeaten through their qualifying campaign for the
2002 World Cup, but, when Zahovi was substituted against Ghana in
Slovenia’s final preparatory friendly, rather than making his way to the
bench, he stomped straight off to the dressing rooms.
At lunchtime on the third day after the game, the NZS finally announced
that Zahovi would not be sent home. ‘The incident was a big one, and went
over certain limits,’ Zavrl said, speaking on a crackling phone line from
Jeju. ‘Our decision is not meant to lessen the weight of the incident … The
rest of the players have accepted our decision with relief. That doesn’t mean
condoning what Zahovi did, but they want peace, to get prepared and to
train normally.’
It was only when Katanec then gave his press conference that it became
clear what the ‘incident’ was. ‘There were things going on during the
game,’ he said. ‘I was a “ljubljanska P …”’ – the Slovenian P-word is the
English C-word – I was subbing only Styrians and I should take another one
off so that another Ljubljan an could play. After the game I heard that I was
a prick of a coach and had been a prick of a player, and that he could buy
me, my house and my family …’ At that, he began to weep. ‘… and
Šmarna Gora [the mountain near Ljubljana where Katanec owned a house
and where he had taken the players for pre-tournament training] …’ A long
silence followed. ‘… So now you know what happened, but I am an
employee of the NZS and I will put everything I’ve got into this. I will
coach this team for I hope three or four more games and after that my story
is over. I’m sorry it had to end this way, but I guess that’s part of football.
Football gives you something, and it takes a little away. That’s it, but I’d
like to say something else. I’m terrified of Slovenia being so small and still
dividing itself into I don’t know what. I’m proud to be Slovenian, and I’m
proud my parents were Croatian, my father and my mother …’ At that, the
tears came more freely, and he stood up and left.
The players had been told not to discuss the incident with the media, but
Zahovi , wearing his Slovenia baseball cap backwards in a curiously banal
assertion of his rebellious nature, responded with an impromptu press
conference outside the training camp. ‘People who dig a hole for others
often end up falling in that hole themselves,’ he said – a Slovenian proverb
implying that Katanec had plotted to damage him, only to end up having to
resign himself. ‘Yes, there were hard words exchanged, but I never
mentioned his parents or their nationality. Šmarna Gora was mentioned and
he [Katanec] was mentioned. I’m sorry about that … it was wrong. This has
been going on a long time … he wanted to provoke my reaction from day
one of the preparations. Things were happening and I didn’t want to react,
even though I was having to listen to somebody putting me down every day.
It wasn’t only about me, but also about other players.’
Katanec, he alleged, had told A imovi that Glenn Hoddle had only signed
him for Tottenham for his own personal gain. There is, it must be stressed,
absolutely no suggestion that there was anything inappropriate about that
transfer, or even that Katanec believed there to be; the remark was
presumably intended to goad A imovi into greater effort.
‘He should stop competing with me and the thirty-two goals I’ve scored,’
Zahovi went on. ‘He should stop competing with my fame and he should
stop competing with the other players because we’ve been hugely important
in getting him where he is today. Nobody wants to take this away from him.
Yesterday there was a meeting, and I wanted to hear what the rest of the
players thought. They were very honest. They said that my reaction was not
appropriate and they didn’t agree with it, but they think I deserve more
respect from my coach … They wanted me to stay. That’s what he was
crying about … He wasn’t crying because he felt insulted …’
Eventually Zahovi came round to the game against Ghana, and one of the
least contrite apologies imaginable. ‘If he thinks I’m not in form,’ he said,
‘he should tell me and I’d be happy to sit on the bench, but when I’m on the
field, he shouldn’t underestimate me. The first time I miss one or two
passes he shouldn’t – I won’t mince words – say he will fuck my mother,
because he didn’t fuck my mother and he won’t fuck my mother. If he
wants to he can start talking to me … I’m apologising in public to return the
ball to his court.’
The ‘apology’, though, was in breach of the NZS’s stipulation that players
should not discuss the incident with the media, and so, finally, the decision
was taken to send Zahovi home. With him went all hope.
Slovenian TV news, unwilling to leave the story alone, but with time to
fill before Zahovi made his way to the airport, occupied themselves by
interviewing various fans. Most of those in South Korea spoke of a feeling
of having wasted their money in going to watch a team that was tearing
itself apart, while those at home tended to focus on the Ljubljana-Styria
divide. The Viole, the hard core of Maribor’s support, accused Zavrl of
simply backing the Ljubljan an horse. This was a familiar moan. That
Slovenia wear green and white – the colours of Olimpija Ljubljana – is
taken by the Viole as a deliberate slight, while there was anger that the NZS
had subsidised the Green Dragons, Olimpija’s Ultras, to go to South Korea.
‘We are always prepared to help organised fans,’ Zavrl replied. ‘The Green
Dragons asked us about a subsidy, and nobody else did.’
As Zahovi pushed his luggage through the airport, head bowed, eyes
radiating hurt, a microphone was shoved in his face. If the players really
were on his side, the reporter asked, why hadn’t they stuck with him until
the end. ‘They don’t have the guts,’ he said.
Slovenia proceeded to lose tamely to South Africa and Paraguay, and
returned to Ljubljana dispirited and disillusioned. The Zahovi incident,
Katanec claimed at his final press conference, had nothing to do with his
resignation, but ‘a new man’ was needed to ‘repair the squad’.
Katanec was so upset that the interview he gave for this book was only his
second in two and a half years that followed. ‘I look at it this way,’ he
explained. ‘Even in a family, where there are only two people, it often
happens that interests grow apart. When you are at the beginning of the
story, you have the same interests, but that doesn’t mean it will always be
like that. Two people get to know each other, they like each other and have
common interests. But as years go by, many realise that perhaps it wasn’t
meant to be. And just as these things happen between two people, they also
happen between twenty people and they can happen between two million
people.
‘So, it happened to us. It happened in basketball as well, but in terms of
media coverage, football is simply so much bigger that everything appears
bigger. Football is magical for people. It creates these emotions, this huge
national pride … From the European championship qualifications on, this
thing happened in Slovenia and it grew at and after each and every match.
You could feel it in Slovenia when you went on the street. You felt
something in the air.’

As the national team prospered, though, the domestic league slid into chaos,
as exemplified by the trials of Olimpija. Backed by the local UDBA, in
Yugoslav times they were Slovenia’s only regular representatives in the top
flight, often attracting crowds of over 20,000, although less because the
standard of football was better than today – although it certainly was – than
because there was nothing else to do. ‘Back then, the lights were on for two
hours per day, the rest of the time you had to use candles,’ Oblak said with
characteristic overstatement. ‘There was no television. If you had
electricity, you could listen to the radio, but that was it. Kids today can’t
imagine what it was like. Nobody went to the seaside, nobody went on
trips. People went hiking and climbing the mountains, that was it, so
obviously everybody went to watch football.’
 The links to the UDBA meant a place on Olimpija’s board for Janez
Zemljari (or Johnny de la Terra, as his name was mockingly translated), a
former president of the Slovenian government and vice-president of the
federal Yugoslav government, but financing was largely provided by SCT, a
construction firm whose president, Ivan Zidar, was also president of the
club. Zidar, a rough, forceful personality, had begun his working life doing
menial jobs in Germany before being educated as an engineer, hauling
himself inch by inch towards power. A keen boxer, he was fiercely proud of
his imposing physique, and once mocked his son-in-law in the Slovenian
broadsheet Delo for not being able to lift a 60kg weight with one arm.
‘Zidar was autocratic,’ said Oblak, who coached under him in 1994–95,
winning the Slovenian championship. ‘He didn’t know much about football
though, that’s for sure. But he was the director of a company that employed
over 3,000 people from southern republics and that’s why he was made
president of Olimpija. Politics put him there so the Bosnians who were
building houses would have something to do – watch football.’
Zidar is a man around whom anecdotes flock. On one occasion, faced
with a strike among SCT workers, he approached the pickets and asked who
was in charge. When the leader came forward, he laid him out with a single
punch. ‘And who’s his deputy?’ he then asked. Nobody volunteered, and
the strikers returned to work. Oblak may have spoken of being ‘friends for
ever’ with Zidar, but he also admitted to having pursued him through the
courts for more than a decade over an apartment he was given as payment
when Zidar was short of ready cash.
Zidar’s presidency was a hangover from totalitarian days. Players would
accept contracts in the knowledge they would be paid only eight or nine
months out of twelve, and, if anybody complained, a harangue from Zidar
would usually silence them. Olimpija had finished fourteenth of nineteen
sides in the final pan-Yugoslav league, but were a big enough fish in a small
enough pond that they won the first four independent Slovenian
championships. It was in those days, though, as average attendances fell
from 7,400 in 1989–90 to 1,100 in 1991–92, that the seeds of their downfall
were sown. As market economics began to take hold, players began suing
Olimpija for unpaid wages. Worse, Gorica and Maribor began to challenge
Olimpija’s pre-eminence, and so the financial rewards of being champions –
advertising, sponsorship, European football – could no longer be taken for
granted.
Zidar’s response was to keep spending, trying desperately to re-establish
Olimpija’s superiority. Nastja eh, the inspiration behind Maribor’s
championship success in 1998, was brought in at huge expense, but
Maribor, better organised and better structured, continued to dominate and
even reached the group stages of the Champions League. At Olimpija, the
debts continued to mount, thanks in part to the government’s decision to
impose a mandatory penalty interest rate of 25 per cent on unpaid debts.
One creditor who sued for two million Slovenian Tolars in 1992 was finally
paid twenty-six million (about £80,000) in 2004, and that was still under
half of what he was owed. By early 2005, the club admitted to a debt of
around 3m, although it was suggested the true figure could be double that.
Either way, with an annual budget optimistically stated at 1.2m, the sum
was unpayable.
So out of control were the debts that in 1998 the club’s assets were frozen.
They began trying to trade through ZŠD Olimpija – the largely ceremonial
umbrella body to which all Olimpija clubs in various sports belonged – but
their accounts were also frozen. Frustrated, Zidar, who had been distracted
anyway as he extended his influence at SCT, declared he would quit. As
players stopped receiving even two-thirds of their salaries, performances
dipped. For the Green Dragons, the final straw came when the board vetoed
on health and safety grounds their plan to mark their tenth anniversary by
hanging a giant number 10 shirt between the floodlights at the Bežigrad
Stadium.
At the time the Dragons were led by Kefo, a short, plump and undeniably
intelligent web designer with a flair for organisation. In November 1998, he
called a strike, and so the Dragons, rather than going to games and cheering
on Olimpija, spent match days handing out fifteen-page pamphlets written
by Kefo outlining their grievances. In under a decade, he noted, Olimpija
had gone from a season in which they beat each of Yugoslavia’s big four –
Red Star, Partizan, Dinamo Zagreb and Hajduk Split – to losing to teams
from Slovenian villages. Changes were needed, he said, not necessarily at
presidential level, but certainly at the level of the director, Jože Prostor,
with whom, as Zidar increasingly became only a figurehead, most of the
power lay.
 When Zidar finally dealt with the protest in April 2000 it was in
characteristic fashion, calling Kefo, telling him to meet him in quarter of an
hour and slamming the phone down. Kefo and two other Dragons hurried to
obey. At the SCT offices, the receptionist took some persuading that three
ultras in Olimpija colours had a meeting with her boss, but when she finally
let them through, Zidar was bullishly welcoming. He offered them drinks,
and when one of Kefo’s lieutenants, a teetotaller, asked for orange juice, he
gave him a double vodka. Then he asked Kefo how much money he
wanted, and agreed to replace the director. At that, his secretary came in to
tell him that some Italian trading partners had arrived to see him. ‘Tell the
fucking Italians to wait,’ he said. ‘My boys are here.’ Prostor was sacked
shortly afterwards and replaced with Miro Gavez, who had been on the
board of a firm that imported BMWs. Zidar himself then resigned, although
he remained as president for a year as no assembly was called to vote for
his successor.
The changes, though, could not alter the fact that the club was facing an
unmanageable debt. They weren’t the only ones: Gorica, Mura, Koper, and
Publikum were all struggling. There was, though, an alternative for clubs
faced with the possibility of declaring themselves bankrupt and starting
again in the second regional leagues (effectively the fifth division),
pioneered by Gorica. Previously NK (Football Club) Gorica, they reformed
themselves as ND (Football Society) Gorica. They had the same address,
the same personnel and the NZS allowed them to carry on playing in the
first division, but, magically, they were free of debt. Koper and Mura,
seeing that Gorica had effectively got away with it, did the same.
Zidar finally departed in 2000, and was replaced by Anton Colari , the
deputy mayor of Ljubljana. By May the following year, he and Gavez had
decided that Olimpija also had to go down the bypass route, and NK
Olimpija became NŠD NK (Football Sports Society Football Club)
Olimpija. They were granted a first division licence for 2001–02, and it
seemed that they, like the others, with a quick finagle, had freed themselves
of debt. The precise legal position of the club, though, remained unresolved.
In September 2001, Olimpija played Brøndby in the UEFA Cup. When
UEFA sent the proceeds from that game to the NZS to pass on to Olimpija,
though, the NZS, acting on the basis that the club’s accounts were still
frozen, confiscated them. NŠD NK sued the NZS, an action that seemed
sure to provoke a ruling one way or the other on the legality of the bypass
procedure. The courts, though, ducked the central issue, determining that as
the entry to UEFA had been made under the name of NK Olimpija, and as
all the players were still technically registered to NK Olimpija, that was the
club that had played in the UEFA Cup, and therefore the NZS’s confiscation
was legitimate. Three years later, however, when bailiffs tried to seize gate
receipts from a match between Olimpija and Maribor, they were unable to
do so as it was determined that that club was NŠD NK Olimpija, and
therefore not responsible for the debts of NK Olimpija.
Even with that lifeline, Olimpija’s overspending continued, and, as
sponsors deserted them, players soon found that their salaries were not
being paid. Performances suffered, which was particularly frustrating for
fans who had thought they were witnessing the beginning of an Olimpija to
match that which had dominated the early years of the Slovenian
championship. Coached by Bojan Prašnikar and with Sebastjan Cimeroti
and Ermin Rakovi forming an exciting front pairing, Olimpija beat
Espanyol 2–1 at the Bežigrad in the UEFA Cup and would have claimed the
Slovenian title if they had won against Maribor in their final game of the
season. Over 10,000 turned out in Ljubljana – the largest crowd for a league
game since Yugoslav times – but Olimpija were undone by Nastja eh, who
by then had rejoined Maribor. He set up Barnabas Sztipanovics for the
opener, and, although Cimeroti equalised, Olimpija were unable to force a
winner. Denied Champions League football, Cimeroti , Rakovi and
Prašnikar all left the club, and Olimpija finished just fifth in 2001–02.
That was where Jurij Schollmayer came in. A former model and a
successful entrepreneur, he was persuaded to get involved with Olimpija by
Pero Lovšin, the front man of Pankrti, the band that started the punk
movement in Slovenia. Schollmayer established Olimpia Ltd and through
that promised to pay the club 1.5m a year, plus 250,000 to the youth
system, in return for all revenues gained through television, sponsorship,
advertising and gate receipts. Olimpia Ltd’s assets, though, were only worth
around 10,000 – the minimum required to establish a limited company
under Slovenian law – and so Schollmayer himself had virtually no
personal liability. Privatisation had left Slovenian football clubs in the
hands of their members, so nobody could actually ‘own’ the club, but,
under the terms of the contract, Olimpia Ltd had the right to appoint half
Olimpija’s board, meaning that Schollmayer effectively had a contract with
himself.
Schollmayer arrived promising Champions League football within three
seasons, appointed Oblak as coach and brought in Robert Prosine ki and the
Slovenian legends Mladen Rudonja and Miran Pavlin. A run of seven
games without a win towards the end of the season, though, did for their
title chances, and Oblak, who was sacked in the middle of it, was quick to
cry foul. ‘He didn’t want us to be champions, because my contract read that
all my bonuses would be doubled if we were champions,’ Oblak said. ‘He
quickly cut me to pieces because he was having to pay me too much each
month. He started to undermine the whole thing and he sacked me. If he
hadn’t done that, we’d have been champions, I can guarantee that. We had
points to spare and there’d have been no problem, but then he started to tell
me to substitute Prosine ki, Rudonja and Pavlin. I didn’t want to do that, so
he ended up substituting me.’ His allegations are virtually impossible to
prove, and it is hard to believe that the potential rewards of Champions
League football would not have outweighed whatever bonuses were owed.
Olimpija went on to finish third in the league, but the Slovenian Cup still
offered the prospect of European football. Oblak had taken them to the last
four, and they advanced a stage further when their semi-final opponents,
Korotan Prevalje, went bankrupt. A spectacular Prosine ki free-kick gave
Olimpija an away goals victory in the final, but he still left that summer.
‘He was the best player ever to play in an Olimpija shirt,’ said Oblak. ‘He’s
an extraordinary talent, sheer class. But I don’t think a Slovenian club could
afford such a player. I think he was conned and that’s why he came. Even
the Porsche he was driving was taken away from him at customs because
Schollmayer had stopped paying for the lease.’
Oblak has a habit of exaggerating, but whether that is true or not,
Schollmayer quickly realised that, even with UEFA Cup qualification,
Slovenian football was no cash cow and cut his investment to 700,000 for
his second season. He managed to persuade the investment group KD to
sponsor Olimpija, but the club’s financial position continued to deteriorate,
and with Slovenia being used as a test case for UEFA’s new licensing rules,
the situation became increasingly serious. Under the system, clubs had to
meet various financial stipulations before being granted a licence to
compete in European competition from the 2004—05 season, with the
programme being extended to cover the Slovenian top flight from 2005–06.
Providing the necessary guarantees proved beyond Olimpija, and so, despite
finishing second in the league in 2004, they were denied entry to the UEFA
Cup in 2004–05. (Maribor, who had finished third, qualified as Cup
winners, and, as Koper and Mura were also refused UEFA licences,
Primorje, who had finished sixth in – that is, bottom of – the championship
playoff, took Slovenia’s second place in the UEFA Cup.)
Realising that the licensing rules threatened Olimpija’s existence in the
top flight, Aleš and various other members of the forum on the club’s
website decided to take action. Who, he asked, were these members who
theoretically owned the club? Mystifyingly, he was told, such information
was confidential, although all playing staff at the club had a vote at the
general assembly. How, then, did a fan become a member? That was
simple: turn up at the club offices, fill in a form and pay a nominal fee. So
he did, as did various other fans. The old guard, many of whom had been
involved in the club since Communist times, realising their power was
being eroded, made some (amateurish) efforts to prevent the new influx.
Boris, the head of the website, for instance, repeatedly found the club
secretary unavailable when he turned up to register.
Schollmayer, finally accepting there was no money to be made, pulled out
in summer 2004, but agreed to sell Olimpia Ltd for one Tolar to anybody
prepared to take on the debts. In the autumn, with an assembly due, Aleš,
representing the forum fans, went to Zemljari and Colari , the senior board
member and the president, and suggested the best thing to do would be for
the club to fold, and start again in the second regional league, thereby
preserving some kind of integrity. He found Zemljari stubborn and
irascible, still apparently stuck in the seventies, demanding to know who
had authorised journalists to write that Olimpija were struggling to survive,
and parroting the old saw that Slovenia was ‘still paying for the Bosnians’.
These ‘Bosnians’, though, had legally binding contracts.
For the fans, the next step was to convene an assembly at which Gavez
could be challenged and replaced as director. The club statutes provided for
an annual general meeting, but at that stage the board had managed to avoid
one for over two years. An extraordinary general meeting, though, could be
called if a third of the members demanded it. Since Gazev would not reveal
how many members there were, it was impossible to know exactly how
many people that constituted, but, in October 2004, a demand for an EGM
signed by twenty members was presented to the board. ‘Our first ambition
was just to watch and choose the best option that presented itself,’ Aleš
explained. ‘As we realised they might fuck us again and have no assembly,
we made a request for an extraordinary assembly.’
 The Green Dragons, meanwhile, were pursuing a more militant course.
Kefo had been replaced by Koma, a nickname that means what it sounds
like it means, and was entirely appropriate. Kefo’s stunts had at least been
alleviated by a degree of wit. In April 2000, for instance, at a game in
Maribor, which at the time suffered over 20 per cent unemployment, the
Dragons unveiled a banner, reading: ‘We would congratulate you on Labour
Day, but none of you have jobs.’ Koma, though, was a far wilder figure, and
under his leadership the Dragons attacked players’ cars and sprayed
insulting graffiti around the ground. In mid-September they issued an
ultimatum to Colari and Gavez, warning them they had until 1 October to
resign. Or what? Aleš asked. Or else, Koma replied.
In a 4–1 defeat to Publikum on 26 September, they put their threat into
action, around twenty Dragons charging on to the pitch with three minutes
remaining and forcing the abandonment of the game. The Olimpija
goalkeeper Ermin Hasi , terrified, sprinted for the dressing rooms, and
following his lead, most of the players followed, although the Dragons’
anger was not really directed at them. The Bosnian defender Enes
Handanagi , by contrast, gained great kudos by sauntering off, as indifferent
to the chaos around him as if he were walking his dog through a deserted
meadow. Milivoj Bra un, Olimpija’s Croatian coach, was also slow to leave
because of an injured leg, and he was seen on national television being
struck over the head with a flagpole. ‘It was nothing personal, just
something that had to be done,’ the Dragons said, admitting Koma had had
coffee with Bra un two days earlier.
As the Slovenian media lamented the morals of the nation’s youth,
Olimpija’s board took the opportunity to blame the Dragons for the absence
of any new sponsors. They’d had verbal agreements with several
companies, they implausibly claimed, but all of them had been scared off by
the violence.
The petition calling for an EGM still had to be dealt with, and, on the
thirtieth day of the thirty-one they were permitted under Slovenian law, the
board responded by calling the AGM for the end of November, although
that date was eventually postponed by a week. By then, the former Olimpija
and Slovenia forward Primož Gliha had declared himself a candidate for the
club presidency. He, though, was acting as a figurehead for Janez Sodržnik,
once a major figure in Ljubljana local government. Candid to a fault,
Sodržnik was greeted with suspicion by Olimpija fans, partly for his
political past, but more particularly because he had been born in Styria.
Sodržnik and Gliha broadly agreed that the club had to be refounded, and,
after the assembly had finally been convened, approached the forum fans
for support.
Aleš was doubtful, but recognised in Gliha a realistic candidate for the
presidency and in an alliance with him the best way of reclaiming the club
from the likes of Zemljari , Colari and Gavez. ‘When the regular assembly
was finally called, they started contacting us from all sides,’ he said. ‘On
one side were the old boys who for the first time in their lives had an
opponent; on the other side were the new boys – Sodržnik and Gliha.’ With
the fans roughly equal in numbers to the old guard, the balance of power lay
with the players. That represented a significant problem for the Gliha group,
because their proposals necessarily entailed the renegotiation or termination
of all player contracts. Nonetheless, Aleš spoke to them, explaining that
since they weren’t being paid what they were owed under their existing
contracts, it didn’t make much difference anyway.
The forum fans put forward a series of proposals: that the next assembly
should be called for the end of the season, that the term of the new president
should be limited until then, that the debt should be calculated and made
public. The players backed them on every point, until it came to electing the
president, when they ignored Gliha and instead voted for Borut Gaberšek, a
former director of SCT who had been on the board for twenty years. Gliha,
bizarrely, wasn’t even entitled to vote at the AGM, his membership having
been denied on the grounds he had applied too late, although no deadlines
are laid out in the club’s statutes.
Predictably, there turned out to be no money to pay the players’ wages
and, within a matter of weeks, seventeen players had left. Olimpija,
remarkably, still qualified for the championship play-offs, but did not even
bother to apply for a licence in March 2005. In the 2005–06 season, they
were effectively replaced by NK Bežigrad, a new club named after the
national stadium in Ljubljana which started out in the fifth division.
Coached by Gliha, their side featured several ageing legends of Slovenian
football, most of whom, apparently, played for free. Their first game, a
friendly against the fourth division side Arne Tabor 69, was won 4–0, all
the goals being scored by the 43-year-old Milko Djurovski, the so-called
magician of Macedonia and one of the very few men to have played for
both Partizan and Red Star. Having an all-star veterans XI in the regional
leagues, though, is hardly a consolation. Olimpija were the biggest, most
presitigious club in the richest of the former Communist nations. If they
cannot survive when Slovenian football is going through an unprecedented
period of success at national level, you begin to wonder who can.

iii Croatia
On a wet night in Kyiv in November 1997, Croatia played Ukraine in the
second leg of a World Cup qualifying play-off. Already 2–0 up from the
first leg, their passage to the finals in France was secured twenty-seven
minutes in, as Alen Boksi equalised Andriy Shevchenko’s early goal.
Needing to score three, and disillusioned after Vitaliy Kosovksyi had had a
goal wrongly ruled out for offside, Ukraine meekly accepted their fate, and,
in the hour and a bit of anaemic football that followed, there was plenty of
opportunity to ponder the surroundings. Most striking were the advertising
hoardings, control of which seemed to have been divided between the two
countries. While the Ukrainian ones were mainly for beer and vodka, on the
Croatian side, one stood out. It read: U boy, u boy, za narod svoy: To battle,
to battle, for your nation.
Buoyed by that nationalistic spirit, Croatia had reached the quarter-finals
of Euro 96, playing some sparkling football. Peter Schmeichel, in particular,
will remember the rapid break that led to Davor Suker nonchalantly
chipping him from twenty-five yards in Croatia’s 3–0 win over Denmark at
Hillsborough.
In France in the World Cup they did even better. Their group, featuring
Japan and Jamaica, was admittedly not as testing as it might have been, but
there was no doubting the quality of their performance in the quarter-final
as an ageing Germany were picked apart, Robert Jarni scoring for the only
time in his seventy-four-match international career before late goals from
Goran Vlaovi and Šuker (with his right foot, extraordinarily) completed a
3–0 win. Although France beat them in the semi-final, Croatia beat Holland
in the play-off for third. ‘I had wonderful players, full of a sense of
patriotism,’ their coach Miroslav Blazevi said, ‘players who were ready to
do big things for their country. One of the biggest advantages Croatia has in
sport is that patriotic feeling.’
That team, emerging from the war, was a powerful symbol of the new
Croatia and was exploited as such by the national president, Franjo
Tudjman. Their success may have been less unexpected than that of
Slovenia would be, but it served a similar function, advertising the bright
new nation to the world. ‘We knew we were the first generation to play for
the new Croatia,’ the defender Slaven Bili said. ‘We knew we had a bloody
war behind us. Tudjman said to us that we were like ambassadors for
Croatia. But there was no extreme nationalism. In 1996, OK, there was
extra motivation when you heard the national anthem, and especially when
you saw the reaction at home. By 1998 we were just thanking God for our
country and I was proud to play for them, but it was different to 1996.’
However much he tries to underplay it, though, the pride was sufficient to
carry Bili through that tournament despite a stress fracture of his hip, a
determination to play that effectively ended his career. He still walks with a
limp, and has to drive a jeep because he finds sitting in lower cars too
uncomfortable, something which rebuts the accusations of malingering still
cast by Everton fans upset that a player for whom they paid West Ham
£4.5million managed just twenty-six league starts for them.
I met Bili in Split in early 2005. As he drove me from my hotel to a
restaurant overlooking the Adriatic, he apologised for the cold. After
several days in Slovenia, where the snow still stood frozen by the sides of
the roads, though, Split felt gloriously springlike. It’s a wonderful city
anyway, especially early in the year before the tourists have moved in, the
Roman remains all the more impressive for being incorporated into the
modern fabric of the town rather than being preserved and exhibited in a
metaphorical glass case. Even the old stadium, now used only for rugby,
with its white bricks and red tiles, feels as though it’s been around for a
couple of millennia. ‘Split didn’t really suffer in the war,’ said Bili . ‘My
mother is from a village ninety minutes drive from here, and they went
there with tanks and destroyed everything, but here we lived a normal life.
There was shelling from ships for a couple of days and they were in the
town for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t real war.’
I have dealt with few more instantly likeable footballers than Bili , and I
certainly can’t remember any others who have insisted on paying for the
coffee. A qualified lawyer, Bili learnt his English from music – he still
plays in a rock band – and speaks with an engaging mid-Atlantic fluency
that occasionally lurches into Cockney or Scouse. An Anglophile, he
maintains a flat in London – primarily so he can watch major tournaments
without constant distractions from the Croatian media – but Bili does not
have the best of reputations in England.
That is partly the result of his lengthy absences for treatment in his final
season at Goodison, but more because of the way he collapsed at the
slightest touch from Laurent Blanc in that 1998 World Cup semi-final.
Blanc was sent off and, as a result, did not play in the final. ‘I’d got a
yellow card against Romania earlier in the tournament,’ Bili explained. ‘I
loved Billy Costacurta [the AC Milan and Italy defender] as a player, and
I’ll always remember that in 1994 he missed the Champions League final
and the World Cup final because of being booked in the semi. So, I thought
to myself before the game, “Don’t do anything stupid: if you commit a foul,
then OK, but don’t argue or anything like that. Don’t do a Billy.”
‘They had a free-kick, and I was marking Blanc. I really liked him as a
player, and at Barcelona he’d played with Prosine ki, who’d been my room-
mate for five years. And he smoked. So I thought, what a great guy. I had
my hand across his chest, and with one hand he pushed my hand down, and
with the other he went to my face. He didn’t hit me like Mike Tyson, but he
gave me a push.
‘At that moment I was panicking, because in nine out of ten situations like
that the referee goes yellow, yellow to both players. And I heard Igor Stima
tell me to go down. So I thought, no final, no third place whatever, so I
went down. I didn’t think “Is he going to miss the final?” I just wanted to
protect myself.
‘I didn’t do anything wrong. He hit me, and the referee came and gave
him a red. I swear if I could change it so he could play in the final, I would.
But I was just acting to protect myself. A lot of French journalists went mad
saying I dived – and the English were obsessed by diving because of what
had happened with Beckham being sent off for hardly touching Simeone –
but the bottom line is that he made a mistake. Nobody can say he didn’t and
that was a red card, but because it was the final, and because it was in
France, blahblahblah it’s a big story.’
 Whatever the rights and wrongs of that – and, to be honest, I doubt many
in Croatia saw anything in the incident beyond the advantage it had gained
them: ‘In the past,’ Blazevi said, ‘we had to find a way to survive as a
small nation, so genetically we have the ability to trick people’ – it should
not be allowed to distract from how good that Croatia side was. Thanks to
Bilic’s less than happy time at Everton and the ageing Davor Šuker’s
disappointing spell at Arsenal, it has become a commonplace almost to
dismiss their achievements in the mid-nineties as the result of riding the
crest of a nationalist wave. True, given organisation, team spirit and a fair
wind, essentially average sides (Greece in 2004, for example) can prosper
over the month’s span of an international tournament, but Croatia were
more than that. In Robert Prosine ki and Zvonimir Boban, they had two of
the greatest midfielders of the nineties.
They first played together in Chile in 1987, when Yugoslavia won the
World Youth Cup with what was probably the best Under-20 side in history.
Including not only Prosine ki and Boban, but also such players as Stima ,
Šuker and Jarni, all of whom became regulars in the full Croatia side, they
averaged a record 2.83 goals per game over the tournament.
Some great teams are designed, planned from the very first in painstaking
detail; most have some element of luck in their constitution; that Yugoslavia
side seems almost to have been randomly flung together, triumphing despite
internal tensions and a football federation that openly admitted they were
sending a team only to fulfil their obligation to FIFA. Their captain,
Aleksandar Djordjevi , was sent off in the final qualifying match in
Hungary and banned for four games, and with Igor Bere ko, Dejan
Vukicevi , Igor Pejovi and Seho Saboti injured and Boban Babunski left
out because he was in dispute with his club, the FSJ withdrew Siniša
Mihajlovi , Vladimir Jugovi and Alen Boksi on the logic that they would
gain more by playing league football. They refused even to finance any
journalists to cover the tournament, and the only Yugoslav reporter to travel
to Chile was Toma Mihajlovi , who worked for Arena, a Zagreb-based
Sunday magazine that was interested in a piece on the large Yugoslav
emigrant population in Santiago. ‘Nobody had any expectations from the
team,’ he said. ‘We thought they’d play the three group games and go
home. But when they got to Chile those players found another face. They
found a nice country and good accommodation in excellent hotels, and so
many girls around …’
Heavy rain forced the postponement of the opening ceremony for three
days – much to the frustration of the organisers, who had thought having
Yugoslavia play Chile in the first match would ensure it was witnessed by a
full stadium – but the game went ahead regardless, Yugoslavia winning 4–2.
‘After that,’ Mihajlovi said, ‘everything was upside down. Everybody in
Chile started supporting Yugoslavia because they had played so well. The
boys realised that if they won the second and third games they would be
able to stay in Santiago.’
And Santiago was worth staying in. Mirko Jozi , the Yugoslavia coach,
had a reputation as a disciplinarian, and tried to rein in his players, but
Stima had met the winner of Miss Chile 1987, herself of Yugoslav descent,
and nothing was going to get in the way of his socialising. ‘There were no
out and out fights,’ said Mihajlovi , ‘but there was constant friction between
them. I was with the players most nights, and there was nothing wild. They
stuck together and didn’t drink, but they did stay in the clubs until three or
four every morning.’
Australia were despatched 4–0 and Togo 4–1, at which Red Star decided
they could do with Prosine ki for a UEFA Cup-tie against Club Bruges, and
attempted to recall him. The players protested to FIFA, and João Havalange,
then the organisation’s chairman, intervened to keep Prosine ki in Chile. He
responded by bending a last-minute free-kick winner against Brazil in the
quarter-final. It was later voted the goal of the tournament.
Yugoslavia then beat East Germany 2–1 in the semi-final, but at some
cost. Predrag Mijatovi was sent off, and Prosine ki was booked in the last
minute, meaning both would miss the final through suspension. A plot,
clearly, for no Balkan victory could be complete without a triumph over
perfidious forces. The Australian referee, Richard Lorenc, it turned out, had
had a major confrontation with the Red Star legend Dragan Sekulara , then
coaching in Melbourne, only a year earlier. And hadn’t the Australian
coach, Les Scheinflug, who had been born in Yugoslavia of German
parents, warned Jozi about him?
Well, perhaps, but if there really were a conspiracy, why let Yugoslavia
win? Why wait until the final minute, when there could be no guarantee he
would make a tackle, to book Prosine ki? None of it sounds very
convincing. Boban gave Yugoslavia an eighty-fifth-minute lead against
West Germany in the final, and, although Marcel Witeczek equalised with a
penalty two minutes later, he went on to miss his kick in the shoot-out,
giving Yugoslavia victory. ‘The team stayed in Chile for two days
afterwards to celebrate,’ Mihajlovi recalled. ‘It was Robert Jarni’s birthday
so there was a party for him. In the semi-final Dubravko Pavli i had had
two teeth knocked out by Matthias Sammer, so they invited the dentist
who’d repaired them to the party and presented him with the match ball.
There was a real family atmosphere with the Yugoslav community there,
and when they went home after three weeks everybody was crying.’
Bili was not in Chile, having fractured an ankle, although it is debatable
whether he would have been in the final squad anyway. He is too modest
and too satisfied with what he did achieve to make an issue of it, but it
remains an oddity that he never represented Yugoslavia at any level. ‘It was
definitely harder for Croatians to play in that team,’ he said. ‘Of course, if
you were Boban or Prosine ki and much, much better than anybody else
you would play, but I wasn’t that good. I don’t know why I was never
picked for Yugoslavia, but people say it was because of my father.’
Bili ’s father, a doctor of economics at Split University, was one of the
organisers of student demonstrations in 1971 that demanded greater
autonomy for Croatia within the Yugoslav Federation. ‘Tito cracked down
on it, and a lot of them went to jail,’ Bili said. ‘My father was one of the
top five men in Croatia, and after that the situation was very difficult for my
family. He didn’t go to jail, and he kept his job, but it wasn’t great.’
In the rest of the former Yugoslavia, people wonder what would have
happened in the nineties had the 1987 World Youth Cup-winners been
allowed to grow together with the likes of Stojkovi , Savicevi , Jugovi ,
Mihajlovi , Pan ev and Katanec. A glimpse of what might have been was
offered in the 1990 World Cup when Yugoslavia, inspired by Stojkovi , beat
Spain in a superb second-round match in Verona, only to lose on penalties
to Argentina in the quarter-final, a game in which they had survived with
ten men for eighty-nine minutes. Two years later, though, having been
imperious in qualifying, Yugoslavia were expelled from the European
Championship. Denmark took their place, and won the tournament. ‘If the
country hadn’t fallen apart,’ Katanec said, ‘I guarantee we would have
crushed the world.’
 Bili , though, was rather less convinced that a Yugoslavia team could have
been better than his Croatia side. ‘Where would you put Savi evi ?’ he
asked. ‘We had a midfield that was the most creative ever – Boban, Prosine
ki, Asanovi . To put Savi evi there, who would you leave out? There were
some great players from the other republics but I wouldn’t have added a
single one of them to our squad. We didn’t need a creative midfield player.
We didn’t need anybody on the flanks – we had Jarni and Stani . We didn’t
need a defence. We didn’t need a goalkeeper. Up front, OK, there is Pan ev,
but we had Šuker and Boksi . They had a great team, and I don’t know what
would have happened if it had still been Yugoslavia, but I really don’t think
we could have done any better.’
The advantage of being a purely Croatian team, of course, was that the
internal rivalries, particularly in the years immediately following the war,
were less pronounced. ‘The most important thing for us was that we were a
team,’ Bili said. ‘We were friends. We had quality on the pitch, but our
biggest quality was team spirit. When you talk to other internationals they
tell you that in the camp they don’t mix that much – they go to their rooms,
play on the PlayStation or read. We were together 24/7.’
At its head, that squad had the incomparable Miroslav Blazevi , an
eccentric whose braggadocio bordered at times on genius. How would
Yugoslavia have done in the nineties if it had stayed together? ‘Oh, they’d
have won the World Cup,’ he said. ‘So long as they’d appointed me as their
coach.’ An emotional, temperamental man, he consulted astrological charts
before making team selections, and attributed Croatia’s success in the
World Cup to good fortune brought by wearing the cap of a gendarme
beaten almost to death by German hooligans earlier in the tournament.
‘He would always say he was the best in the world,’ said Bili . ‘I’m not
saying he was a bad coach or a great coach, but he was the ideal coach for
us. If you’d given us Capello, Ferguson or Wenger, it wouldn’t have
worked. He was everybody’s father, a great motivator.
‘You would play against, let’s say, Estonia, and you know it’s only
Estonia, but he would gradually motivate you. Every day he knew in his
head when he was going to create an incident to wake everybody up a bit,
then he’d tell us all to go to a nightclub or something. At team meetings
he’d be talking about Estonia as though they were fucking Brazil. You’d
know he was lying, you’d know it wasn’t true, but you say, fuck, yeah, it’s
going to be hard. And he would always say, OK, Estonia’s left-back is
whoever, and he’d be talking about their players, and he’d be writing their
names on a board, and you’d know it was wrong; he’d be saying, like, this
guy, he’s so quick, he’s so good, and you’d know when he was talking to
you that he’d never seen him in his fucking life.
‘Anyway, it would motivate you, but whoever we played against, he
always told us we were better than them. So when we played Argentina in
the World Cup, he came to me and said “Son,” because we were always his
sons, “Son, you have to come with me and talk to the press.” So, OK, it’s
me and him in the press conference. And I know even the twenty-second
player in their squad plays for Inter, and everybody else is at AC Milan,
Real Madrid, Barcelona … all at the best teams, and we have Boban at
Milan, but he doesn’t play, and Šuker at Real Madrid, and he doesn’t play.
The rest of us were playing in great leagues but not for great teams. So he
says to the press, “Argentina, not a bad team, not a bad team, but none of
their players play for the best teams in Europe.” So I look at him, and say,
“What the fuck are you talking about?” But that’s what he was like. It was
all nonsense, but it was great nonsense.’
Or, as Blazevic saw it: ‘I convinced my players we were the best in the
world and they accepted it. We were packed with confidence. We destroyed
the German machine 3–0 in the quarter-final and we showed them how
Croatians play football.’
Born in Travnik, Bosnia, in 1935, Blazevi played for FK Sarajevo and the
Croatian sides Rijeka and Dinamo Zagreb before moving to Switzerland
with Vevey and Sion. As a coach, he won a Swiss championship with
Grasshoppers and a Cup with Sion, and briefly took charge of the
Switzerland national team before returning to Croatia. In 1982, wearing a
lucky white scarf to every game, he led Dinamo Zagreb to their first
Yugoslav championship in twenty-four years. He also rejected Prosine ki,
vowing, with typical hyperbole, to eat his degree certificate if the midfielder
ever made it as a player. In 2001, when coach of Iran, he said he would
hang himself from the crossbar if his side lost to the Republic of Ireland in a
play-off for World Cup qualification: despite being wrong on both counts,
his degree certificate and his neck remain intact.
Blazevi was also a close friend of Tudjman, and the president, wearing
the trademark white uniform he thought lent him the gravitas of Tito, was
often to be seen both at Croatia games and at the squad’s training camps.
‘President Tudjman was a big football enthusiast, a crucial man in Croatia’s
football success,’ Blazevi said. ‘I was very close to him and we had a
special relationship. He helped a lot.’
Not, Bili insisted, that that made the team any more nationalistic.
‘Tudjman was a big Croatian, and he was crazy for sport and mad for
football, and that was good,’ he said. ‘Why should we be ashamed when
our president comes to watch us play? If I were playing for England, I
would be proud if Tony Blair came to watch. There’s nothing wrong with it.
They said we were a nationalist team, but why? I had lunch with Tudjman
once and that was one of the best memories of my life. Why not?’ Serbs
ethnically cleansed from Krajina would presumably be able to find a
reason.
Many of those doing the cleansing were drawn from the Bad Blue Boys,
Dinamo Zagreb’s Ultras, who took their name – always written in English,
of course, for all the best hooligans are English – from the Sean Penn film
Bad Boys. Founded in 1986, that watershed year for nationalism in
Yugoslavia, they soon developed a reputation for violence. ‘Not so rare
were the big fights,’ as their website says. ‘Numerous blows were given and
taken; to prove one’s love for the club, they didn’t mind. Dinamo was and
still is something sacred.’ They affiliated to Tudjman’s HDZ, and four years
later, the website goes on, they went to ‘defend Croatia … from Vukovar to
Prevlaka. Many of them never returned to “their” north. In honour and
everlasting glory of the fallen Dinamo fans, beneath the western stands a
monument was built, an altar for the Croatian heroes who forever had the
blue colours in their hearts.’
Tudjman, who had been president of Partizan Belgrade in the fifties, was a
fan of football in general and Dinamo in particular, and, after returning to
Croatia, he used his influence to the club’s advantage. The future Leeds and
Middlesbrough forward Mark Viduka joined Dinamo after Tudjman had
rung him at home in Melbourne; while, in 1994, at a league match against
Primorac a few days before a Cup-Winners Cup tie against Auxerre,
Tudjman walked into the opposing dressing room and suggested it might be
an idea if they didn’t try too hard. He thought 6–0 might be a suitable boost
for Dinamo. Sure enough, Primorac lost 6–0.
 Tudjman’s most notable act at Partizan had been to switch their kit from
red-and-blue stripes to black-and-white, an early indication of his penchant
for cosmetic change. Having convinced himself he was the father of the
nation, he then appears to have decided that his role demanded a spree of
renaming. Most cities in Croatia now have at least one street named after
him.
Most significantly, in 1993, he changed the name of Dinamo (Communist,
hence Titoist, hence federal, hence not nationalist, hence unacceptable) to
HAŠK Gradjanski, after the two clubs from which Dinamo was formed
when the Communists took power in 1945. Then he changed it again, to
Croatia Zagreb. Few of the fans took any notice, most continuing to call the
club Dinamo. When one turned up at a political rally with a Dinamo banner,
Tudjman berated him, at which the crowd began chanting ‘Dinamo, not
Croatia’. A month later, the HDZ was defeated in local elections. Not quite
as dramatic as the impact the Delije had on Miloševic, perhaps, but a
demonstration of the power of the fans’ bodies nonetheless.

Croatia played Yugoslavia (by then consisting of just Serbia and

Montenegro) for the first time in a European Championship qualifier in
Belgrade in August 1999. Bili missed the game with his ongoing hip
problem, but he and Alen Boksi , who was also injured, were invited by
Blazevi to travel with the squad. ‘It was incredibly hostile,’ he said. ‘They
were calling us Ustaše and everything, and then in the second half the lights
went off. It was completely dark. All you could see were the infra-red
beams on sniper rifles.’ The night before I met Bili , his Croatia Under-21
side had played a friendly in Bosnia that had been abandoned at half time
because of a floodlight failure. ‘I turned to Aljosa Asanovi , who’s now my
assistant,’ he said. ‘And I asked him about that time in Belgrade. I asked
him if he’d shat himself. He looked at me, and he said: “Of course I fucking
did.” I was in the VIP section, so I was safe, but for those on the pitch …’
There is even a theory among Croatians that the power was deliberately cut
because Croatia had seemed to be getting on top. In what might have been
seen as a diplomatic gesture, were such a thing conceivable in Belgrade, the
match finished in a 0–0 draw.
The return in Zagreb two months later, a game Croatia had to win to
qualify, was hardly less intense. Before kick-off Croatian fans unfurled a
huge banner reading ‘Vukovar 91’ – a reminder of an atrocity to be avenged
— while wounded war veterans were presented to the crowd before kick-
off. The incident for which the game will be remembered, though, came
five minutes before half time. Jarni and Zoran Mirkovi tangled in chasing a
ball towards the goal line and Mirkovi , making the most of it, tumbled to
win a free-kick. Jarni, angered, stood over him and shouted in his face, at
which Mirkovic – regardless of the fact that Yugoslavia, needing a win to
be sure of qualification, led 2–1 – reached up, grabbed Jarni’s testicles and
gave them a sharp tweak. He was sent off-giving the two-finger-and-a-
thumb Serb salute to the Croatian fans as he went – but, far from being
hung in effigy back in Belgrade for having damaged his side’s chances, he
was hailed as a hero. Faced with a slight to his honour, he had taken his
revenge. Perhaps it would have been different had Yugoslavia not qualified
– although Croatia came back to draw, the Republic of Ireland succumbed
to a last-minute equaliser in Macedonia FYR – but the reaction said much
of Balkan priorities nonetheless.
Much of the Croatian crowd’s bile was directed at Siniša Mihajlovi , who
has, by dint of some less than diplomatic statements in the media, come to
symbolise Serb nationalism. I have, I confess, a soft spot for Mihajlovi . For
one thing, it amuses me that the most reviled player in European football
used to be known as ‘Barbika’ because of his fluffy Barbie-doll hairstyle.
For another, amid the controversy that clouds him, it is often forgotten just
what a good footballer he was. Sven-Göran Eriksson rated his left foot
alongside David Beckham’s right, and took him from Roma to Sampdoria
and then to Lazio. Nobody – not Platini, not Maradona, not Zola – has
scored more free-kicks in Serie A than him. So good is he that when, at a
Yugoslavia training session, the midfielder Albert Nadj offered to buy the
whole squad dinner if Mihajlovi could hit the crossbar from the halfway
line with two shots out of three, he didn’t need the third attempt. He clearly
has some pretty significant personality flaws, but I can’t quite understand
how he has come to be so hated. And he is hated – even the Guardian ran a
piece asking, ‘Is this the nastiest man in football?’
That headline followed a Champions League game between Chelsea and
Lazio in November 2003 in which Mihajlovi spat into Adrian Mutu’s ear.
That is pretty much indefensible, although it should perhaps be considered
that it is a very British attitude that sees spitting as the ultimate taboo –
Mutu, significantly, seemed far less bothered by the incident than anybody
else at Chelsea. Bad as that was, far worse was the incident in October 2000
that saw him banned for two games by UEFA after Patrick Vieira claimed
he had called him ‘a fucking black monkey’. Mihajlovi could, under Italian
law, have been jailed for up to three years, but after he made a public
apology and disavowal of racism from the centre-circle at the Stadio
Olimpico, ahead of Lazio’s next home Champions League game, no charges
were pressed.
Mihajlovi ’s defence, though, is worth hearing, not because it excuses
what he said, but because of the insight it offers into his mentality. ‘Yes, I
insulted Vieira,’ Mihajlovi said, ‘but only as an answer to his insults. He
called me “a gypsy shit”, and so I answered back with “black shit”. I’m
proud of being a gypsy, so I wasn’t offended, and I don’t see how he could
be offended because I called him black. I certainly didn’t call him a
monkey. Vieira provoked me from the first minute, and whatever colour his
skin is, I’m not going to let somebody treat me like that. I am who I am and
I would have reacted the same way even on the street. I’ve played football
since I was fifteen years old and in that time I have been kicked, spat upon
and insulted. In football these things happen. What made me really angry is
that off the pitch, back home, Vieira gave a press conference to talk about
incidents that occurred during the match and must be kept on the field. If I
am a racist, so is Vieira.’ Vieira was never charged over the ‘gypsy’
allegation, which may say something about the western European attitudes
that dominate at UEFA: racism against the Roma remains one of Europe’s
forgotten evils.
For Mihajlovi , like Mirkovi , an attack on his honour had to be settled. It
was that belief that provoked the incident with Mutu, who, it appears, had
deliberately set out to wind up Mihajlovi , having been sent off in an
international in Bucharest following a clash with the defender. ‘I reacted
like that because I was provoked in a dishonourable way,’ Mihajlovi , said.
‘As a kid I got into a lot of fights. I got beaten up and I beat people up. I
fought with older children. I didn’t get frightened. I remember there was a
teacher who lived on our street who didn’t want me in her class because she
thought I would cause trouble. However, I was always an excellent student
and later that teacher told me she regretted not having me in her class
because I was a very different person in school to how I was on the street.’
 Age has not diminished that divide between public and private selves.
Eriksson’s adviser Athole Still, who has known Mihajlovi socially for
several years, has spoken of him as ‘a Jekyll-and-Hyde character’ who ‘is
transformed on the pitch’. ‘As a family man,’ Still said, ‘he is the most
benign, relaxed, pleasant character.’ Even Mihajlovi , though, accepts that
he has issues. ‘When I sleep, I dream of snakes,’ he said in an interview
with the Serbian magazine Tempo. ‘I hate snakes. People who understand
these things tell me the snakes are my enemies.’
He has certainly made enough of them over his career, but he has suffered
too from an element of scapegoating. Just as the loathing felt in England for
Diego Maradona was in part shaped by the anti-Argentine attitudes that
followed the Falklands War, so the perception of Mihajlovi has been
conditioned by the wars of the nineties and the NATO bombing of
Belgrade. The war is central to the man. Mihajlovi was born to a Serbian
father and Croatian mother in Vukovar in the far east of Croatia. He grew
up just outside the city – then a peaceful place with an ethnically mixed
population of 50,000 – in Borovo Selo, the village into which Croat
extremists launched three Ambrust missiles to ignite the war in April 1991.
By July the war was in full swing, and Vukovar was surrounded by the
Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army (JNA). For four months they
bombarded the town, reducing the 15,000 largely Croat inhabitants who
remained to living in cellars without water or electricity. Those who tried to
flee were picked off by snipers. Vukovar fell on 19 November and, despite
the international community’s efforts to organise an evacuation, several
hundred Croats were massacred. Four years later, as the Croats swept back
through the land they had lost, Vukovar changed hands again. To what
extent revenge was taken against the Serbs who remained is unclear, but
what is certainly true is that the Vukovar Serbs, mindful (and constantly
reminded by propaganda from Belgrade) of the atrocities committed against
Serbs by the Ustaše, were terrified. Given their son’s status as a hero of the
local Serb community, Mihajlovi ’s parents had more to fear than most, but,
in the hours before the Croatian army arrived in Borovo Selo, they escaped.
It is not known for sure who smuggled them away, and Mihajlovi is
understandably reticent on the subject, but the strong suspicion in Serbia is
that it was Arkan.
 Mihajlovi returned to Borovo Selo in 2000. ‘It was wiped out,’ he said.
‘Our house was reduced to rubble. I stopped the car near my old school
because I wanted to walk along the path I used to take every day, but the
school wasn’t there any more. When I went through the ruins of our house,
I found an old poster of the Yugoslavia national team. There was a bullet
hole where my heart should have been.’ When German television showed
footage of the house shortly after the region was handed back to Croatia,
several photographs of Mihajlovi could be seen amid the stones. In each of
them, the eyes had been cut out – an obvious reference to the Ustaše leader
Ante Paveli ’s insistence on having the eyes of murdered Serbs brought to
him in a bowl each morning to prove the massacres were continuing apace.
Two weeks after Arkan’s assassination, Lazio fans displayed banners
commemorating his death during a Serie A game against Bari at the Stadio
Olimpico. That may just have been coincidence – his right-wing militarism,
after all, is just the kind of thing to appeal to the more extreme Ultra groups
– but Mihajlovi is widely believed to have given at least his tacit consent.
For that he has been condemned, but if Arkan really did save his parents’
lives, the tribute is perhaps understandable.

Croatia’s ill-feeling towards Serbia is only to be expected, but Croatian

football has seen a more general rise in violence. In Yugoslav times, the
rivalry between Hajduk and Dinamo was a friendly one, akin, Bili said, to
that between Liverpool and Everton. ‘It was a big day for Croatia to
celebrate,’ he said. ‘In the stadium they would sing the same songs
together.’ Now, with the two clubs having won thirteen of the first fourteen
independent Croatian championships, it is far more bitter. Away fans have
been banned after a series of violent clashes, but Bili admitted that, even
with that restriction, he would not take his son to a Hajduk-Dinamo game
were they not guaranteed seats in the VIP section. To paraphrase what
Brane Oblak said of the situation in Slovenia, it is as though rivalry, if it
does not exist, must be invented. The effect is further to depress attendances
that had fallen anyway since fragmentation; where Hajduk Split could once
expect average gates of up to 15,000, they now get less than a third of that,
which has an obvious financial impact. Only the intervention of Bili ,
Asanovi , Stima and Boksi averted bankruptcy for Hajduk in 2001. ‘They
were in a terrible state and the players hadn’t been paid for months,’ Bili
said. ‘So we invested some money. It was probably the worst investment
ever.’ That, in turn, has diminished the quality of the Croatian league. I was
repeatedly given the blithe assurance that the Croatian league is the most
developed of any in the former Yugoslavia, but, even if that is true,
Hajduk’s defeat to the Irish side Shelbourne in a Champions League
qualifier in 2004–05 suggests it is a fairly empty boast.
The decline of the league, though, has not as yet affected the national
team, few of whose players play in Croatia anyway. There too, though,
recent years have been marked by increasing violence among fans, and a
surprising hostility has developed with Slovenia since independence. On the
face of it, they would seem to have a lot in common. Both were once part of
the Austro-Hungarian empire, both are predominantly Roman Catholic, and
both use Roman script. Certainly they had more in common with each other
than with Serbia, where the influence was Ottoman, the religion Orthodox
and the script Cyrillic. Yet the same week that the two were drawn together
in a qualification play-off for Euro 2004, a poll in a Croatian newspaper
reported that while only 45 per cent of Croatians hate Serbs, 60 per cent
hate Slovenes.
The two nations may have fought wars of independence against
essentially the same enemy, but it was in those conflicts that the present day
hostility has its roots. Slovenians are bitter that Tudjman, reneging on an
earlier agreement, allowed the JNA to march through his country in an
effort to force Slovenia back into the federation. Slovenia, nonetheless,
unhindered by an indigenous Serb population, achieved secession within
ten days. Croatia’s subsequent war lasted four years.
During that period, the Slovenian-owned Ljubljanska Bank shut down its
offices in Zagreb, and, in so doing, seized all assets held by Croatians in
foreign currency accounts. In a similar manoeuvre to that practised by the
football clubs, the Nova Ljubljanska Bank was then formed, and the debts
of its previous incarnation written off. Croatian investors were
understandably outraged, but the Slovenian government argued that their
money was circulating in other former Yugoslav republics, and therefore
couldn’t be reclaimed.
Partly because of the Ljubljanska Bank issue, the Croatian government
stopped paying costs for the Krsko nuclear power station, which is in
Slovenia, but since its foundation had been jointly owned by Slovenia and
Croatia. The Slovenian government reacted by cutting off the power supply
to Croatia. Agreement was eventually reached and an international treaty
signed – largely because the Slovenians feared the Croatians would refuse
to pay their share when the plant came to be decommissioned – but the
issue still rankles.
And then there is the sticky issue of borders. Initially Slovenia and Croatia
agreed to maintain the borders as they had been in the federal Yugoslavia.
That was fine for the land boundary, but it had never been necessary to
draw up a sea border. International conventions exist for such matters, but
geography, unfortunately, doesn’t comply. Slovenia, tucked up in the north-
eastern corner of the Adriatic, has just twenty-six miles of coastline, and
only has access to the open sea through the Bay of Piran. That would be
split by strict application of convention, closing off Slovenian waters where
Croatia’s sea border meets Italy’s. Quite aside from the absurdity of a
country with a coastline being technically landlocked, such a resolution
would have a devastating economic impact on the Slovenian port of Koper,
one of the major southern gateways into central Europe. The Slovenians,
anyway, argued on the uti possidetis principle that as they had always been
responsible for the gulf, they should continue to be so.
An agreement was reached whereby Croatia allowed Slovenia free access
to the open sea in return for concessions over the land borders, but it fell
apart when the Croatian parliament refused to ratify it. That the Slovenian
government had revealed it was prepared to negotiate over the land border,
suggesting that line did not quite have the permanence that had been
assumed, only complicated the issue. The situation was hardly helped when
the radical Croatian nationalist politician Slaven Letica visited the disputed
Slovenian peak of Trdinov Vrh decked out as the legendary early
nineteenth-century Croatian hero Ban Josip Jela i . He had intended to ride
up the hill on a white charger, but complications over transportation meant
that the horse didn’t arrive, and he ended up struggling up on foot, only to
be chased straight back down by Slovenian border guards.
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.
The hostility had boiled over on Slovenia’s previous visit to Croatia, for
an ill-advised friendly in March 2002. The BBB lay in wait at traffic lights,
and when Slovenian cars stopped, set about them with baseball bats and
metal bars, leaving several Slovenian fans needing hospital treatment.
Slovenians were horrified – in the unwritten rules of Balkan hooliganism,
attacking ‘ordinary’ fans as opposed to other crews simply isn’t acceptable.
Slovenian flags were burnt in the stadium, and the traditional chant
whereby one half of the stadium would shout ‘Dinamo’ and the other reply
‘Zagreb’ replaced by one side calling ‘Ubi’, and the other answering
‘Janeza’ – ‘Kill Janez’, the equivalent of an English crowd taunting
Scotland fans by chanting ‘Kill the Jocks’.
That violence, in itself, was simply the culmination of a series of incidents
at other sporting events over the previous six months. Croatian fans
travelling to support the slalom skier Ivica Kosteli had clashed with
Slovenian fans in Kranjska Gora the previous winter. Then, in January
2002, the BBB turned up in Zlata Lisica near Maribor to support Ivica’s
sister Janica, and began pelting her rivals with snowballs. This time, the
Slovenians were expecting them, and a huge fight broke out between the
BBB and the Viole.
The worst incident, though, came at the final of the European Men’s
Water Polo Championship, held in Kranj, Slovenia, which, to the dismay of
the organisers, pitted Croatia against Serbia-Montenegro. Around 3,000
Croatians packed the stands, outnumbering by far the 200 Serbian fans who
were segregated into an area next to the enclosure for VIPs – among whom
sat the Serbian foreign minister. Serbia won, at which their supporters were
attacked by a group of Croatians. Slovenian police, in an effort to protect
the VIPs, piled in, and the incident escalated. Chairs and other missiles
were thrown, and a Croatian fan was seen on national television being
dropped from a height on to his head.
Thanks largely to a massive police presence at both games, the play-off
passed peacefully, but the level of hostility was evident in the vehemence of
the celebrations in Zagreb after Croatia had secured a 2–1 aggregate victory.
Fans gathered in Trg Jela i a, the main square in Zagreb, where they were
entertained by the Croatian band Psihomodo Pop. At the end of their act,
the lead singer thanked his audience and then bellowed, ‘Slovenian
pussies!’ which captured the mood perfectly. It is as though without Serbs
on whom to focus their aggression, enemies have had to be found closer to
home. As Katanec said, it seems that the Balkans cannot stop Balkanising.

iv Bosnia-Hercegovina
Walk east along ul Zelenih Beretki through the old part of Sarajevo, and
you come to the Orthodox cathedral. Just up to the left is the Catholic
cathedral, and next to that is the old synagogue. A few yards further on is
the peaceful courtyard that surrounds the Gazi Husrevbey mosque. As my
attention was drawn to their remarkable proximity, I was reminded,
strangely, of the scene in JFK when Kevin Costner points out to his
subordinate that each of the intelligence services in New Orleans has an
office on the same square, as though gathering around the headquarters of
the pro-Cuba organisation for which Lee Harvey Oswald worked. In
Sarajevo, the point of triangulation is the scene of another assassination, the
spot outside the City Museum at which ul Zelenih Beretki meets the river,
where, on 28 June 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia
were shot dead by the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, precipitating the
First World War. A plaque bearing Princip’s footsteps used to be set in the
pavement there, but it was ripped out by Muslims during the war.
In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the novelist Rebecca West chides the
river in Sarajevo for running red, accusing it of prostrating itself too
obviously before pathetic fallacy. Seven decades later, despite having yet
greater and more local carnage to commemorate, the Miljacka runs largely
dark green, the red showing only where the current is strong enough to part
the thick weed that all but covers the river bed. Nonetheless, there is little
danger of anybody forgetting the city’s tragic history. Just along from the
museum, for instance, is the shell of the national library, hit by an
incendiary in August 1992, a hundred years to the day after construction
had begun. Everywhere, walls are dotted with bullet holes and pavements
marked with ‘Sarajevo roses’, the small craters left by mortars, many of
them now filled with red rubber as a memorial to the siege.
 Looking straight across the river from my room in the Saray Hotel I could
see a Muslim cemetery, the uniform whiteness of the gravestones itself
testimony to how many died how recently. Beyond that are the hills, range
upon range surrounding the town. Some are green, covered in pines; some,
those closer to the city centre, the ones that were not controlled by the
Serbs, are brown, stripped bare, every tree taken for firewood after the
electricity supply was cut off.
It was on 2 March 1992 that Serb troops first took up positions in those
hills, and laid siege to the police academy at Vraca above Grbavica, a Serb
district to the south of the river. Three days later, responding to the decision
by the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovi , leader of the main Bosniak
(that is, ethnically Muslim) party, to mobilise the Bosnian civil defence, a
small crowd gathered in the west of the city and marched towards the
centre. As the demonstrators progressed, they were joined by thousands of
others – Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs alike – carrying Yugoslav flags and
portraits of Tito – all protesting against a conflict based on ethnic divisions.
The march swung right over the Vrbanja bridge, towards the Serb
barricades in Grbavica. Shots were fired. One man was hit in the foot, but
the march continued. There were more shots, then a hand grenade was
thrown, and, in panic, the demonstrators dispersed. In the chaos, Suada
Dilberovi , a twenty-one-year-old medical student from Dubrovnik, was hit
in the chest. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the Koševo Hospital,
Sarajevo’s first casualty of war. By the end of the month, the airport had
been sealed and the blockade was complete. 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.
Then, in April 1992 – shortly after the EC had recognised Bosnia-
Hercegovina’s independence – Salihamidži received a call-up to play for
the Yugoslavia Under-16 side against the CIS. The squad was to meet in
Belgrade on 1 May, so, on 30 April, Salihamidži ’s father, Ahmed, drove
Hasan and his team-mate Vedran Peli to Sarajevo to catch a plane to the
Serbian capital. After driving for half an hour, they came to a Serb
checkpoint at Bradina, where they were held up for four hours while
soldiers checked that the documents from the Yugoslav Football Federation
(FSJ) were genuine. By the time they reached Sarajevo, it was dark, but
they hurried to the airport anyway, and caught the last flight that night. By
the following morning, the city was completely besieged.
After the match, which was played in Cyprus, Salihamidži , Peli and
another Bosnian, Edis Mulali , unable to fly back to Sarajevo, stayed in
Belgrade and began to train with Red Star, who offered them contracts. All
three refused, and, ten weeks after returning from Cyprus, realising that the
siege was unlikely to be lifted any time soon, they set out by land, making
their way back to Bosnia through Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia.
Salihamidži continued to train with Turbina, a local club in Jablonica, and
started to work as a bartender, while his father did all he could to find his
son a club in western Europe. It seemed for a while that Salihamidži might
join his father’s friend Jerko Tipuri at Club Bruges, but eventually his
salvation was Ahmed Halilhodzi , the cousin of the future Lille and Paris
St-Germain coach Vahid Halilhodzi . Although born in Jablonica, he had
lived in Germany for twenty years and secured Salihamidži youth terms
with the Bundesliga side SV Hamburg.
All that was needed then was exit papers, which took three months to
procure, after which Ahmed Salihamidži put his son in a car to Zadar in
Croatia, from where he took a bus to Hamburg. Ahmed Halilhodzi ’s wife
Djula was supposed to meet Salihamidži at the bus station, but when he
arrived, he couldn’t see her. Gradually people drifted away, until he was left
alone. Tired and frightened, he went to the bus station’s small café, where,
so intimidated he could barely speak, he whispered the only two words of
German he knew, ‘Bitte limonade.’ The waiter, though, could not
understand him, so he tried again.
 ‘Bitte limonade.’
‘Pa tako mi red brate!’ (‘So, speak to me, my brother!’) the waiter
replied; he was a Bosnian Croat. The two chatted, calming Salihamidži
until Halilhodzi finally arrived half an hour later.
‘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.’
Salihamidži spent six months living at Ahmed Halilhodzi ’s house in
Hamburg, and after that moved into the club’s academy. There, his energy
levels undiminished, he was the only player to represent three different
teams, and impressed sufficiently that when he was eighteen he was offered
a professional contract by Felix Magath, who would coach him again at
Bayern Munich. That meant that he had to leave the academy, so he moved
in with his Spanish team-mate Paco Copado, who lived with his parents and
his sister, Esther. For Salihamidži , though, the war and his family remained
a constant concern. ‘This coach, Magath, is really good,’ he wrote to his
parents. ‘He’s teaching me properly, but he never wants to talk to me. He
never asks if I miss my family, how they’re getting on in the war … I miss
my sister a lot, but also I miss my father’s criticism. He always knew what
the best thing for me was. I think a lot about my mother – I’m a mama’s
boy. I can’t wait to see her, and to sit on her knee.’
In 1995, Copado was transferred to Real Mallorca and returned to Spain
with his parents. They wanted Esther to go with them, but she decided
instead to stay with Salihamidži . The following year Salihamidži played
nine times for Hamburg, making his reputation with a stunning performance
away to Eintracht Frankfurt on the final day of the season. Needing a
victory to qualify for the UEFA Cup, Hamburg won 4–1, Salihamidži
scoring twice and setting up the other two. The following night, he was a
guest on a chat show on ARD TV, who unbeknown to him, had sent a
camera crew to Jablonica on the day of the game to interview his family.
When Salihamidži saw the piece, he began to cry; when, later, contact was
made for a live link-up, he all but broke down.
 ‘My son has three basic characteristics: hard work, ambition and a desire
to progress,’ Ahmed Salihamidži said. ‘He has two faults: he’s too
ambitious and he can’t stand to be beaten. When he’s lost a match, he
switches off his phone for two or three days and nobody can talk to him.
Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe that’s the reason he’s so successful.’
Successful he has undoubtedly been. A year after his debut for Hamburg,
he was in pre-season training with the club in Spain when he received a
telephone call to tell him he’d been called up for the Bosnia-Hercegovina
Under-21 side. ‘He was so happy, he started jumping up and down on the
bed,’ said his father, who seems to regard embarrassing his son as a parental
duty. Esther, you imagine, would not have had to wait long to be shown the
album with the baby photos. After just one game for the Under-2is,
Salihamidži was elevated to the full national team, making his debut in
Bosnia-Hercegovina’s first competitive match, a World Cup qualifier
against Croatia. Bosnia lost 4–1, but Salihamidži got the goal, a fitting
beginning for the player who would become his nation’s footballing
figurehead.
The man who gave him his international chance was Fuad Muzurovi , the
first coach of an independent Bosnia. The Bosnian Football Federation
(NSBiH) was established shortly after the declaration of independence –
initially representing only the Muslim clubs – but it was not until November
1995, two weeks before the Dayton Peace Agreement, that Bosnia-
Hercegovina played their first international – a friendly away against
Albania in Tirana. ‘We set up our headquarters in a hotel in Zagreb, but I
was really doubtful as to whether we should make the trip because I had
only eight players,’ he said. ‘We decided to call up Husred Musemi who
had played in Scotland for Hearts, even though he had already retired. In
the end I had only twelve players and no reserve goalkeeper, and when we
got to Tirana I was worried because the players who were coming from
Slovenia were late. There was a while when it looked like some of my
coaching staff might have had to play.’
I met Muzurovi in the café at the Koševo Stadium, although, it being
Ramadan, he refused anything to eat or drink. A white-haired man with an
intense gaze, he seemed principally concerned to discuss heading with me,
having specialised in the subject as part of his coaching qualification – ‘not
just scoring,’ he explained, ‘but passing and clearing as well’. It took me a
while to work out why he thought I could possibly have anything new to
say on a subject about which he had already written a sixty-page
dissertation, but then I realised it was just a matter of national stereotyping.
‘If you see a good nice goal scored with the head, we say it is a goal in the
English style,’ he told me. ‘A goal with the foot is a Euro-goal’
Muzurovi had to deal with rather more consequential regional divides. ‘I
could only call on players from one part of the country,’ he said, ‘so there
were big problems.’ Muzurovi wanted to pick Risto Vidakovi , who had
played for Red Star Belgrade and FK Sarajevo before the war, and went on
to play for Real Betis in Spain, but he refused. ‘He told me he was scared,’
Muzurovi said. ‘The same with Savo Miloševi – he’s also Bosnian but he
plays for Serbia. Mario Stani was born in Sarajevo, but he played for
Croatia. They were afraid of the reaction of the fans in Croatia and Serbia
and in the places in Bosnia where their parents were.’
During his first years as national coach, when he was also in charge of FK
Sarajevo, Muzurovi ’s main role was simply to keep football in Bosnia
alive, and to that end in 1993 he took his side on a foreign tour of
‘humanitarian games’ to raise money for orphans and veterans, and to raise
awareness of Bosnia’s plight.
Mirza Varešanovi was a player with FK Sarajevo when the war began.
He had served for over a year on the front line when he was invited to
rejoin the squad to prepare for the tour. ‘We trained in the basketball hall,’
he said. ‘Every day going to and from training we were under fire from the
snipers and the cannons, but our love for the club and for football was
bigger than the fear for our lives. It was our way of fighting for Bosnia.
People who lived in Sarajevo under the siege think that maybe it’s not a
good way of behaving during the war, but because we were well known, the
people in the Bosnian presidency thought it was more useful for us to go
abroad and play as the team of the besieged city than to stay back and
practise. We were some kind of Bosnian ambassadors.’
Quite apart from the problems of training, though, there was the issue of
getting out of the city, which, where it wasn’t surrounded by Serb troops,
was sealed by the UN. The squad was split into four groups of seven
players, each of which was placed under the control of a member of the
special forces. ‘The idea was that we would go across the airport on four
consecutive days,’ Muzurovi said. ‘I remember the night we went. We
knelt out of sight in front of the airport, and then the officer with us said:
“Run like hell.” We had to run with our bags on our backs. There was no
stopping for two hundred yards, because we knew if we did we’d be killed.
The middle of the airport was the most dangerous place because that was
where you came in range of the Serb concentration camp at Kula. As we ran
across, they were shooting at us.
‘It is hard for me to talk about this, because my son was with me and I
was afraid for him. He was caught by the UN forces, who gave him a bit of
a kicking.’ Muzurovi ’s son, Mirza, who by that stage had joined us, nodded
ruefully. ‘I went to the players and told them to go on without me,’
Muzurovi went on, ‘but one of the police officers promised he would bring
my son, so we kept going.
‘The UN forces didn’t allow anybody to move across the airport, whether
you were going in or out of Sarajevo. They had a tank with a spotlight, so
when we saw the light we just turned round and made it look like we were
going into the city from the free territory. That was the game you had to
play. We turned round and lay down in the snow, and the UN force picked
us up, put us in a transporter and took us to the free territory.’
‘Like a taxi,’ said his son.
The players, still dodging Serb patrols, crossed the mountains by night,
walking through the snow until, two days after they’d set off, they arrived
in a small village where they were able to hitch a lift in a refrigerated meat
truck to Pazari . From there they caught a bus across the border to Split.
‘Leaving my parents was the hardest part,’ Varešanovi said. ‘I didn’t know
if they’d still be alive when I came back. For six months after leaving I
knew nothing about them. I tried to make contact through the radio station,
and I tried to make phone calls. It’s really hard when you hear the phone
ringing, and you don’t know whether there’s anybody in the house to pick
up and say “I’m alive”.’
Once the squad reached Zagreb, Miroslav Blazevi , at the time the
president of Dinamo Zagreb, provided accommodation and equipment, and
they played Hajduk Split in the first leg of a tour that would eventually take
in fifty-four matches in seventeen countries as diverse as Austria, Saudi
Arabia and Indonesia. They met the Pope in the Vatican, and then, after
beating the Iran national side 3–1 in Tehran, the Iranian president Ali
Akhbar Rafsanjahni. ‘He said to us: “Congratulations on your victory,’”
Muzurovi told me. ‘“This is your way of fighting. This is the best way to
present your young state to the world. I wish you all the best and I’ll see
you in a free Bosnia.’”
Back in Sarajevo, the intervention of the UN Protection Force (Unprofor)
allowed football to begin again in a limited form. In March 1994, despite
knowing Serb artillery was trained on the Koševo, a game was played
between teams representing Unprofor and the city of Sarajevo (Unprofor
lost 4–0), and later that year, the situation was sufficiently improved for the
inaugural Bosnian championship to be played, the top four sides after a
series of regional play-offs meeting in Zenica, away from the worst of the
fighting.
It’s easy enough wandering around Sarajevo to see why, despite
Unprofor’s efforts, playing in the capital was all but impossible. From the
inside, the Koševo, the national stadium and the home of FK Sarajevo,
which was rebuilt for the 1984 Winter Olympics, seems almost untouched,
but outside, where the training pitches used to be, there are graveyards, one
field dotted with the plain white stones of the Muslims, the next with the
more ornate crosses and sculptures of the Catholic Croats. On the other side
of the ground, across a shallow valley itself covered in headstones, stands
the hospital which, somehow, kept operating throughout the siege. The
Grbavica Stadium, the home of Zeljeznicar, the other Sarajevo team, fared
even worse.
It is now one of those quaint little grounds UEFA seem to be doing their
best to stamp out. They have one modern stand, all homogenous blue
plastic, but the end behind the other goal consists of nothing more than a
series of concrete steps cut into the natural banking of the hillside. The
main stand is constructed of delicately carved wood, apparently designed to
resemble a cuckoo clock, and, facing that, is a shallow terrace that would be
unremarkable were it not for the ancient steam engine that sits level with
the halfway line, a nod to the club’s origins in the railways. The stadium
stood on the front line, and when the siege was lifted in 1996, the first thing
players and officials had to do was to clear the pitch of mines.
The area around the Grbavica is typical of those parts of Sarajevo that lay
near the front. Renovation has begun, but it is far from complete. I met
Dželaludin Muharemovi , at the time the captain of Zeljeznicar, in a
pizzeria a hundred yards from the stadium. It seemed a pleasant enough
place, a small fountain bubbling in the courtyard, and it was only when I
came out and happened to glance up that I realised that from the second
storey up the building was a shell, the walls still perforated by bullet holes
and the more ragged tears inflicted by mortar bombardment.
Muharemovi is a popular figure in the city, even among fans of FK
Sarajevo. He was undeniably friendly and charismatic, but there was a
hauntedness about his face, a premature hardness to the lines around his
eyes. Muharemovi had played for Zeljeznicar for six months when the war
began. ‘I joined the special police force to defend the city,’ he said. ‘There
were quite a few guys who stayed in Sarajevo during the siege. We played
football for fun sometimes, but it was difficult because there was constant
danger from snipers and shells and we didn’t have space to play real
football. We started to play properly again in 1994, in the hall of a school
near the centre of town; just a few of us got together and started to do
something with the ball. The biggest problem when they decided to start the
championship was to put the team back together.’
Zeljeznicar finished bottom of the final group – which was won by elik,
a team based in Zenica – but the results were largely academic. ‘That was
the time when we started to think about the other things, not just the war
and the fighting and our duties in the police or the army,’ Muharemovi
explained. ‘Zenica was a more peaceful place than Sarajevo. We weren’t in
danger from snipers or mortar shells, and for the players from Sarajevo it
was a really good feeling to walk on the streets without thinking that
somebody could get hurt or be killed. I started to feel like a football player
again and that was a great feeling, one of the most beautiful things I can
remember.
‘We came out of Sarajevo very hungry. We’d lost lots of weight and we
hadn’t trained a lot. elik were playing in the free territory, in almost
European conditions, and that was why they won the championship. We
could play against them for forty-five minutes or an hour, but after that we
just disappeared from the pitch. The worst thing after the tournament was
the thought that we had to go back to Sarajevo.’ Muharemovi was lucky,
though. NK Zagreb had scouts in Zenica, and they were impressed enough
to sign him.
As the siege continued, so too, remarkably, did the football, often in
absurd conditions. Muzurovi , who brought his FK Sarajevo side back to
compete in the first championship, told me about travelling for a game in
Bihac, taking three days over a journey that would usually take six hours. In
May 1995, a mortar landed on a game taking place in Sarajevo, killing
several players and spectators. Yet, still the football continued, a flickering
of normality and hope in the darkness.
*
Once the war was over, priorities changed, and in 1998, Muzurovi resigned
as national coach. ‘During the war, I wasn’t doing it for money,’ he
explained. ‘I had been doing it for love. But after 1998 when we began to
play seriously, I decided to talk about a professional way of doing things.
The time of love was over, but because they didn’t want to discuss my
contract, I decided to move away. I didn’t have any money, and the only
way I could make some was to move abroad.’
Money is a constant problem. Varešanovi , a wiry, worried-looking man
with extraordinary snakeskin winkle-pickers, was, when I met him, the
youngest sports director in Bosnian football. On the wall behind his desk in
the FK Sarajevo club offices hung two portraits, one of Safet Suši , once of
Paris St-Germain and probably the best Bosnian player in history, the other
of Asim Ferhatovi , a star of the FK Sarajevo side of the sixties who broke a
contract with Be ikta because he missed Sarajevo so much.
They serve now as painful reminders of the good old days, far removed
from the troubles of the present. Varešanovi seemed all but despairing
about the state of his club and Bosnian football in general. ‘You can’t make
progress at the moment,’ he explained. ‘You can only survive. We are like
beggars knocking on the door asking for money. It’s hard for us to do that
because we are a club with a name, with a tradition in Europe. We have to
be honest, and with the hard economic situation in the club we can’t
promise the title every year, but the fans keep the pressure on us.’
The government, he said, should offer tax breaks for those investing in
clubs, provision should be made to set up shops and restaurants at the
Koševo, the league should be reduced in size so there are fewer second-rate
teams, the infrastructure and youth coaching set-up should be improved.
That last point was something Muzurovi stressed. ‘Conditions for work
with young players are far worse than when we won the league in 1967,’ he
said. ‘Behind our best training pitch is a pitch without grass. You see every
day around five to six hundred small kids playing in the dust, without water,
without anything. Sarajevo youth teams are the best in Bosnia, the
champions, but they practise in and have their matches in the mud, in the
dust. Could you imagine how good we’d be if we had a decent pitch, warm
water and everything? I know all there is to know about teaching young
kids to head the ball, and none of this generation can head the ball in the
right way. At dusk you can’t see anything, so they close their eyes and head
the ball in the wrong way.’ It is hard not to sympathise with people as
genuine and passionate as Muzurovi , but there remains a terrible bathos
about his complaints: when training pitches have been turned into
cemeteries, heading technique just doesn’t seem that important.

Since the Dayton Peace Accord, Bosnia has been split into two entities – 51
per cent of the country is administered by the Federation of Bosnia-
Hercegovina (the Croat and Bosniak portion), and the remainder by the
Republika Srpska – while the presidency cycles between each of the three
groups. That speaks more of grudging acceptance than genuine
reconciliation, but, slowly, things are improving, and in that process
football has had a significant symbolic role.
On Easter Monday 1993, the Serbs began shelling Srebrenica, a small
town about two hours’ drive from Sarajevo. Before the war its population
had been around 8,000, but with the influx of refugees fleeing ethnic
cleansing in the surrounding villages that figure had grown to 40,000, most
of whom lived rough. In a twenty-minute bombardment, the Serbs worked
the length of the high street, killing fifty-six people, several of them
children who had been playing on a nearby school football pitch. One boy, a
grim icon of the war, had his eyeballs burst by the force of the shock waves.
Louis Gentile, the only UNHCR official left in the town, spoke of seeing
flesh hanging from the fence that surrounded the schoolyard. Unprofor
withdrew and declared Srebrenica a ‘safe area’. Western governments,
though, allocated only a fifth of the forces it was estimated were needed to
implement such a zone. In July 1995, supposedly reacting to a guerrilla
attack from within what was theoretically a demilitarised area, the Serbs
bombarded and took Srebrenica. As many as 8,500 Bosniak men were then
systematically slaughtered.
 Four years later, a number of Bosniak football teams of various ages
travelled to Srebrenica and played a series of matches against Bosnian
Serbs. It is hard to be entirely sure, but it seems likely that it was on the
pitches on which they played that at least some of the victims for the
massacres were selected. ‘It’s difficult,’ Sadik Vili , the coach of one of the
Bosniak sides, said. ‘I lost ninety per cent of the people I loved in these
hills, but the children are making the first step.’ Again you can’t help but
think what a tiny step it is, but at least it’s in the right direction.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the three nations set up separate
divisions, but from 1998, the top sides in the Bosniak and Croatian leagues
played off for the Bosnian championship. Two years later, it seemed that
agreement had been reached on incorporating the Serbs, and the FIFA
president Sepp Blatter was invited to Sarajevo for celebrations that were to
include a match between a FIFA World Star XI and a multi-ethnic Bosnia.
A month before Blatter’s arrival, though, the Serbs withdrew, claiming they
had not been fully consulted on the format for play-off games. A joint
Bosniak–Croat league nonetheless began in 2000; Serb clubs finally joined
two years later and the NSBiH is now a truly national body – arguably, in
fact, Bosnia-Hercegovina’s most national body.
That speaks of a tentative return to the tolerance for which Sarajevo was
once famous, but ethnic tensions are never far below the surface. In Mostar,
the city whose ancient bridge – for so long a symbol of harmony – was
destroyed in the Bosniak–Croat part of the war, for instance, Croats accuse
Muslims of having hijacked Velež, the club that once represented the whole
community. ‘They took the name because they knew that everybody would
have heard of it, but nobody believes it is the same team,’ explained Ivan
Djorbi , who was so disaffected that he and other Croats resurrected HSK
Zrinjski, a team with Croatian roots that had been outlawed by Tito after the
Second World War for being too closely associated with nationalism.
Luckily for them, the Brijeli Brijeg stadium that had been home to Velež
was on the Croatian side of the bridge, so they struck a legally dubious deal
with the Croat-run South-West Mostar Municipality to rent the ground for
109 years. Not surprisingly, derbies are hostile affairs. At least, though,
there are derbies – or there would be, had Velež not been relegated in 2003
– and Bosniaks and Croats are prepared to compete against each other
again.
Just as significantly, in October 2002, the defender Vladan Gruji became
the first Bosnian Serb to play for Bosnia-Hercegovina. ‘When I heard I was
in the squad, I was the happiest man on the planet,’ he said. ‘It was a real
honour for me.’ Gruji was born in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republika
Srpska, but he insisted all his childhood friends were delighted by his call-
up. ‘Nobody told me not to do it,’ he said. ‘Nor did I have any problems or
threats from the Serb nationalists. It was simple. People from Banja Luka
knew me, they knew my football potential and they all thought I had a place
in the Bosnia squad. It was a logical step for me. For me the national team
will always be the number one priority.’
Once Gruji had taken the step, others followed. First came the Bochum
forward Zvjezdan Misimovi , then Semion Miloševi , Dušan Kerkez and
Siniša Mulina. More will follow, yet Gruji seemed oddly blasé about the
political significance of his decision. That may be because he did not want
in himself to become a cause, but, given the way his discussion of his
international career mingled with the ordinary jargon of football speak, it
appeared that he genuinely did just see his call-up as a logical step. ‘I had
three wishes in my life,’ he said. ‘I have accomplished one by playing for
the Bosnia national team.
‘My second is to play in England. What a league! Lots of attractive clubs,
you can touch and feel the tradition. That country must be the dream of
every football player.
‘The third one is the most important for me. I dream of playing for Bosnia
in my native Banja Luka. I know the situation is still tense, but I also know
a lot of people who want to see the Bosnian national team in Banja Luka’s
City Stadium. We should break the ice with a Bosnia Under-21 match there
first, to see and hear what the reaction is. There are a lot of people who live
in Banja Luka who are really happy when the Bosnia team wins a match,
but you never know who might come to the stadium to make trouble. It’s
probably still too early, but I believe the day will come and I am looking
forward to it.’
If the opposing parties could come together in Bosnia, the feeling is they
could probably come together anywhere in the former Yugoslavia, despite
the continuing ill-feeling between and within the other former republics.
UEFA tend to treat such things with great reluctance, but support is
gradually growing for an Adriatic League such as has existed in basketball
since 2001. ‘I’d be the happiest man in the world if we could have that kind
of league again,’ said Varešanovi . ‘We want to play against Red Star and
Dinamo Zagreb – there’d be more quality, more people at the games. If you
left it to the sportsmen you could easily manage the league, but for now it’s
quite impossible. In every former Yugoslav republic there is too much
politics.’
It is an enticing prospect, having, instead of leagues in which two sides
dominate the rest, a genuine contest with seven or eight major clubs. ‘It
would be great,’ Bili said. ‘There’d be twenty thousand at every game:
more money, better games, better football … It would not be such a step up
in quality for players moving abroad from our league. A foreign manager
could come to Split and watch, say, Hajduk against Partizan; it would be a
good game and maybe he would pick a player. If he comes for Hajduk
against Medimurje, there are a thousand people there, there’s no
atmosphere, and it’s not a great game because of that, so nobody plays well
and he doesn’t come again …’
Quite apart from the benefits for football, it would be a significant symbol
of reconciliation – providing, of course, there weren’t riots every week, and
that is far from guaranteed. Even in basketball there has been crowd trouble
when, for instance, Partizan have played in Split, and the size of a football
crowd naturally makes security concerns all the more intense. ‘It cannot
happen,’ Blazevi said, ‘the wounds are too fresh.’ Nonetheless, advocates
of the plan insist, familiarity would lessen the intensity and perhaps in the
future lead to friendship. After all, for centuries, Muslims, Croats and Serbs
lived together in Bosnia, with long periods of peace between the brief
outbreaks of conflict.
It is not just football that would benefit from greater cooperation. ‘We
can’t sell our shoes to England,’ said Bili , ‘so we sell them to our
neighbours. I would like the Italians to come to Croatia and say “This is the
best coffee in the world”, but it ain’t gonna happen. We have to deal with
our neighbours.’ It may not quite be the federal ideal of which Tito dreamt,
but at least it is harmony of a kind, albeit one driven by the demands of the
market. Football may have played its part in bringing Yugoslavia down, but
it also has a part to play in helping its former constituent parts to live
alongside each other, perhaps even with each other, once again.
 5 BULGARIA
Chaos Theory

Stoyan Georgiev, my fixer in Bulgaria, pulled over on to the hard shoulder

and parked on the grass beside an abandoned gypsy caravan. For several
hundred yards stretching back towards Pazardzhik, the verges and the
central reservation of the dual carriageway were lined by parked cars. This
was a special occasion – Hebar, the local club, were at the time a third
division team and a Cup quarter-final against CSKA was always going to
draw an exceptional crowd – but it must also be acknowledged that
Bulgaria as a whole has yet to embrace the car park.
As we walked to the stadium, conveniently located just off the motorway
to Sofia, Stoyan offered me a peanut, which I refused.
‘But why?’ he asked.
‘I don’t like them.’
‘But you must always eat nuts at football.’
He had a point; everybody else in eastern Europe does, at least those who
aren’t eating sunflower seeds – a peculiarly frustrating habit even to watch:
bite off one end, strip the rest of the shell with your teeth, then chew a
tasteless sliver the length of a Tic-tac and about a quarter as thick. Given
that most fans also smoke, if there is any kind of breeze you come away
from games covered in a heavy dandruff of ash and broken husk.
People talk about the FA Cup as something unique – and in terms of
tradition and scale it is – but no matter where you are, when a small side
reaches the latter stages of a competition, the atmosphere is the same. There
was a real sense of festivity about Pazardzhik that day, the babble of fans
unused to the attention of the nation and determined to make the most of it.
We met a local businessman Stoyan knew from his days doing national
service, who admitted he went to, at most, two or three games a season.
‘But you are from England,’ he kept chuckling to himself, ‘and you are here
to watch Hebar.’
For him and for other local businesses, the day was about more than
football; this was a chance for nationwide publicity. It is not often
Pazardzhik plays host to anything of any significance, and it is still best
known for a misplaced comma. As the Ottomans carried out reprisals
following a failed revolt in 1876, a clerk saved Pazardzhik with a sleight of
punctuation, altering orders to ‘burn the town, not spare it’ to read ‘burn the
town not, spare it’. Two years later, unfortunately, as the Ottomans retreated
in the face of the War of Liberation, the town was torched. Judging from
what I saw, the rebuilding hasn’t quite finished yet, rusting steel poles still
projecting everywhere from the bland concrete blocks.
We were admitted to the press area by an elderly gateman with a face so
lined it seemed to have been shattered by the insertion of his eyes; Bulgaria
does facial wrinkles exceptionally well. We had to stand – not a particular
imposition for me, but presumably a great frustration to the journalists who
actually had to file match reports – as the tiny mobile stand that was
supposed to house us was filled, as so often in eastern Europe, with leather-
jacketed men and their puffa-jacketed, custard-haired girlfriends. They may
not be referred to as nomenklatura any more, but the phenomenon is the
same: the local elite, defined now by financial rather than political
preferment, still hold sway, even if it means getting in the way of people
trying to do their jobs.
Not being able to see much of the game was probably a blessing, ruined as
it was by a dreadful pitch. I know it was a third division ground, but this
wasn’t even close to respectability, more like something on which you’d
graze sheep than stadium turf. It was spongy and drab, pocked with
potholes half-filled with sand. Early in the second half a CSKA player,
defeated by a bobble, contrived to miss an empty net from six yards. Evgeni
Yordanov scored the game’s only goal in the first minute, and inevitably it
followed a defensive error, a Hebar player stumbling over the ball as it
lodged in a penalty-box crater.
So CSKA went through, and, after beating Pirin 1922 in the semi-final,
met their eternal rivals Levski in the final. Twenty years earlier, the two had
met in the most infamous game in Bulgarian history. Appropriately, the
rematch two decades on featured three red cards and a controversial penalty,
as Levski ran out 2–1 winners.

At the height of the summer, Bulgaria can become unbearably hot, but 19
June 1985 dawned bright and fresh, the perfect day, it seemed, for the
perfect Cup final. A fortnight earlier a Bulgaria side made up largely of
players from CSKA and Levski had beaten Yugoslavia 2–1, which, coupled
with a 2–0 defeat of France, the European champions, a month before, had
taken them to the brink of qualification for the Mexico World Cup.
Bulgarian football was in rude health, and the nation, remembering Levski’s
epic 4–3 victory nine years earlier when the two had last met in a Cup final,
was agog.
Levski – named after Vassil Levski, a leader of the Bulgarian
independence movement hanged by the Ottomans in 1873 – were officially
registered in 1914, having been founded by students from the II Mare High
School in Sofia three years earlier. By the time CSKA, the army club, were
founded in 1948, they had already won five league titles. Popular as they
were with fans, though, Levski, presumably because of their success before
the establishment of a Communist government, seem always to have been
regarded with suspicion by the regime. Their association with a
revolutionary hero can’t have helped their standing (a favourite chant
proclaimed: ‘Levski means freedom’) and, in 1950, they were renamed
Dinamo Sofia. Eight years later they returned to their original name, but a
forced merger with Spartak Sofia, the police club, in 1969 spawned Levski-
Spartak, the team of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Thus was established
the classic Communist football duopoly, although CSKA, able to conscript
players from across the country, were by far the more successful and, by the
time of the 1985 Cup final, they had won twenty-three titles to Levski’s
sixteen.
In 1985, though, Levski were on the rise. With such players as Plamen
Nikolov, Nasko Sirakov, Emil Spasov, and, above all, the hugely gifted and
hugely popular Bozhidar Iskrenov, they had already won the league that
season, their first successful defence of the title in thirty-five years.
Victories over Stuttgart in consecutive seasons, first in the UEFA Cup
(although they lost to Watford in the next round) and then in the European
Cup, had led many to suggest the 1985 vintage was the greatest in Levski’s
history.
CSKA, meanwhile, were in transition. Their great generation, which in
successive seasons had ended Nottingham Forest’s and Liverpool’s reigns
as European champions, was in decline, but Georgi Dimitrov endured as
captain and Plamen Markov continued to pull the strings from midfield,
while their side also included the former European Golden Boot-winner
Georgi Slavkov and the nineteen-year-old Hristo Stoichkov. If CSKA drew
hope for the final from his emerging talents, they took rather more from the
news that Iskrenov would miss the game through injury. It was an absence
for which he would later count himself extremely fortunate.
Sofia derbies are always tinderbox affairs, and this one was ignited after
twenty-six minutes as Slavkov gathered a long pass from Radoslav
Zdravkov and clipped a precise finish past Bobby Mihailov, the Bulgaria
national goalkeeper who, incongruously, would go on to play for Reading
and gain fame for promoting a brand of hair-replacement therapy. The
Levski-Spartak players, believing Slavkov to have controlled the ball with
his arm, were incensed, and protested vehemently. Television replays are
inconclusive, but suggest they probably had a case. The referee, Asparuh
Yasenov, gave the goal, but the mood had turned and his grip on the game
was gone. Urged on by a baying, near-riotous crowd, players hurtled into
every challenge. Iliya Voinov added a second for CSKA with a deft free-
kick eight minutes after half time, and then, on the hour, they won a penalty
as Iliya Voinov was fouled.
All composure and self-control gone, Levski’s players swarmed around
Yasenov and, in the mêlée, Mihailov twice struck him. Amazingly, Yasenov
did not send him off and, after some semblance of order had been restored,
the goalkeeper saved Slavkov’s penalty. From then on the ball was little
more than an accessory to a battle, and, after a shocking challenge by
Kostadin Yanchev on Spasov, a full-on brawl broke out. A dozen red cards
could have been shown, but Yasenov sent off only the two initial
protagonists, Yanchev and Spasov.
Sirakov pulled one back for Levski with a penalty seven minutes from
time, but CSKA survived the little football that followed. At the whistle,
Mihailov ran to confront Yasenov and again hit him, prompting another
mass confrontation that seethed for ten minutes before order was restored
and CSKA presented with the trophy.
‘This is a really bad memory for me,’ said Yasenov. ‘I tried to be
completely fair to both teams, but the pressure on referees in such games is
huge. Both the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Internal Affairs
wanted to prove that they were the more powerful, and the players were
given extra motivation from their bosses in uniforms. I probably showed
too many cards during the game. There is a truth about matches like this,
which is that no matter how strict the referee, if the players want to behave
badly, a referee cannot stop them.
‘The fatal moment was that first goal. I’m still not sure whether Georgi
Slaskov used his hand to score, but after that everything went wrong and
the tension was enormous. I think my only big mistake was not to send off
Bobby Mihailov. Nobody tried to put pressure on me before the match, but
it was always difficult to referee matches between CSKA and Levski. We
all knew who was behind the clubs and that we had to be faultless.
Sometimes the psychological pressure leads to mistakes.’
If any joy could be taken in such a tainted triumph, it was extinguished the
following day as the Bulgarian Communist Party acted against the ‘breach
of socialistic morals’ on both sides. Under the headline ‘Let’s eradicate
unacceptable actions in Bulgarian football’ the official Party newspaper,
Rabotnichesko delo, published a list of draconian penalties.
The two clubs were effectively dissolved, losing their status as the teams
of the army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and being renamed: CSKA
as CFKA Sredets and Levski-Spartak as Vitosha. CSKA were stripped of
the Cup, and both clubs were disqualified from the league, meaning that
Trakia Plovdiv (now returned to their earlier name of Botev Plovdiv), who
had finished third, were named as champions. The management of both
clubs was dismissed and the two coaches, Manol Manolov of CSKA and
Vassil Metodiev of Levski-Spartak, were sacked.
It was the players, though, who faced the severest sanctions. Four Levski
players – Mihailov, Spasov, Nikolov and Emil Velev – were banned for life,
as was Stoichkov, for ‘a violation of the socialistic moral, and football
hooliganism’. Four other players, including Sirakov, received suspensions
of between three and twelve months. ‘I felt I’d been killed,’ said Stoichkov.
‘I don’t know why I was punished – probably, because I was the youngest.
They could have destroyed me.’
The biggest losers were Spasov and Nikolov, both of whom saw the pre-
contract agreements they had signed with Porto scrapped by the Bulgarian
Football Federation (BFS). Spasov, an elegant midfielder, was particularly
unlucky. He had never been booked before that final, and had barely been
involved in the brawls. ‘At the time I was thirty and the ban was a huge
blow for me,’ he said. ‘I lived in shock for a month. I even tried to talk with
influential party leaders to let me go to Portugal, but I couldn’t reach them.
Two years later Porto won the European Cup …’
His ban was lifted the following May as part of a series of pardons
delivered by the BFS, as they realised what an embarrassment the World
Cup could become if Bulgaria were deprived of several of their best
players. Ultimately neither Spasov nor Stoichkov made the squad for
Mexico, but Mihailov played in each of Bulgaria’s games in the
tournament, and went on to win over a hundred caps, while Sirakov scored
their late equaliser against Italy in the tournament’s opening game.
Nonetheless, the severity of the suspensions, which could have crippled
Bulgarian football and denied the world the genius of Stoichkov, remains
mysterious.
For Levski fans, the overreaction was a sign of conspiracy, of the state
plotting against them. ‘The aim of the bans was to destroy Levski-Spartak,’
said Velev, who worked in a factory during the twelve months before his
ban was lifted. ‘We had won seven times in a row against CSKA and they
wanted to stop us.’ Given the damage inflicted on CSKA at the same time,
it is not the most convincing argument, but this was not the first time Levski
felt they had been deliberately undermined by the regime.
About fifty kilometres north of Sofia, as the road to Vratsa hairpins through
the mountains, there stands a boulder, perhaps six feet in diameter, set upon
a concrete plinth. It is usually surrounded by a handful of bedraggled
bouquets, for it was on this spot that, at 11 a.m. on 30 June 1971, Bulgaria’s
greatest player was killed. Stoichkov, of course, has good claim to that title,
but in a poll in 2000, it was Georgi Asparuhov – ‘Gundi’ as he was
nicknamed – who was voted the best Bulgarian player of the twentieth
century.
Asparuhov was born in 1943 in Reduta, a suburb of Sofia. He showed
early promise in football, volleyball, basketball and gymnastics, but, when
he was seven, his father, Asparuh Rangelov, registered him with the youth
section of Levski. After a two-hour trial, the Levski youth coach Kotse
Georgiev approached Rangelov. ‘I can’t see what we can teach your son,’
he is reputed to have said. ‘He is a natural born footballer.’ He progressed
rapidly, and won Bulgarian youth titles in 1960 and 1961. At the age of
eighteen, though, he had to fulfil his compulsory national service, and so
joined the military school at CSKA. He played in one friendly for them,
after which their coaching staff decided he was not good enough, and sent
him to see out his time with Botev Plovdiv. It was a huge mistake.
Botev, a club of few pretensions whose sole previous achievement had
been to lose the 1956 Bulgarian Cup final, won the Cup in 1962, and lost in
the final the following year, when they also finished second in the league.
They also reached the last eight of the Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1962–63,
Asparuhov scoring five as Steaua Bucharest were beaten by a 7–4 aggregate
in the first round. Botev did what they could to keep Asparuhov in Plovdiv,
but, in October 1963, he returned to Levski. Asparuhov scored twenty-
seven goals in the 1964–65 season as Levski won the title, their first league
championship success in twelve years, and the honours kept on coming.
Eusebio described him as ‘one of the best I have ever seen’ after a
European Cup defeat to Benfica in which Asparuhov scored three, and he
got another two against AC Milan in the 1968–69 Cup-Winners’ Cup.
Further league titles arrived in 1968 and 1970, and Cups in 1967 and 1970.
Asparuhov’s finest moments, though, came in the national shirt. He
played in the final stages of three World Cups and, against Hungary in
1962, scored his country’s first ever goal in the finals (although they lost
that game 6–1). His most famous goal came against England in a friendly at
Wembley in December 1968. Picking up the ball only a few yards inside the
England half, he drifted through three challenges and finished calmly to
earn Bulgaria a 1–1 draw against the world champions. Strong in the air and
blessed with great technical ability, he won fifty caps and managed 150
goals in 244 league appearances for Botev and Levski, but it was his jovial
charisma and his loyalty to Levski that made him such a popular figure.
Levski faced CSKA in the final league game of the 1970-71 season,
trailing their city rivals by two points, but with a goal difference so inferior
that the title was already decided. Tsvetan Vesselinov scored to give them a
1–0 win, but that was of far less significance than an incident in the closing
minutes as Plamen Yankov tackled Asparuhov. Most now seem to agree
that the challenge was hard but fair, but Asparuhov, uncharacteristically,
retaliated, and both were sent off by the referee Aleksandar Shterev. Yankov
continues to insist that had Asparuhov not reacted, the game would simply
have carried on.
It usually took four days for the disciplinary committee to convene, but
the day after the game, a commission met and banned both players for three
games. And so, two days before the Soviet Army Cup final, Asparuhov and
his team-mate Nikola Kotkov, also an international, left Sofia to play in an
exhibition game in the mountain town of Vratsa, where Botev, the local
club, were celebrating their fiftieth anniversary.
Almost an hour after setting off, Asparuhov’s famous pale brown Alfa
Romeo pulled into a service station near Vitinya. He filled up the tank with
9.20 levs of petrol, but, with typical generosity, did not wait for change after
handing over a 10-lev note. The few seconds that would have taken might
have saved his life. As he got back into the car, a man approached and
asked for a lift. Asparuhov agreed, delaying his departure a fraction. In two
acts of generosity, he set in motion the timetable for his death.
A few minutes later, he turned a blind hairpin, and drove straight into an
oncoming ZIL truck. The front of the Alfa Romeo was destroyed by the
impact, and the car was consumed by flames; all three men inside died
instantly. That same day, an accident in space killed three Soviet
cosmonauts, and Asparuhov’s death did not even make the front page of the
sports newspapers. Over 500,000 mourners, though, turned out for his
funeral.
A tragedy, certainly, but it is hard to place either Asparuhov’s death or the
punishments that followed the 1985 Cup final in a conspiratorial scheme
that would justify Levski’s paranoia. Both, rather, speak of an arbitrary
form of justice by a body more interested in being seen to act than in
coherence or fairness. In that regard, Bulgarian football is hardly unique,
either in the context of eastern Europe or of football’s governing bodies.
The 1985 punishments, after all, hit both sides, and, under their new
names, both CSKA and Levski struggled initially as they were forced to
rely on their youth teams to an unprecedented extent. For Bulgarian football
as a whole, the effects, paradoxically, were largely positive, as young
players were given their chance much sooner by the big two, while the
smaller sides, at last, had a chance at success, making the league far tighter
and far more competitive. In the 1985–86 season the teenaged Emil
Kostadinov and Luboslav Penev made their debuts for CFKA Sredets while
Georgi Donkov, Velko Yotov and Georgi Slavchev got their chance with
Vitosha.
Fittingly, though, the main beneficiaries were Beroe, the team from Stara
Zagora, who had themselves suffered an irrationally severe punishment
from the party. The name Stara Zagora literally means ‘Old Town Behind
the Mountain’, but the actual old town was destroyed by the retreating
Ottomans in 1877, and the present city is a weird amalgam: the
regimentation of streets laid out to a rigid grid plan offset by a pervading
leafiness. My only visit was for a league game in 2002, a dismal 3–0 defeat
to Spartak Varna. Beroe’s relegation had long since been confirmed, and the
ground, a shallow oval of concrete, was all but empty. The only remarkable
thing was a vintage fire engine rusting in the long grass behind one of the
goals.
The club was founded in 1916, but didn’t win promotion to the top flight
until 1954. By the late sixties, largely thanks to the attacking trio of Georgi
Belchev, Yancho Dimitrov and Petar Zhekov, they had developed into a side
good enough to challenge the CSKA and Levski duopoly, even if they
continued to operate at a significant disadvantage. Zhekov, for instance,
scored 101 goals for Beroe, before, as virtually all good players eventually
did, being coerced into joining CSKA, where he scored 144 more to
become the top scorer in the history of the Bulgarian league.
 Crowds of 35,000 were common when CSKA or Levski went to Stara
Zagora, and Levski, in particular, found the trip uncomfortable, failing to
win there between 1958 and 1976. It was their meeting in 1970 that will
always be remembered. Beroe dominated, and took a sixty-fifth-minute lead
through Georgi Belchev. A decisive second eluded them, though, and, in the
final minute, Levski won a corner. Sasho Rostov’s kick looked simple for
Todor Krustev, Beroe’s experienced keeper, but as he went to gather, he was
impeded by Kiril Ivkov and Vassil Mitkov, allowing Dobromir Zhechev to
force the ball over the line. Beroe protested, but the referee, Boris
Trendafilov, gave the goal. As Levski celebrated, Kostov gesticulated
mockingly at the crowd, drawing a hail of bottles and other missiles.
The 1–1 result stood, but, a week later, as Beroe blithely prepared for a
league game against Dunav Rousse, the party announced its verdict. Most
had expected that, at worst, Beroe would have to play some games behind
closed doors, but the party took a strict line, expelling Beroe from the top
flight and imposing on their coach, Atanas Kovachev, who had been treated
with suspicion since an attempt to flee to the USA, a life ban from football.
‘I still can’t understand why we were punished so severely,’ Boncho
Merdzhanov, then Beroe’s president, said. ‘The crowd was wound up by
Sasho Rostov’s behaviour. He was a great sportsman and you didn’t expect
gestures like that from him, but that does not justify the crowd’s reaction. If
there was real justice the fans would have been punished and not the team.
Nobody in the team did anything wrong. We tried to defend the club, but
there was no overturning the party’s decision.’
Nobody was in any doubt that if CSKA or Levski fans had been involved
in a similar incident the party’s decision would have been very different.
Three political leaders from Stara Zagora – General Delcho Delchev,
Stoyou Nedelchev and Hristo Shanov – even approached Todor Zhivkov,
the General Secretary of the party. He, apparently, admitted there had been
an overreaction, but refused to intervene.
A few years later, Krustev was called up to the national side for a game
against France. As the squad prepared in Velingrad, they received a visit
from Boris Velchev, a Levski fan and, at the time, one of the most
influential figures in the party. ‘He approached me, and asked if I knew who
he was,’ Krustev said. ‘When I said yes, he asked if I knew who had
punished Beroe after the game against Levski. Then he said: “So, be
careful. If you play and make mistakes, you will never return to the national
squad.’” The logic of intimidating your own national goalkeeper is
nonexistent, and while there must be a suspicion that Krustev elaborated the
story to emphasise his victimhood, the incident smacks more of leaders
used to governing by fear, almost instinctively attempting to instil that fear
wherever they could.
The season after their enforced relegation, Beroe came back, winning the
second division and scoring a record ninety goals in the process. They
finished third the following season, and went on to achieve notable results
through the seventies, particularly in Europe, where they beat sides of the
calibre of Austria Vienna, Athletic Bilbao and Juventus. It was not until
1985–86, though, that they won their first silverware. It is impossible to say
whether they would have overcome Levski and CSKA on equal terms, but
there can be no doubting that, with such players as Vassil Dragolov, Yordan
Mitev, Milan Kashmerov and Tenyo Minchev, they were a formidable side.
Others may commemorate 12 April as the date Yury Gagarin completed the
first manned space flight, but in Stara Zagora that will always be
overshadowed by the events twenty-five years later. As Halley’s Comet
passed overhead, Vassil Dragolov scored the goal that beat Slavia Sofia and
confirmed their only title. Beroe fans eagerly await the comet’s return in
2062.

The 1985 Cup final was the first agent of change in Bulgarian football, but
there were far bigger upheavals after Zhivkov resigned in November 1989.
Although the Communists, under the new guise of the Bulgarian Socialist
Party, were returned to government in elections the following year, the
atmosphere had changed, and the system changed with it. The punishments
imposed in 1985 were overturned, the league title restored to Levski and the
Cup to CSKA.
Player sales became the only viable way of surviving as state subsidies
disappeared. CSKA made significant gains selling Kostadinov to Porto,
Penev to Valencia and Stoichkov to Barcelona, while Levski sold Sirakov to
Real Zaragoza and Nikolai Iliev to Bologna. Previously players had only
been able to leave Bulgaria once they’d reached the age of twenty-eight, but
with that restriction removed, the summer of 1990 saw an exodus. The
result was a generation of players playing regular high-quality football in
top-class conditions, and that led to an unexpectedly successful World Cup
four years later.
Bulgaria were within seconds of not reaching the USA, but, in injury time
against France in the final qualifier in Paris, David Ginola squandered
possession, Bulgaria broke and Emil Kostadinov struck a gorgeous winner,
qualifying Bulgaria at France’s expense. ‘God is Bulgarian,’ screamed the
commentator on Bulgarian television; Gérard Houllier, the France manager,
was rather less complimentary about Ginola, and never picked him again.
Still, Bulgaria had been in the finals four times before, and had failed to
win a game. An opening defeat to Nigeria suggested more of the same, but
Greece, despite having qualified unbeaten (albeit from a group rendered
significantly easier by the expulsion of Yugoslavia), proved compliant
opposition. They had already lost 4–0 to Argentina, and once Stoichkov had
converted a fifth-minute penalty, the only question was how many. Four
was the answer again, leaving Bulgaria needing a draw against Argentina to
ensure progress as one of the best third-placed sides. They did far better
than that.
Argentina had already qualified, and were unsettled by the departure of
Diego Maradona, who had failed a drugs test following their victory over
Nigeria, but Bulgaria’s performance was hugely impressive nonetheless.
Stoichkov sprinted clear and jabbed past Luis Islas to give them the lead
just after the hour, and, even when Tzanko Tzvetanov was sent off six
minutes later, they held their nerve, wrapping up the game with a last-
minute Sirakov goal. Only an even later goal by Daniel Amokachi for
Nigeria against Greece prevented Bulgaria topping the group.
They went through in second, though, and faced Mexico in the last
sixteen, a game ruined by the Syrian referee Jamal Al-Sharif, who showed
eight yellow cards and nonsensically sent off Emil Kremenliev and Luis
García. Bulgaria eventually went through after a shoot-out, but probably
wouldn’t have needed it had it not been for a highly suspect penalty from
which Mexico had equalised.
And so came the Giants Stadium and Germany, and what their coach
Dimitar Penev called, with few dissenters, ‘the finest day in the history of
Bulgarian football’. Again Bulgaria conceded a penalty, Yordan Lechkov,
the tall balding midfielder, tripping Jürgen Klinsmann. Lothar Matthäus, for
the second successive quarter-final, converted from the spot. The world
sighed, mentally praising Bulgarian pluck and waiting for German
professionalism and experience (that side averaged fifty-seven caps per
player) to kill the game off. When, with seventeen minutes remaining, Rudi
Völler tapped in the rebound after Andreas Möller had hit the post, it
seemed they had. He, though, was ruled offside, and, two minutes later, the
irrepressible Stoichkov, subdued until then, was fouled by Guido Buchwald
and whipped the resulting free-kick into the top corner. Three minutes after
that, the turnaround was complete. Zlatko Yankov crossed high from the
right, and Lechkov overpowered little Thomas Hässler to thump a header
past Bodo Illgner.
Bulgaria could not contain Roberto Baggio in the semi-final and lost 2—
1, but the point was made. Stoichkov was a once-in-a-lifetime genius, and
with the likes of Kostadinov, Lechkov, Sirakov and Krassimir Balakov, few
could dispute that their place in the semi-finals was richly deserved. For all
the economic problems at home, the decline of Communism had brought
hope to football. It couldn’t last.
The changes may have brought money to those clubs with players to sell,
and it certainly improved the level of the national team, but the standard of
the league plummeted. Between 1975–76 and 1989–90, Bulgarian sides
twice reached the semi-finals of European competition, and on four other
occasions made the quarter-finals. In the fifteen seasons after that, no
Bulgarian side got further than the third round of the UEFA Cup.
As elsewhere, the removal of clubs from state control brought a wave of
new owners. At CSKA, Valentin Mihov used the money from the sales of
Stoichkov and Kostadinov to sign such foreign stars as Bernardo Redín,
who had played for Colombia in the 1990 World Cup. Working with limited
resources, Tomas Lafchis coaxed Levski to a hat-trick of titles between
1993 and 1995. For the most part, though, the new owners fell somewhere
between opportunistic and incompetent. At Botev Plovdiv, Hristo Danov
borrowed huge sums to sign the likes of Nasko Sirakov, Bobby Mihailov,
Georgi Donkov and Doncho Donev, but they failed even to qualify for
Europe and were soon on the verge of bankruptcy. At other clubs it was a
similar story. Grisha Topalov at Shumen, Ivo Georgiev at Montana and
Hristo Aleksandrov at Spartak Plovdiv all enjoyed their season in the sun
before financial reality bit.
 Perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly the most successful, of
Bulgarian football’s nouveaux riches, though, is Grisha Ganchev, a former
wrestler who is chairman of Litex, a company that runs a chain of petrol
stations across Bulgaria as well as factories producing juice and coffee.
Litex’s headquarters are on Banat Street in one of the better areas of Sofia.
It is not too far from the city centre and the buildings there are reasonably
modern, yet Stoyan still had to park on a rough patch of earth running down
the centre of the road. In Sofia, cars are stacked everywhere – on corners,
on pavements, on central reservations. Life has gone on since 1989, and the
city is struggling to keep up.
There is a sense of that too with the architecture. Presented with a city in
need of reconstruction after the Second World War, Bulgaria’s architects
seem to have opted to make their capital as functional and as ugly as
possible, despite the considerable aesthetic advantage presented by Mount
Vitosha (the ‘lungs of the city’), which looms to the south. Although work
is being done to restore various historic buildings, Sofia’s most
characteristic building is the Palace of Culture, a concrete monster of quite
staggering awfulness that, to the shame of all concerned, was built as
recently as 1981. Everywhere, grey-brown concrete predominates. Litex’s
offices are no different: nothing in the grim exterior suggests it houses one
of Bulgaria’s most successful companies.
Inside is a different matter. The walls are practically tiled with paintings,
most of them, in a variety of styles, depicting traditional Bulgarian
landscapes. Ganchev takes seriously his role as a patron of the arts. In his
office, though, football predominated. The walls were dotted with pennants
from a host of European clubs, while above the desk was pinned a large
poster of the squad.
Ganchev is a short, energetic man, who, even sitting behind his desk,
seemed to exude a muscular swagger. He was born in a small village near
Lovech, and, in 1996, decided to take over his local club. Until then Lovech
had spent most of their seventy-five years puttering along in the second
division, changing name with far greater regularity than they did division:
founded as Hisarya they went through Todor Kirkov, Torpedo, Kurpachev,
Yunak, Osam and Lex before taking the Litex prefix. Why them? I asked.
Why not one of the big two? ‘It is easy to be a fan of Levski or CSKA,’
Ganchev said. ‘It is more beautiful when it is your own team.’
 Others had gone into clubs with the same attitude, but what set Ganchev
apart was that he had no illusions that he could make money from Bulgarian
football. ‘It’s impossible to make a profit at the moment,’ he said. ‘I
invested because I love football and because I wanted to stimulate growth
in my home town.’
He did not, though, go in with any sentimentality, immediately sacking
every player on the staff apart from Vitomir Vutov, a goalkeeper who was
still playing regularly for the club eight years later. His radical approach
was successful and Litex were promoted in 1997, finishing six points clear
at the top of the second division. They even beat Levski 2–0 in the first leg
of a Cup match, only for a controversial late winner from Dimiter Ivankov,
the Levski goalkeeper, to rob them of victory in the second leg.
That summer Ganchev declared his ambition to turn Litex into serious
title contenders – the empty words of another megalomaniac chairman
drunk on early success, many thought – but Ganchev proved as good as his
word. He replaced Ferario Spasov, the coach who had earned promotion
and whom he had known since their days at sports college together, with the
experienced Serbian Dragoljub Bekvalac, but then, apparently from a sense
that things just didn’t feel right, sacked him three weeks into the season,
despite Litex recording two wins and a draw from his three games in
charge. Coaches in Bulgaria have a lifespan only slightly longer than that of
mayflies, but this, nonetheless, was shocking. ‘I believe eighty per cent of
success comes from the coach,’ Ganchev said, and appointed Dimiter
Dimitrov, who had done much to make Naftex Bourgas a force in the mid-
nineties. Litex drew their two hardest games, away at CSKA and Levski,
and at the midway point of the season were top of the table.
They began the spring season well, but, having signed Radostin
Kishishev, who went on to play for Charlton, from the Turkish side
Bursaspor, fielded him before he was properly registered. Levski protested,
and the two games in which he had played – draws away to Levski
Kjustendil and at home to Levski Sofia – were awarded as defeats against
Litex. Lesser teams might have crumbled, but Litex were galvanised, and
took ten points from their final four games to win the title, the first in their
history, by five points. ‘In Lovech they partied all night,’ said Ganchev.
‘There were people still drunk when they went into work the next day.’
 After a UEFA Cup defeat to Grazer AK the following season, Dimitrov
quit to take charge of the national side, at which Ganchev turned again to
Spasov. If anything, things got even better on the pitch, as Litex hammered
CSKA 8–0 on their way to another title. Again, though, Europe was their
undoing. Glentoran proved no obstacle in the first preliminary round of the
Champions League, and, when Widzew Łód were beaten 4–1 in the home
leg, Litex were already dreaming of a glamorous qualifying-round tie
against Gabriel Batistuta’s Fiorentina. They conceded three in the second
half in Poland, though, and were eliminated on penalties. ‘I’m ashamed of
our performance and can’t cope any more,’ said Ganchev, and withdrew
from the club. The Albania internationals Alban Bushi and Altin Haxi, and
the Bulgaria midfielder Stoicho Stoilov, also left. Litex became plain
Lovech again, and the momentum was lost.
A few months later, though, Ganchev returned. ‘I love this club, and I love
this city,’ he said. ‘Our main aim will be to entertain the fans; titles are not
on the agenda. If we play well, the trophies will come.’ The Cup arrived
immediately, at which Ganchev restored the Litex name. ‘After the run
we’d had,’ he said, ‘the club deserved it.’ Success proved harder to come by
in his second spell, and it wasn’t until 2004 that Litex won another trophy,
beating CSKA in the Cup final.
Was the increased competition, then, indicative of a rise in the general
standard of the Bulgarian league, evidence that one man with money
couldn’t buy his way to the title? ‘No,’ said Ganchev, shaking his head
slowly. ‘Maybe joining the EU will raise the economic level, but at the
moment it will be at least ten years before a Bulgarian side reaches the
group stages of the Champions League.’
Whether that will be Litex or not is doubtful. In 2005, Ganchev, in a
conscious effort to raise his club’s profile, appointed the respected Israeli
Yitzhak Schum, who had previously led Panathinaikos in the Champions
League. After just six months, though, he departed, muttering grimly about
the infrequency with which he was paid. It happens that I know two of the
middlemen who helped establish contact between Ganchev and Schum.
Needless to say, despite various verbal promises, neither has received a
penny for their efforts. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular
dispute, the general pattern is common enough: good intentions undermined
by sharp practice.
 6 ROMANIA
Anghels with Dirty Faces

Injury time was approaching when Gavrila Balint headed what he believed
was the goal that would give Steaua a 2–1 victory over their city rivals
Dinamo in the 1988 Romanian Cup final. As he raised his arms in
celebration, though, the linesman raised his flag: offside. What followed has
come to symbolise both the madness of football under the Ceau escu
regime and the intensity of the rivalry between Dinamo and Steaua.
According to most witnesses, Valentin Ceau escu, son of Nicolae and
president of Steaua, signalled from the Communist Party box for his players
to leave the field. ‘A crazy day, a show of power,’ Mircea Lucescu, the
Dinamo coach that day, told me. ‘I said to their players, “Come on, please,
you are professionals,” but they still went off. We were left standing around
for half an hour waiting for somebody to tell us what to do.’
Taking some kind of initiative, the Dinamo defender loan Andone
dropped his shorts and waved his penis in protest at the Communist Party
box, an act for which he received a one-year ban from football. The referee
eventually abandoned the match and the Cup was presented to Dinamo. ‘We
went home,’ Lucescu said, ‘but the next day they took the Cup off us
because Ceau escu had decided that Steaua had won. Steaua were a tool of
the generals and they were afraid that Dinamo had grown too powerful.’
Needless to say, Valentin Ceau escu’s version of events is rather different.
‘The players came off the pitch, but it was the coach who ordered them off,
not me,’ he said. ‘My father was sat next to me and he asked me who’d
won. I didn’t know myself. Dinamo were then given the trophy so I went
into their dressing room to congratulate them. Their coach just shouted at
me: “You don’t decide the result.” Then he threw the trophy at me and
asked me to leave. In the end it was so ridiculous that I didn’t care who’d
won.’
Valentin still lives in Bucharest, where he works as a nuclear physicist. He
always seemed a little withdrawn, very much the odd Ceau escu out, the
white sheep of the family; so much so, in fact, that it is widely believed he
was adopted. These days he is a thin, nervous man, a chain-smoker, his face
creased with worry. Having worked at the Nuclear Physics Institute in
Magurele and studied at Imperial College, London, he had no intention of
pursuing a career within the Communist Party, and, if modern sentiments
are to be believed, appears to have been widely admired for his modesty.
Where his younger brother Nicu was noted for his flash tastes and travelled
in expensive chauffeur-driven cars, Valentin preferred to drive himself in a
humble Dacia. He was also a genuine football fan.
In 1983, Steaua were struggling. Five years had passed since they had last
won the title, and they were in danger of being eclipsed not only by
Dinamo, but also by Universitatea Craiova, who won the league in 1980
and 1981 and, in 1982–83, reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Cup.
Concerned, General Constantin Olteanu, the head of the Army Ministry,
which ran the club, appointed Valentin as president, whether in hope of
family favour or in recognition of his gifts as an administrative leader, it is
hard to say.
Valentin soon became famous for the long hours he worked, despite
opposition from his parents. ‘They didn’t think being head of a football
team was good enough for a president’s son,’ he explained. ‘I missed a
family Christmas one year because I was on tour with the team and they
were very unhappy.’ The relationship he built up with the players, though,
would ultimately be his salvation: after Valentin’s parents had been shot,
Marius Lacatus put him up in his apartment in Bucharest. ‘Valentin was our
friend,’ the forward explained. ‘I was happy to help him after all he had
done for us.’ And he had done a lot. Laszlö Bölöni, who has played more
times for Romania than anybody except Gheorghe Hagi, maintains that
Valentin was ‘the best manager I ever worked for’.
In Valentin’s first season, Dinamo secured their third consecutive league
title. From then on, though, it was a story of Steaua domination. They won
five successive championships and, in 1986, became the first eastern bloc
side to lift the European Cup. They also effectively became the first club
from the East to be run on professional grounds, agreeing a sponsorship
deal with Ford. Indeed, had it not been for the intervention of Nicolae Ceau
escu, who decided the plan was too capitalistic, Steaua would have sold
Hagi to Juventus in 1988 in return for funding to establish a Fiat car plant in
Bucharest. Their critics point out that the military habitually rewarded
Steaua players with televisions, video recorders and other consumer goods
that were not readily available, but the Securitate, the secret police, were
doing just as much to promote Dinamo.

Romania is not an easy country to like, an uncomfortable mix of the

appealing and the appalling. Bucharest at night is roamed by packs of stray
dogs, the offspring of pets released when Ceau escu forced families into
flats, and there are times, walking down urine-streaked alleys between
hideous concrete apartment blocks, when you wonder if it may be the most
depressing capital in Europe. Then you turn a corner, and in front of you is
a church of exceptional beauty.
Bucharest’s most famous landmark is similarly ambiguous. The Cas
Poporului (House of the People), an enormous folly built by Ceau escu as
his home and the parliament, is, with a height of sixty-four metres and a
surface area of 265,000 square metres, the largest building in Europe. There
is no doubting the quality of the craftsmanship of the interior or the
impressiveness of the scale, but as a whole there is something monstrous
about it. It is estimated Ceau escu spent $3billion on his House of the
People, while the people themselves rotted in squalid flats. Ceau escu,
believing great capitals had to stand on a waterway, even diverted the
Dâmbovi a river to run through Bucharest, but these days the channels run
shallow, ugly concrete trenches cutting round the south of the city centre.
Everywhere in Romania, the beautiful coexists with the grim.
 I have had some very good times in Bucharest, but I have had some very
bad. Nowhere have so many people tried to rip me off. It is as though
decades under Ceau escu – probably the most capricious of all the post-
Stalin European dictators – has bred a cynicism, a belief that as life is
unfair, you might as well take what you can get when you can get it. That
said, I have also met with acts of spontaneous kindness; the problem being
that you get so used to the cheats that you become aggressively suspicious
of people who actually do just want to help. The result is a perpetual sense
of confusion and mistrust, and, if the football is anything to go by, with
good reason.
Lucescu, warm, affable man that he is – apart from on the subject of the
English tomato, which he abhors: ‘bland, tough, tasteless, like eating damp
cardboard’ – is also utterly paranoid, seeing conspiracy at every turn. He
was Romania national coach between 1982 and 1986, during which time he
led them to a first European Championship finals and would have taken
them to the Mexico World Cup had England and Northern Ireland not
drawn their final qualifying game 0–0. England were already through; the
point meant that Northern Ireland joined them. ‘I had a big problem with
England and Northern Ireland,’ Lucescu said. ‘They arranged to draw at
Wembley …’
This is a regular charge in Romania, and, in fairness, Brian Glanville
acknowledges in The Story of the World Cup that there may have been a
barely conscious desire on the part of the English players to help a team that
was, in many cases, made up of their clubmates, but the accusation that the
game was fixed in any organised manner can be refuted simply by watching
the video. I tried to point out to Lucescu that Pat Jennings had had a superb
game for Northern Ireland, making two outstanding saves, but he was
having none of it. ‘I know very well what happened,’ he insisted. ‘I had a
big problem with Harry Cavan, who was a vice-president of FIFA and
president of the Irish FA. I went to London to arrange the dates, and I said
that the last match had to be between the best two sides, Romania against
England. We had been at the European Championship in France, and
neither of them had, so normally it would be our right, but immediately Mr
Cavan said no. He said they had already arranged it, and they put us to play
the first match against Northern Ireland for the inauguration of the stadium
in Belfast [actually, the inauguration of the new North Stand]. All of FIFA
was at Windsor Park – Blatter, Havelange, everybody – and everything was
unfair. We lost 3–2, but it was a match of shame because they scored from a
penalty and they scored from an offside position.’ Not for the only time in
Romania, I found the belief in conspiracy shaping the evidence. Northern
Ireland’s goals that day actually came from an Andone own goal, Norman
Whiteside and Martin O’Neill – no dodgy penalties necessary.
Whatever the validity of those claims, in what followed Lucescu seems to
have genuine cause for grievance. ‘Ten days after they won the European
Cup,’ he said, ‘Steaua came to Dinamo for the derby. Valentin came with a
flag to celebrate their success, but we won 2–1. Ten days after that, we
played them again in the final of the Cup, and that time we won 1–0. They
went mad. In August, Romania played [a European Championship
qualifier] against Austria. We won 4–0, but after that they decided to kick
me out. The system was like that – I had too much popularity. Valentin
wanted it to be only him, nobody else.’
Dinamo, though, were hardly innocent victims before the Steaua
juggernaut. Most disgracefully, the Securitate bugged Steaua’s offices
throughout the eighties. ‘They knew everything,’ said Colonel Nicolae
Gavrila, who became head of Steaua’s department of football development
in 1985. ‘One day General Tudor Postelnicu [the head of the Securitate]
told Constantin Olteanu [the Army Minister] everything he had said in a
private conversation with Anghel Iordanescu [the assistant coach], just to
prove their power.’
Before derbies, it became common practice for the Securitate to try to
unsettle the Steaua club captain Tudorel Stoica by having the local police
arrest his father, a notorious drunk, in his home town of Galati. Dinamo
would also regularly try to obstruct transfers, attempting, for instance, to
hijack Stefan Iovan’s move from CSM Resita in 1981 by blackmailing him
over a woman he had left pregnant two years earlier. Steaua’s efforts to sign
the defender Adrian Bumbescu from Olt Scornice ti were similarly
frustrated for several weeks by the simple tactic of ordering club officials to
send Bumbescu to visit his family in Craiova every time Steaua’s
representatives came to visit.
Scornice ti themselves provide an interesting footnote to the history of
political interference in Romanian football. Under Florin Halagian – a
coach who has been accused of beating his charges, and would commonly
kick under-performing players off the team bus on the way back from away
games – the side from Ceau escu’s home village miraculously earned three
successive promotions in the late seventies. On one occasion they put
seventeen past Electrodul Slatina in the second half to win 18–0, having
erroneously been informed that their promotion rivals Flacara Moreni, who
were 2–0 up at half time, were leading 9–0. Scornice ti itself, having being
selected as one of the flagships of Ceau escu’s programme of
collectivisation, whereby rural communities were forced into apartment
blocks and their cottages knocked down to increase space for agriculture, is
now a concrete mess, but it does boast a 20,000-capacity football stadium, a
gift from the dictator to his birthplace. The football team was expelled from
the league following the Revolution, but re-formed and now spends most of
its time bobbing around the third division.
All the chicanery, though, should not be allowed to disguise the fact that
Dinamo and Steaua were two exceptional sides, as Steaua’s European Cup
triumph proved. ‘Each of us knew exactly our jobs, and we had such a
perfect idea of where to pass the ball that if the coach had asked us to play
with our eyes closed we could have put the ball where we needed to,’ Iovan
explained. ‘We were like a perfect car. Great credit has to go to Bölöni. I
don’t know how he did it, but he could always find the perfect pass; he was
the key to our stability. We were a team that was very attacking and we
often forgot about the importance of defending.’ Arie Haan, the great Dutch
player whose Anderlecht side were hammered 3–0 in Bucharest in the
second leg of the semi-final, said he had never seen a side play with such
rhythm.
Come the final, though, they found themselves infected by nerves. Given
they were playing Barcelona in Seville – an ‘injustice’ as Lacatus put it – a
defensiveness was perhaps only to be expected. Wherever they had played,
though, Ceau escu’s restrictions on travel would have ensured Steaua’s fans
were greatly outnumbered: only 1,000 Romanians travelled to Spain – 200
Steaua officials and 800 Communist Party members. All of them were first
vetted by the Securitate, but forty nonetheless defected.
Steaua anyway did not travel well: the away legs in the four previous
rounds had yielded only a win, a draw and two defeats. Night-time troubled
them, too, and so Steaua spent their final training sessions practising not at
the Ghencea, their home, but at the 23 August Stadium, the only ground in
Romania at the time with floodlights. To make conditions in Seville as
similar to home as possible, they did the equivalent of donning hair shirts
by flying their own food out with them – chicken, beef, potatoes and
cheese, and some bottles of Jidvei, a Romanian wine. At the last moment a
few bottles of Romanian champagne were included, a wise addition.
The longer the final went on, the more frustrated Terry Venables’s
Barcelona became. Steve Archibald, who had missed the semi-final with a
hamstring injury and was a controversial recall in place of Pichi Alonso,
was far from his best, and the tensions in the Barcelona squad were exposed
as Bernd Schüster, the temperamental German playmaker, stormed straight
out of the stadium after being substituted. In contrast to Venables’s
tribulations, the Steaua coach Emerich Jenei, with seventeen minutes of
normal time remaining, pulled a masterstroke, introducing the thirty-six-
year-old Iordanescu, who had not played a game all season, for Lucian
Balan. The switch steadied them, but Steaua still did not have the resolve to
push for a win and the game went to penalties.
Mentally in tatters, Barcelona proceeded to produce the worst sequence of
penalties ever seen in a major tournament shoot-out. Mihai Majearu,
Steaua’s usual penalty-taker, saw his kick saved by Javier Urruti, but the
Steaua goalkeeper Helmut Ducadam fisted away José Alexanco’s effort.
Urruti saved again from Bölöni, then, for Barca, came Angel Pedraza.
‘After the first kick, it was a psychological battle,’ said Ducadam. ‘I was
almost sure that Pedraza would go for the same corner as Alexanco, and I
was right.’ Four penalties gone and all missed, Lacatus dispensed with
subtlety, and his powerfully struck shot bounced in off the crossbar. For
Ducadam, the mind games continued. ‘For the third kick I figured Pichi
Alonso would think there was no way I would dive to my right again,’ he
explained. ‘I gambled that he would also place it to my right and he did.’
Gavrila Balint made it 2–0, meaning that Marcos had to score. ‘The fourth
penalty was the hardest,’ said Ducadam. ‘I wasn’t sure if I should dive to
my right again or go to the left. I reckoned Marcos would hit it to my left,
and again I chose correctly.’
A hero then, but Ducadam soon became a figure of controversy, as he
vanished that summer. Truth is an elusive commodity in Romania, and it is
still hard to be sure exactly what happened. There were rumours that he had
been shot (or, in some versions of the story, had his arm lopped off) by one
of Ceau escu’s henchmen, jealous of the car he had received as a bonus for
winning the European Cup, but five years later Ducadam returned, briefly –
alive and with two arms – to play for Vagonul, a team in Arad. His absence,
he said, had been caused by a life-threatening blood disorder that required
an intensive course of transfusions. He has always been distinctly uneasy on
the topic, though, and there are still those who believe Ceau escu himself
had him beaten up – cruelly attacking the arms that made him great – after
he complained at a dinner held in Steaua’s honour that a car was not
adequate reward for the glory he had brought to Romania.
Steaua’s performances in Europe in the following seasons – a semi-final
in 1987–88 and a defeat to Arrigo Saachi’s AC Milan in the final a year
later – indicate just how good a side they were, but it is hard not to
sympathise with Lucescu’s frustration. Steaua went a ludicrous 104 games
unbeaten in the domestic league, and there is no question that they were
aided in that run by referees, some games stretching on several minutes
over the ninety. That said, neither was it coincidental that three Dinamo
forwards – Dudu Georgescu, Rodion Camataru and Dorin Mateut – won the
European Golden Boot in the eighties, having been assisted by opposing
defenders for the greater good of the Ceau escu regime. In a 5–4 win over
Dinamo, Rapid fans happily highlighted the lunacy of the situation,
chanting ‘Try harder Camataru, you must score at least twice.’
As Lucescu has it, the fact that Dinamo were able to beat Steaua 3–0 early
in the 1989–90 season was a ‘sign that the generals were losing their grip’.
By December, that grip had gone entirely. On the seventeenth, the
Securitate and the army confronted demonstrators in Timi oara as they
broke into the offices of the local Communist Party and hurled portraits of
Ceau escu out of the windows. That afternoon, the Executive Political
Committee of the Communist Party ordered the army to turn their guns on
protesters, and the revolution had its first casualties. Two days later, though,
the army in Timi oara went over to the side of the demonstrators. On 20
December, Ceau escu arrived back in Romania from a state visit to Iran,
imposed martial law in Timi County, and arranged to speak at a large rally
in front of the Central Committee building in Bucharest to prove his power
remained undiminished. Factories from around Bucharest, as they had often
done before, sent their most loyal employees to hear Ceau escu speak, but
when they arrived in the Pia a Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (what is now Pia a
Revolu a Revolu iei) they were told Ceau escu had changed his mind and
that they should go home. Then, though, the factories were told the speech
would be given at noon, and that they should assemble more workers.
Necessarily, the new crowd was not so carefully hand-picked as the first –
perhaps in this instance there was a conspiracy – and Ceau escu’s words
were drowned out by booing. Demonstrations continued through the night,
and the following morning protesters converged once again on the Central
Committee building. Again Ceau escu tried to speak to the crowd, but this
time, as well as the booing, he was pelted with missiles. As demonstrators
surged past police into the building, Ceau escu and his wife escaped by
helicopter from the rooftop. They headed first for their villa at Snagov,
about twenty-five miles north-west of Bucharest, but, feigning engine
trouble, the pilot brought the helicopter down by the side of the main road
from Bucharest to Târgovi te. A car was commandeered, but on reaching
Târgovi te, Ceau escu and his wife were arrested. They were tried on 24
December, and executed by firing squad the following day. Five months
later, Dinamo did the double.
The intriguing thing about Ceau escu’s escape attempt is that he should
try to flee to Snagov in the first place. It seems likely that he thought he
could fly by private jet from there to a country willing to offer him asylum,
but there were those who saw a Gothic significance in the fact that in the
stone church on the island in the middle of Lake Snagov is the tomb of Vlad
epe – Vlad the Impaler – the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince and
national hero, who, legend has it, will rise again in his country’s hour of
need. That is not to say anybody actually thought Ceau escu, who actively
played up an association with epe , going to resurrect his political career
with an army of the dead, but Snagov was a logical symbolic rallying point.
The undead are pretty much unavoidable in Romania, a land where
vampires were an integral part of folklore long before Bram Stoker took the
arbitrary decision to set Dracula in Transylvania. (Stoker never visited
Romania, his first draft was set in Austria and Dracula’s castle – which the
novel places on the Borga pass and the tourist industry equates with the
castle at Bran – was based on Cruden Castle in Aberdeenshire. The
common association of epe with Dracula is just wrong, based on the
coincidence that he was nicknamed ‘Dr culea’ – son of Dr cul – after his
father was awarded the Order of the Dragon – ‘Dr cul’ in Romanian – by
Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1431.) Appropriately, it was tracking down
the ghoulish tale of a footballer’s grave in Craiova that first took me to
Romania.
For all Ceau escu’s plans for collectivisation, the south-west of the
country remains a rural backwater. Having taken the ferry across the
Danube from Vidin in Bulgaria, I caught a train from Calafat to Craiova.
It’s a journey of only about fifty miles, but it took over three hours as we
crawled along, stopping at virtually every field to pick up more labourers,
all of whom, it seemed, were ruddy-faced, drenched in sweat and more than
a little tipsy from the bottles of beer that were passed around the carriage. It
all felt rather as though I’d blundered into a Thomas Hardy novel.
On eventually reaching Craiova, I realised I’d left my notes on the grave
back in Sofia. Not the best move, admittedly, but I was confident I knew the
name of the graveyard, so I walked out into the car park, located a cluster of
taxis, and asked, ‘Cimitirul Dorobân ia?’ The first driver looked blank, and
shouted to his mates. Attracted by the thought of an Englishman and his
inevitably bulging wallet, a group of about a dozen drivers quickly
gathered. ‘Cimitirul Dorobân ia?’ I said again. More blank looks.
‘Anglais?’ one asked.
‘Oui, anglais.’
None of them spoke English. We tried in French (or as close as I get to
French), but I didn’t know the word for cemetery, or grave, or tomb. One of
them rattled through a list of languages: ‘Deutsch? Español? Italiano?
Russki? Portuguese?’ ‘Nein. No. No. Niet. Não.’
So I resorted to the universal language of mime, casting dignity to the
winds and falling back into the dust, hands pressed together over my chest
in the manner of a dead Crusader.
‘L’hôtel?’ the linguist offered hopefully.
I got to my feet and drew with my hands the shape of a cross.
‘L’hôpital?’
‘Non, après l’hôpital. Après le mort. Je voudrais visiter la place pour les
personnes mortes. Je voudrais visiter Florin Piturca.’
‘Piturca’, it turned out, was the password.
‘Ah, Piturca. Cimitirul Dorobân ia.’
‘Comme j’ai dit.’
 The roads deteriorated rapidly as we drove away from the station, and it
wasn’t long before they were little more than dirt tracks. We passed the odd
donkey-drawn cart, and a couple of kids on battered old bikes, and then,
when we had left the town centre far behind, there appeared on the horizon
a smudge of dust. As we drew closer, it became apparent that it was a
column of people, maybe 200 strong, at the head of which, sombrely
swinging a thurible, strode a priest, dressed entirely in black. As we slowed
and passed to one side, the procession opened out, and I saw, lying flat on
his back on a low wooden trailer, another priest: huge, black-robed, grey-
bearded and very obviously dead. As I say, you don’t have to go far in
Romania to be struck by the macabre.
I had been slightly concerned about finding the tomb once I got to the
cemetery, but I needn’t have worried. As soon as I walked through the gate
I saw Piturca, standing cast in bronze upon his plinth, left arm crooked
across his chest, right arm straining backwards, as though to steady himself
for a surge on to his right foot. Just by his right foot was a ball, made not of
bronze, but of black and white plastic, the original having been stolen in
2000. It looked lightweight, totally out of place, rather as though Roberto
Carlos were lining up a free-kick with a penny-floater. Alongside the statue
stood the tomb, the size of a small house, marked on one corner with a
plaque reading ‘Ap. 20’ – the number of the apartment in which he had
lived in Craiova.
At twenty-seven, Florin Piturca was a well-respected striker for the
second division side Drobeta Turnu Severin, nowhere near as good as his
cousin Victor would become with Steaua, but a solid enough journeyman
nonetheless. On 10 December 1978, he scored in his side’s 2–1 victory over
Metalul Bucharest, but, on returning home, he told his wife he was feeling
ill and went to the bathroom. Ten minutes later, he was dead.
His father, Maximilian, a local cobbler, was distraught, and spent what
little money he had in establishing a lasting monument to his son. The night
Florin was buried, Maximilian stayed in the tomb. He went on sleeping
there every night until his death in 1994. ‘That was my husband’s house,’
Florin’s mother, Vasilica, said. ‘He worked every day, and every night he
went to the cemetery to sleep by his son in the mausoleum.’ When I was
there Vasilica, a woman perhaps best described as formidable, was trying to
get the local council to reverse their decision to refuse her the right to run
an electric charge through the statue. ‘It is the poor people who stole the
ball,’ she said. ‘If we replace the ball and electrify the statue then
everybody knows that anybody who touches it will die.’
She was equally forthright in her beliefs about what happened to her son.
‘We wanted to know the cause of his death,’ she said. ‘We went to the
hospital to see the results of the autopsy, and we were advised to go back
six months later. When we did, though, they told us it was too late. Some of
Florin’s team-mates told me that at half time the team doctors gave the
players some tea to drink. I believe there were drugs in the tea.’ The theory
exists that, desperate for sporting success, the Ceau escu regime used mid-
ranking sportsmen as guinea pigs before passing stimulants on to top-level
athletes. Whether that is true or not, Zoia Ceau escu, Nicolae’s daughter,
was sufficiently upset by the mausoleum on a visit in March 1989 that she
decided to have it knocked down, and sent in the bulldozers.
The cemetery’s gravekeeper, a short excitable balding man who, when he
realised I spoke no Romanian, jabbered on in a composite of English,
French and Italian, remembered the night well. ‘Maximilian came out,’ he
told me, ‘covered in dust and shaking his fist. “A curse on you and your
family,” he had cried. “In a year I will be back and you will be dead.”’ Nine
months later, Zoia’s parents were executed. By the following March, the
tomb had been rebuilt, and Maximilian was back, sleeping alongside his
dead son. He fell ill with a heart problem in 1994, but, despite knowing he
was dying, chose to stay with his son. ‘I have waited for this day for a long
time,’ he said. ‘I am very happy that soon I will see my son again.’

The issue of drugs has never really gone away. Almost quarter of a century
after Piturca’s death, Romanian football was erecting another monument to
another player who died in mysterious circumstances. Catalin Haldan was
only twenty-four when, on 5 October 2000, left out of the national squad,
he travelled with Dinamo Bucharest to play a friendly against the second
division side Oltenita. A few minutes into the second half, he laid a ball off
to a team-mate and keeled over. ‘He fell first to his knees, stayed there for a
second and then fell to the ground,’ said Dinamo’s goalkeeping coach
Gheorghe Nitu, who was the first to reach the stricken player.
Haldan was rushed to a local hospital, and a helicopter arranged to fly him
back to Bucharest, but, twenty minutes after collapsing, he was pronounced
dead. After an autopsy Vladimir Belis, the director of the Bucharest
Forensic Institute, issued a statement saying Haldan had not died as a result
of taking stimulants. It was later discovered that Dinamo had not submitted
all of his medical records and, more suspiciously, that Haldan had not
attended the mandatory three-monthly medical examination the FRF had
insisted upon for all players following the death of the Astra Ploie ti
midfielder Stefan Vraboriu in similar circumstances two years earlier. Belis
then found that Dinamo had had all their players checked at the Medsana
clinic in Bucharest six weeks earlier, and went to the police to force
Dinamo to hand over their records, which showed that Haldan had serious
defects to both his heart and his liver. Belis promptly passed the autopsy
results on to the National Anti-Doping Commission, which confirmed that
Haldan had hepatitis C at the time of his death. The commission’s director,
Ioan Dragan, subsequently claimed that his symptoms indicated the use of
anabolic steroids. Shockingly, Haldan was the fourth Romanian player to
die on the pitch in the space of two years, while, ten days before his death,
his team-mate Florentin Petre was diagnosed with hepatitis C. Whether he
had taken any stimulants or not, the hope in Romania was that Haldan’s
death and the outpouring of grief that followed would help raise awareness
of the problems of drugs in sport. It does not bode well, though, that one of
the pall-bearers at Haldan’s funeral was Adrian Mutu, who, of course, was
sacked by Chelsea for cocaine abuse.
It was only in June 2001 that Romanian football produced its first positive
drugs test: the Arges Pite ti forward Adrian Neaga and their reserve
goalkeeper Cristian Buturugu failing tests following a game against Rapid
Bucharest. Both were later exonerated when it was decided that the entire
squad had been ‘inadvertently’ contaminated by vitamin supplements given
them by the club’s medical team. It hardly helped Neaga’s protestations of
innocence, though, that the week before providing his positive test he had
become the first player in Romanian history to refuse to give a urine
sample, claiming that ‘the conditions weren’t right to give an accurate
result’.
The drugs issue is just part of the mire into which Romanian football has
blundered. There may not actually be more match-fixing in Romania than
in other countries in eastern Europe, but they certainly do it with more
chutzpah. The national side, elevated by such technically gifted players as
Gheorghe Hagi, Ilie Dumitrescu and Gica Popescu, may have won admirers
for the fluency of their football – the victory over Argentina in the 1994
World Cup stands out – but for most of the nineties Romanian domestic
football was dominated by the so-called Cooperativa, a loose cartel of
around a dozen clubs who would exchange home wins to ensure that none
were ever relegated. It became so pointless for teams from outside the
Cooperativa to try to compete that in 2001 Baia Mare, who had won
promotion from Divizia B to Divizia A, sold their place in the top flight to
Bacau, who had been relegated. The two big Romanian sports papers,
Gazeta Sporturilor and Prosport, for many years fingered Jean Padureanu
and Gheorghe Stefan, presidents of Gloria Bistri a and Ceahlaul Piatra
Neam respectively, as the ringleaders, but no significant action was taken.
Stefan – ‘Muttley to Padureanu’s Dick Dastardly’ as one journalist put it –
was also accused of assaulting match officials and intimidating
representatives of the league, charges he hardly bothered to refute. ‘I
believe in a sense of fairness and justice,’ he said. ‘I always try to defend
my team, whatever the circumstances may be. I understand that on
occasions I have broken the rules, but when you are emotionally involved in
football it’s very difficult to keep your emotions in check. When I feel that I
and my team have been wronged I believe that I have to make a stand.’
His hold, though, is strong. Those few players who were prepared to
speak about the match-fixing seemed genuinely frightened, whispering their
responses as though afraid club officials may hear. ‘The players are
employed by the football clubs and because we’re not in a strong position
financially it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for us to reveal
things that might jeopardise our careers,’ the Ceahlaul defender Leo
Grozavu explained. ‘We just have to accept that this is the way things are.
Only when Romanian football players become financially secure will
corruption disappear.’
In July 2000, Stefan finally got some kind of comeuppance as he was
suspended for a year by UEFA after an attempt to bribe the French referee
Stéphane Moulin with prostitutes ahead of an InterToto Cup third-round
match against Austria Vienna. ‘We provide hospitality for all our guests,’
Stefan blustered, before claiming that Moulin had got the wrong end of the
stick and that the four women who had approached him were merely folk
singers. ‘In the last two years we have hosted teams like Juventus and
Mallorca and the referees have been pleased by what they have seen here.’
The response of the Romanian Football Federation (FRF) was
characteristically farcical. Mircea Sandu, the FRF president, who, when he
isn’t withdrawing his foot from his mouth, seems to spend most of his time
washing his hands of important issues, decided it was all Moulin’s fault. ‘I
think Monsieur Moulin is a queer fish,’ he said. ‘A girl stayed at his table
for a second and suddenly he was in a hurry to go back to his hotel.’
That Sandu, a scandal-magnet who, more appositely than might have been
thought at the time, was nicknamed ‘the Godfather’ in his playing days,
managed to win four successive FRF presidential elections is little short of
miraculous. One night in November 2002, to take only the most notorious
incident, his daughter, Raluca, a professional tennis player, was in the
Bucharest nightclub Office with her boyfriend Walter Zenga, the former
Italy goalkeeper who at the time was coach of National, and a number of
other members of National’s coaching staff, including the former Chelsea
defender Dan Petrescu. At around midnight, the club was raided by police,
who made straight for their table, and discovered on the floor two wraps of
cocaine – one under the table, and one under Zenga’s chair. ‘It was
fantastic,’ said Petrescu, who seems to have found the whole episode
hilarious. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen the police do something like this, and
it was just like being in the movies. They had their faces covered in black
masks and all of them had guns. I was not afraid, as I knew that my wife
and I are clean and have never tried drugs. Walter was very nervous but I
explained he had nothing to worry about and so he cooperated with the
police.’ Zenga and Raluca were released without charge the next morning,
vehemently protesting their innocence. A police spokesman explained that
the raid had been authorised following a tip-off from someone inside the
club. Later that day, to the delight of the Romanian tabloids, it emerged that
Raluca’s ex, the tennis player Ion-Ion iriac, had also been in Office that
night, with his new girlfriend, the pop star and Playboy model Ileana
Lazariuc.
Those parts of Romanian football that haven’t been written by Edgar
Allan Poe, it seems, have been dreamt up by Thomas Pynchon: paranoia is
universal. In the bar before the Steaua–Dinamo derby at the Ghencea in
March 2002, most of the talk was of whether Chelsea’s 3–2 win over
Fulham a couple of days earlier had been fixed. To Romanians, a late goal,
especially when the other team has just equalised, is always suspicious. I
was slightly surprised anybody actually cared about the probity of the
English game, but it turned out they were more concerned about their fixed-
odds coupons. I recognise that most of the Romanians I know have a
background in football, but the habit still seems disproportionately popular.
Whenever I was in the Gazeta offices, they seemed to speak of little else,
and I still get occasional Friday e-mails enquiring into, for instance, the
state of Kevin Kyle’s back before they decide whether to put down
Sunderland v Gillingham as a home win.
The previous year I’d been to the reverse fixture at the tefan cel Mare on
a raw April afternoon, a remarkably venomous game in which the local fire
services got so sick of dousing flares as they were thrown on to the running
track that they turned their hoses on the front rows of the stands.
Unyielding, Dinamo fans, numbed by their hatred of Steaua and then by the
delirium of a late own goal that gave them an unlikely victory, clung
soaking to the wire fencing, hurling coins and abuse at anyone who came
within range. Remarkably, in the year that followed, the clubs had managed
to ratchet up their mutual loathing another notch.
As I waited for the train to Bucharest on the morning of the game, a
tracksuited figure sitting next to me – an off-duty croupier called Ascamio –
asked for a light. He was a Universitatea Craiova fan, but he said he was
looking forward to watching the game, and hoping, for once, that Steaua
would win or at least get a point so that National might take the title. In the
previous two decades, only Craiova in 1991 and Rapid in 1999 had broken
the Dinamo-Steaua duopoly. ‘If National won the league,’ Ascamio said, ‘it
would show that you do not need money to win. It would show that the
days of corruption are over.’ With average gates of only around 2,000,
National simply couldn’t bribe their way to the title as Steaua, Dinamo and
Rapid were all accused of doing during the nineties.
He spoke of the ‘days of corruption’ as though they were a new
phenomenon, but it is hard to know when Romanian football was not
corrupt. Perhaps there was a brief golden age between the overthrow of
Ceau escu and the hijacking of the game by the Cooperativa, perhaps
Dinamo’s double in 1990 and Craiova’s victory the following year were –
amid the chaos of the change of regime – honest, open triumphs, but
certainly by the mid-nineties, in thrall to the financial might of the club
presidents, football was as bent as it had been when the army and the
Securitate were wrangling for preeminence. If you walk through
Bucharest,’ Bölöni said to me, ‘you will see many bad things. It is very sad,
but the truth is that many people in Romania are very poor. Romanian
football is also very poor, so perhaps there is corruption. When I was
national coach, if I had found that one of my players was involved in the
corruption, I would have expelled him from the side; but it is almost
impossible to find out.’
Proof has always been the problem. Senior internationals such as Hagi
and Popescu made repeated calls for the FRF to clean up the game,
journalists made their accusations, and, for most of his first three terms in
office, Sandu continued to mumble sheepishly about a lack of evidence. In
November 2001, though, a mishit cross from the balding Slovenia forward
Milan Osterc looped over Bogdan Stelea to give his nation victory over
Romania in a World Cup qualification play-off. After three successive
appearances at World Cup finals, suddenly everybody recognised there was
a crisis. The prime minister Adrian Nastase instructed the sports minister
Georgiu Gingaras to put the game to rights, and he initiated a police probe
into the finances of every top-flight club, pledging the biggest investigation
into corruption in Romanian football since 1980, when 130 referees and
forty players and club officials were charged with match-fixing.
At the same time, Sandu was re-elected – unopposed – for a fourth term as
president of the FRF, and vowed to eradicate match-fixing from Romania
before he stood down in 2006. He gathered the club presidents together,
and, as though conducting some bizarre (and presumably lengthy)
temperance meeting, had them confess their previous crimes. ‘It had all got
out of control,’ he said. ‘They said some astonishing stuff in there but no
one named any names.’ He then declared ‘Zero Hour’ on match-fixing.
‘From the spring, we will shoot corruption dead,’ he said. ‘This is a war.
There is no alternative if we really want to stop the corruption.’
Others were cynical. ‘Until the entire leadership of Romanian soccer is
changed, the history of corruption will repeat itself,’ said Popescu. ‘It is like
a thief stealing ten times then announcing suddenly he is a reformed man.
How are you supposed to believe him?’ Sandu, though, was determined to
appear adamant. ‘We will not await any proof,’ he said. ‘A fixed match can
be seen with the naked eye, and we will punish those who are throwing mud
against the cheek of our game.’
And they didn’t wait for any proof, docking Dinamo and Ceahlaul Piatra
Neam three points each for allegedly fixing Dinamo’s 2–1 win on the
opening day of the spring half of the season. ‘They are a mafia,’ blustered
Stefan. The week before the game, the Steaua coach Victor Piturca had
claimed that a Dinamo victory had been agreed as part of the transfer deal
that took the striker Costel Ilie to Bucharest over the winter break. ‘It will
be fixed,’ he said. ‘It will be a huge scandal. Normally it would be a very
open game, and any result would be possible, but everything that people are
saying about it not being a fair game will come true. I don’t want to accuse
Dinamo, but the only time I’ve seen them play this season was their 2–1
win over Gloria Bistri a, which was a very strange game.’ Within three
months, though, Dinamo’s punishment was overturned on appeal.
A Steaua coach attacking Dinamo, of course, was nothing new – nor were
accusations against Gloria and Ceahlaul – but the tensions between the two
Bucharest giants were given an added spice by the increasing involvement
of Giovanni Becali, by far the biggest agent in Romanian football. It is
alleged that before the Revolution he carried out a series of robberies and
frauds across Europe with another Romanian, Dan Albanu, who was killed
in a car crash in 1990. The pair followed the Romania national team
whenever they played away, and became well known to players.
Accordingly, he was ideally placed to become an agent when the markets
opened up following the collapse of Communism. His company,
International Sports Management, acted for a number of high-profile
players, among them Hagi, Popescu and Stelea. Until 1999, he was also a
firm friend of Victor Piturca.
What happened that autumn is far from clear, but Piturca and Becali
became sworn enemies. Piturca, at the time, was national coach, and, in
2000, he led his side, which included the ageing Hagi, to the finals of the
European Championship. Quite reasonably, he insisted that those players
who had played in all the qualification games should receive larger bonuses
than those – Hagi among them – who had missed the vital away win over
Portugal. Hagi protested, Piturca refused to back down, and, having
committed the ultimate sin of offending Hagi, Piturca was sacked before the
finals and replaced by Jenei.
 The two, it was fairly well known, did not get on. Piturca had been, if not
the star, then at least the leading scorer of Steaua’s European Cup-winning
side, but, in that 1985–86 season, a nineteen-year-old Hagi, then at Sportul
Studentesc, beat him to the top-scorers’ title by a single goal. Hagi joined
Steaua on a one-match loan for the European Super Cup final against
Dynamo Kyiv later that year, but, after scoring the winner with a deflected
free-kick, never went back. Valentin Ceau escu has always insisted that he
never wanted to sign Hagi, saying he was ‘too much of an individual’, but
he nonetheless became the fulcrum of the team built by Iordanescu, who
had succeeded Jenei that summer. Piturca’s team became Hagi’s team,
prompting rumours of jealousy, and matters were hardly helped when
Piturca led the goalscoring charts by one going into the final game of the
following season, only for Hagi to rack up an unlikely six to take the title.
Even allowing for that, though, Hagi’s complaint was odd enough that
questions began to be asked. Why would Hagi, who is noted for his
generosity, quibble over a sum that, alongside the wealth he has
accumulated from the game, could have meant little to him? Could it be,
people wondered, that Hagi was put up to destabilising Piturca by
somebody with a deeper agenda, by, for instance, Giovanni Becali? Shortly
after Piturca’s appointment as coach of Steaua, the conspiracy theorists
noted, Becali declared himself a Dinamo fan and initiated the spending
spree that saw, among others, Ovidiu Stinga, Florin Pirvu, Bogdan Lobont
and Dorin Semeghin join the club.
Giovanni Becali’s cousin Gigi was, at the time, the majority shareholder
of Steaua, and, just to add another strand to the tangle of interrelationship,
Hagi was once close enough to him to serve as best man at his wedding.
Hagi, of course, is a Steaua legend, and, since ending his playing career, has
regularly made clear that he would love to return to his former club as
coach, something that would have left Giovanni Becali with a significant
influence over Romania’s two biggest clubs. That season, Hagi had
repeatedly attacked Gigi Becali, Piturca and the other major investor, Viorel
Paunescu. ‘They won a title, but we all know how that came about,’ he said.
‘In Europe they did nothing. Steaua is a team that is honoured throughout
Europe. Three men cannot simply turn up, invest a few dollars and think the
club is theirs.’
 As Steaua’s form slipped after Christmas, and fans began to call for
Piturca’s head, Hagi stepped up his attack. It was after a goalless draw
against National, who had been reduced to ten men with half an hour
remaining, that matters came to a head as fighting broke out among
frustrated fans. ‘Even when they have an extra man, Steaua cannot win
these days,’ Hagi said. ‘The team is nothing, and the fans are upset so they
called for the coach and the directors to resign. Fans all over the world do
that if they are angry with the performances of their team. It’s a democratic
means of expressing an opinion and it must be respected. But what I saw
against National when the crowd started whistling and jeering was truly
amazing. I saw fans being beaten by Gigi Becali’s men. How can you beat a
fan because he doesn’t like how the team plays? In the Bernabéu, if 100,000
fans were waving their white handkerchiefs to protest about the
performance of their team, can you believe that the Real Madrid president
would send in gorillas to beat them up because the coach doesn’t like to see
the fans criticising him or the players?’
Steaua, of course, categorically denied the claims. ‘I don’t understand
where this attitude against me has come from,’ said Gigi Becali. ‘He is
godfather to my children, but that doesn’t stop him having something
against me. I still love him, because I understand he is just a weapon in the
hands of others. Maybe nobody else will ever be born with his talent, but it
seems now that he wants to be president of the country, run all of football
and have people look at him as God. The only place he would ever beat me
is on a football field. It would have been better if he had stayed out of this
storm and held on to his crown as the king of football. I will not be evicted
from Steaua, not by a hundred Hagis or by NATO troops.’
Amid all the sniping, the form of both sides suffered. Dinamo went on a
run of one win in seven games, while Steaua took just four points from six
home games. In Romania, though, there is no such thing as poor form, and
Gigi Becali blamed Nicolae Grigorescu, the head of the Romanian
Referees’ Commission, whom, he said, had had it in for him since a night in
a casino when he refused to lend him £7,000. ‘I used to think he was an
honourable man,’ he said. When Grigorescu dismissed the allegations, he
went further. ‘I would never have believed he could be such a good actor,’
he said. ‘Perhaps he missed his calling by becoming a referee.’
 Piturca, meanwhile, decided those members of his squad who had signed
up to Giovanni Becali’s agency were to blame, and, calling them ‘traitors’,
dropped the defenders Iulian Miu and Valeriu Bordeanu and the forward
Ionel Danciulescu. ‘Giovanni wants to ruin Steaua and make it easy for
Dinamo to win the title,’ Gigi Becali said. ‘Anybody on his books is for
Dinamo and against Steaua. He says he just wants to help players move
abroad, but that is a lie. I know of players who have refused to sign for
Steaua because Giovanni wants them to sign for him.’
Ostracised by Steaua, Danciulescu decided to return to Dinamo, whom he
had left in acrimonious circumstances in 1998. His efforts against
Manchester United in the third qualifying round of the Champions League
in 2004–05, when he was denied a goal only by Mikaël Silvestre’s
determination to bundle the ball over the line himself, marked the final
stage of his rehabilitation, but, back in 2002, Dinamo fans were deeply
suspicious. A month after the derby, following some particularly vicious
barracking during an away game at Bacau, he drove his jeep off the Ciurel
Bridge and into the River Dâmbovi a. Luckily the vehicle landed the right
way up, and he was able to swim to safety. Newspaper reports later claimed
he had been drunk and that hospital staff had provided a urine sample for
him; he maintained he was simply distressed.
At the derby itself, Danciulescu was booed by both sets of fans as he
jogged out to warm up, setting the tone for an evening of needle and
controversy. The game finished 2–2 and featured ten bookings and two red
cards, but, in the bar afterwards, two incidents dominated conversation:
Dinamo’s opener, which followed a gratuitous foul by Claudiu Niculescu
on the Steaua goalkeeper Martin Tudor; and a second-half handball that
could have given Steaua a penalty. The referee, Cristian Balaj, everybody
told me, must have been bribed, so that Dinamo would win the title. I
pointed out that, while Niculescu’s foul was obvious and really should have
been given, the penalty appeal was a joke, the ball having been lifted into a
defensive hand from a matter of inches. What about the game the day
before, I was asked, when National drew disappointingly with Sportul
Studentesc? Wasn’t it obvious that the fixers had been in, that little National
had been paid off? Well, not really, I said: National had hit the woodwork
twice, and it seemed to me that they’d just had one of those days. I didn’t
understand, I was told: I was a naïve foreigner. In Romania, teams don’t
have just one of those days.
Three weeks later, National lost their final game of the season 2–1 in
Craiova, while Dinamo beat Bra ov 4–0 to take the title by two points; if
their punishment for match-fixing against Ceahlaul had not been
overturned, National would have been champions. Ceahlaul were relegated
in 2004, suggesting the grip of the Cooperativa is weakening, and Rapid
won the title again in 2003, but, essentially, by hook or by crook, the
domination of the big two continues.
 7 THE CAUCASUS
Wandering Rocks

i Georgia
On 23 May 2001, as he did every day, Levan Kaladze took a taxi to the
Tbilisi Railways Hospital where he was training to be a doctor. On this
particular morning, though, as he walked from the cab to the hospital door,
he was approached by three men in police uniform. There was a brief
altercation, and then the men dragged him to their car, a white Niva,
bundled him inside and sped off. Police later traced them as far as
Mtskheta, just to the north-west of Tbilisi, but then the trail ran cold. That
night, Kaladze’s aunt received a telephone call directing her to a drop where
the kidnappers had hidden a letter written by Levan. In it, he said he would
be freed for a ransom of $600,000. Levan, whose brother Kakha had left
Dynamo Kyiv for AC Milan four months earlier, has not been seen since.
The Ministry of the Interior believed Levan was being held in the Pankisi
Gorge, a lawless area of Akhmeta, north-east of Tbilisi, long identified by
Russia as a bolt hole for Chechen rebels, and by the USA as an al-Qaeda
stronghold. Three Red Cross volunteers and two Spanish businessmen were
taken hostage there in separate incidents in 2000; none have ever been
found. In Levan’s case, though, for a couple of years at least, the kidnappers
remained in touch. ‘There were several telephone calls and anonymous
letters,’ Kaladze explained to me through Zaza Tsuladze, who was
onefootball’s correspondent in Georgia. ‘Then they sent a video in which
Levan was blindfolded, begging for help. I was terrified that I would say
something that would stop us getting Levan back.’
Eventually the kidnappers offered a deal, by which Kaladze’s father Karlo
was to deliver $65,000 in cash to a wood near Khobi, a city in Samegrelo,
in the west of Georgia, an area that has seen a huge influx of refugees from
the separatist fighting in Abkhazia. Karlo went to the rendezvous at
midnight, but when he asked to speak to Levan, the kidnappers panicked.
For Karlo, the episode was just another example of the incompetence of the
Georgian police. ‘I was supposed to deliver the money, and the police were
supposed to be waiting,’ he said. ‘But they failed, and they have never told
me why.’
Kaladze’s frustrations grew to the extent that he considered renouncing
his Georgian citizenship to become a Ukrainian. His father threatened to set
himself on fire in front of the Georgian parliament, calling it ‘a disgrace’
that the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – at the time, the president
of AC Milan – seemed more interested in the case than the Georgian
authorities. Two years after Levan’s kidnapping, his family agreed to pay
the kidnappers $200,000, plus an extra $100,000 if he was released within
twenty days. They paid out the first instalment, but Levan is still missing.
Georgia is a dangerous, volatile place. I was fortunate that when I was
there in June 2001, Georgia’s relationship with its separatist regions had
entered one of its less fraught periods. A group of journalists who went to
Tbilisi in March 2003 to cover Georgia’s European championship qualifier
against the Republic of Ireland, though, were held up at gunpoint on their
first night and spent the rest of the trip holed up in their hotel. That is a
shame, for Tbilisi is a lovely city, more Levantine than Soviet in feel, its
hodge-podge of pleasantly shabby streets dotted with palm trees. That said,
there is something unsettling about a place where the proprietor of a
twenty-four-hour Internet café leaves his semi-automatic pistol lying on the
counter. Most of my time in Tbilisi passed in an alcoholic haze, which is
probably the best way to experience the Caucasus. Perhaps it is a need to
assert their values given the proximity of the Muslim world, perhaps it is
simply that there isn’t much else to do, but Georgians have elevated
drinking into a way of life, and, while there, I lived their way.

I went to Tbilisi partly to visit Zaza and his wife Natya, who translated for
him, and partly to cover WIT Georgia Tbilisi’s InterToto Cup-tie against SV
Ried of Austria; the idea being to discover whether there was anywhere in
the world that the competition had a purpose. WIT were forced to switch
the game to the vast Boris Paichadze Stadium in central Tbilisi, after UEFA
decided their usual home, the Armazi Stadium, was unsuitable. This kind of
thing usually irritates me: clubs, I think, have a right to play at home, and if
that means millionaire fancy-dans for once having to change in a concrete
outhouse with only two showers and a cracked urinal for comfort, well, so
be it. So, when, after a visit to the cathedral at Mtskheta with Zaza and
Natya the day before the game, I discovered that the Armazi lay just off the
road back to Tbilisi, I insisted on going to have a look. I hold my hands up:
UEFA were absolutely right.
There was a set of goalposts at each end, and there were white lines
wobbling through the grass, but, that aside, the only thing to mark it out as a
stadium was a sliver of cracked concrete terracing, no more than six or
seven steps deep, that staggered along the bank by one touchline. Empty
football grounds, haunted by voices that echo back through the generations,
can be profoundly melancholic places, but the Armazi didn’t even feel
empty. There was nothing to contain the nothingness: no stands, no terraces,
not even a fence to act as a line of demarcation. It was just one field among
many, devoid of cows, admittedly, and with slightly shorter and less patchy
grass than the fields surrounding it, but essentially just another block of
green in a rough swathe stretching all the way to the hill on which the
church of Jvari perches. It was an undeniably beautiful spot, but it wasn’t a
football ground.
We hadn’t been there long when the groundsman, clad incongruously in a
shiny white Liverpool away shirt, scuttled up to see what we were doing.
Natya explained I was a journalist, at which he stretched his arm towards
the rutted, puddled pitch, and grumbled about a lack of resources. If the
surface at the Armazi is typical, it is hardly surprising Georgians have a
reputation for being superb dribblers who never pass the ball. I felt a little
embarrassed for the groundsman, and would have left, but he insisted on
showing us inside the concrete shack that served as dressing rooms. There
were the odd trappings of professionalism – training bibs and cones strewn
on the floor, a magnetic tactics board propped against the wall – but it’s
hard to imagine many British schools still put up with such spartan
conditions. The groundsman led us into the showers, and, with a mighty
yank, turned a lever on the wall. From two of the six shower-heads thin
streams of water dribbled on to the concrete floor. I held my hand out, and
wasn’t at all surprised to find the water was cold.

The Paichadze, if anything, is an even sadder place than the Armazi. WIT –
who are named after their sponsors, a company that, among other things,
produces pet food – have never been anything. They are a small club with
no history and no fans and the fact they play in a no-stadium is, although
depressing, at least logical. The Paichadze is a different matter. It is one of
those vast concrete bowls so beloved of the Soviets, constructed for
Dinamo Tbilisi in 1976 as they approached the height of their powers.
When Dinamo beat Liverpool in the European Cup in 1979, it is estimated
that 110,000 fans, many of them uniformed police and army, squeezed on to
the low wooden benches. These days, the benches lie in disrepair, splintered
and broken, and replaced in the only part of the ground that is open by a
few thousand desultory plastic seats. Downstairs, on the concourse, set into
one of the massive struts that support the stand, is a photograph of
Dinamo’s 1981 Cup-Winners’ Cup-winning side. With such talents as
David Kipiani, Vitali Daraselia, Ramaz Shengelia and Alexander Chivadze,
that was a great side – capable of fluid, technical football of the highest
order. Two decades later, a case study in post-Soviet corruption and the
perils of privatisation, they were struggling to survive.
Dinamo were founded in November 1925 by a merger of police, army and
navy teams, and were run by the Interior Ministry, who believed a football
team would help to promote fitness in the secret police. Stalin was a
Georgian, and Lavrenty Beria overtly supported Dinamo, but that was not
the advantage it might have seemed. It was not until 1964, eleven years
after Stalin’s death and Beria’s subsequent execution, that Dinamo won the
title for the first time, a failing that many Georgians believe to have been
politically motivated. Boris Paichadze, after whom the stadium is named,
was the great star of Dinamo in the years around the war, an elegant
forward who earned the nickname ‘the footballing Caruso’ after a
particularly impressive tour of Romania. Three times he inspired Dinamo to
second place in the Soviet championship, three times to third, and three
times he played on the losing side in Soviet Cup finals. ‘Once I said to
Beria that it would have been better if people could have said that Dinamo
had been champions of the USSR several times,’ Paichadze wrote in his
memoirs. ‘He went mad, and screamed that the champions could only be
from Moscow or Kyiv, and said that we should just accept coming second.’
It was not until the late seventies that Dinamo enjoyed a sustained spell of
predominance. Strongly supported by Eduard Shevardnadze, then the head
of the Georgian Communist Party and later the president of an independent
Georgia, and coached by Nodar Akhalkatsi, they won two Cups, the League
and the Cup-Winners’ Cup in the five years that followed the construction
of the Paichadze. West Ham fans who were there still speak in awe of
Dinamo’s 4–1 win at Upton Park in the Cup-Winners’ Cup quarter-final in
March 1981. Dinamo went on to win the competition that season, and
reached the semi-finals as defending champions, but, later that year,
Daraselia, who had scored the winner against Carl-Zeiss Jena in the 1981
final, was killed in a car crash (Kipiani, who had provided the assist, died in
a similar way twenty years later), and their period of achievement came to
an end.
Independence, though, brought immediate success, as Dinamo dominated
the Georgian championship, becoming the first European side to win ten
successive league titles. There may have been triumph on the pitch, but off
it affairs were sliding into chaos. Dinamo were privatised in 1992, with the
Ministry retaining a tenth of the club through the Dinamo Sports
Association, a further tenth going to Merab Zhordania, a former player who
was appointed president, and the remaining 80 per cent to Merab Ratiani,
the president of Bermukha, a company specialising in transportation and the
manufacture of chocolate. He was a member of the Mkhedrioni, the
nationalist paramilitary and political organisation established by Jaba
Ioseliani in 1989, which, presenting itself as a modern equivalent of the
Georgian guerrilla groups that fought against Persian, Ottoman and Russian
rule – the word translates roughly as ‘horsemen’ – was instrumental in
deposing Zviad Gamsakhurdia as president and replacing him with
Shevardnadze in 1992.
 The first scandal wasn’t long in coming. It wasn’t until 1993 that the
champions of the independent Georgian league were admitted to European
competition, by which time Dinamo had already won four Georgian titles.
Their run in the Champions League, though, consisted of a single qualifying
round tie against Linfield, after which they were expelled from the
competition for having attempted to bribe the Turkish referee. That, of
course, cast doubt on the integrity of their championship successes, but in a
country where corruption had become a way of life, nobody seemed
particularly concerned. Financially, meanwhile, Dinamo seemed hugely
successful, operating, as Dynamo Kyiv had, effectively as an import-export
business, tax breaks having been secured for them by the Mkhedrioni. ‘The
Georgian mafia at Dinamo concealed $28million from their budget.’ the
reformist politician Givi Targamadze later claimed. ‘They imported oil and
grain to Georgia and paid no tax on it.’
Certainly something curious was going on with the club’s finances,
because, despite several significant player-sales, they declared themselves
bankrupt in 2000. Ioseliani had by then been arrested, while Zhordania,
having become president of the Georgian Football Federation (GFF) in
1998, had given up the presidency of Dinamo Tbilisi. Suspicious of the
import-export business, the Ministry of Internal Affairs began to investigate
the club, despite effectively owning 10 per cent of it. Ratiani was arrested in
July 2000, after allegedly attempting to divert a significant slice of the fee
from the sale of Georgi Demetradze to Alania Vladikavkaz into his own
bank account. He was released in December 2000 after paying a £45,000
fine.
After Ratiani’s arrest, the focus turned to Zhordania, who, it was alleged,
had a secret bank account in Switzerland into which he creamed off a share
of the transfer revenues received by the club. When police went to
interview Zhordania late in October 2001, though, they discovered he had
left the country a couple of weeks earlier. The general secretary of the GFF,
Valery Cholaria, insisted he was merely away on holiday, admitted he had
no idea where, but said Zhordania would return in the first week of
December. By November, Georgian police announced they were preparing
to launch an international manhunt, only for Zhordania to reappear, as
Cholaria had said he would, at the beginning of December. He had been –
and, bearing in mind his banking arrangements, it would take a face of
stone not to raise an eyebrow – in Switzerland. ‘I haven’t committed any
crime,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t hiding anywhere, and I have nothing to hide. I was
on vacation, but now I’ve come back, and I’m ready to answer all
questions. These accusations are absurd. No secret account exists at the
Finanz Bank and none ever did. Everybody knew about that account. I was
president of Dinamo Tbilisi at that time and I personally opened that
account, as UEFA had requested, in order to receive financial help from
them.’ He spent forty-five days in prison in 2003, but was released when he
repaid $350,000 into club funds. He finally resigned as president of the
GFF in April 2005, after again being arrested, this time on charges of
embezzling $10 million from Dinamo between 1997 and 2000.
It had been long established that something was seriously amiss, and in
February 2001 FIFA banned Dinamo from any transfer activity after an
investigation revealed that not a penny from the sales of Levan Kobiashvili,
Levan Tskitishvili and Alexander Iashvili to Freiburg; Rati Aleksidze to
Chelsea; Khaka Kaladze to Dynamo Kyiv; and Demetradze and Mikhail
Ashvetia to Alania, had ended up in club accounts. That was when the
Georgian fourth division side Mretebi saw fit to mention that, according to
the deal by which they had sold Georgi Kinkladze to Dinamo in 1993, they
were owed 8.5 per cent of the £2million for which he had joined
Manchester City in 1995.
At that stage, it appeared, with Dinamo in desperate need of new
investors, that a consortium headed by Revaz Arveladze, a former Georgia
international and the brother of Archil and Shota Arveladze – themselves
both internationals and, at the time, of Cologne and Ajax respectively –
would take over, but, with financial investigations ongoing it was decided
to put the club completely under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.
‘[Revaz] Arveladze came to me with a plan,’ Targamadze, then the Minister
of the Interior, explained, ‘and they had a foreign investor who would take
care of the club. I don’t doubt his honesty, but there are serious criminal
organisations who stole millions of dollars from the club. The Ministry of
Internal Affairs was investigating the case, and so it was appropriate that
they should take charge of the club.’
Later in 2001, the Ministry sold 90 per cent of the club to Sport World
Partnership, a company registered under British law in Gibraltar and owned
by Badri Patakartsishvili. Born in Tbilisi in 1953, he had worked in the
Maud-Kamvol textiles factory before moving to Moscow in 1991, where,
through dealings in the auto trade, he became an associate of the Russian
oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Having been welcomed into the so-called
‘Family’ of wealthy businessmen that surrounded President Yeltsin,
Patakartsishvili invested in such companies as Logo Vaz, Aeroflot, Lada,
ORT and TV6 – all large organisations undergoing hasty privatisation.
Until 2001, he and Berezovsky also jointly owned 50 per cent of shares in
the oil giant Sibneft, the rest of the company belonging to Roman
Abramovich. Berezovsky claims that the two of them were forced to sell
their half of the company to Abramovich for $1.3billion – a figure he
believes to be between a third and half the true value – or face seeing
Sibneft destroyed by the new Russian president Vladimir Putin, who had by
then begun his crackdown on the Family. Soon afterwards, the Russian
Prosecutor General’s Office issued a warrant for Patakartsishvili’s arrest
after he repeatedly failed to report for questioning over his part in an
attempt by Nikolai Glushkov, a former deputy general director of Aeroflot
and another Berezovsky protégé, to flee the country. Offered asylum by
Shevardnadze, Patakartsishvili fled to Georgia. Having liquidated his
Russian assets, he initiated a series of projects, buying health resorts in
Ureki and Kobuleti in the west of Georgia, beginning construction of a
harbour on the Black Sea at a cost of $1 billion, founding the TV company
Imedi, and investing in Dinamo, to whom he promised Champions League
football within four seasons.
That always seemed a ludicrous boast, but Dinamo, their finances
stabilised, did at least win the league again in 2003, ending three years of
dominance by Torpedo Kutaisi. It was WIT, though, who, extraordinarily,
given their evident poverty, took the title in 2004, beating Sioni Bolnisi in a
championship play-off that took over three hours to complete because of
crowd trouble in which two fans were stabbed. Sioni were subsequently
banned from competing in the 2004–05 UEFA Cup, and their assistant
coach suspended for attacking the referee.
That at least speaks of passion, of which there was conspicuously little at
the InterToto game against SV Ried. Most of the crowd seemed to regard
the game as little more than an inconsequential backdrop to their
consumption of sunflower seeds. WIT won 1–0 despite having a man sent
off, but none of the 6,000 crowd seemed that bothered. Yet 6,000 is a large
attendance for Georgian football; we may mock the InterToto, but it is one
of the highlights of the Georgian football calendar.
With a couple of minutes remaining, Zaza abruptly left his seat and went
to talk to a balding man sitting a few rows in front. He came back and
muttered something to Natya, who proudly announced that Rezo
Dzodzuashvili had granted us an interview. He, I was vaguely aware, had
just been sacked as joint national coach after his co-coach David Kipiani
had resigned, and had responded with a rant at Zhordania. The details were
far from clear in my mind, but it seemed senseless, not to say rude, to turn
him down, so, when the final whistle blew, we went to meet him at the front
of the stand.
It was one of those desperate interviews in which you realise early on that
your interviewee is not being helpful and that you can think of only about
two questions to ask him. All journalists must have experienced the awful
sinking sensation – if they haven’t, it simply means they’ve never
interviewed Darius Vassell, the king of the monosyllable – and there’s
really nothing you can do other than blunder to as swift a conclusion as you
can, while still retaining some shred of dignity. At least I had the time it
took Natya to interpret, to think.
‘So, can you explain the circumstances surrounding your dismissal?’
‘I have not lost my job. I am coach of Torpedo Kutaisi.’
‘Yes, but your dismissal from the job of national coach?’
‘I am no longer coach, but I’m sure the team will continue to prosper.’
‘How is your relationship with the Georgian Football Federation?’
‘Fine.’
And so it went on – going nowhere. When, after a couple of minutes I
glanced round for inspiration, I became aware for the first time that behind
me had gathered a jostling crowd of probably around fifty people, all
straining to hear Dzodzuashvili’s words of wisdom while Zaza attempted to
keep them at a reasonably discreet distance. At that, I lost all self-control,
thanked Dzodzuashvili sincerely and snapped off my Dictaphone. I later
checked what he’d said when he’d first been sacked, and discovered he’d
claimed that Kipiani and Zhordania had picked the team for defeats to Italy,
Hungary and Romania, whereas he’d been in charge of the victory over
Lithuania.
 That night, I had dinner with Zaza and Natya and a group of their friends
in a fantastic hill-top restaurant overlooking the city. We were to eat, we
were told, in the traditional Georgian manner, which, for all the
sophistication of the local cuisine, basically means with lots of wine and a
fair amount of vodka. Zaza was appointed tamada, putting him in charge of
the toasts. In theory, how much you down from your glass indicates how
heartily you agree with the toast, but in practice it’s very hard not to down
the lot every time. How, after all, can you show any reserve in drinking to
the hospitality of your hosts, or the beauty of Mother Georgia, or even,
when raised in an effort to be accommodating, the good health of the
Queen? At least the glasses offered a choice: if we’d really been doing it
properly, I was told, we’d have been drinking from hollowed-out horns,
which can’t be put down until they’ve been drained. The final toast, drunk
with large glasses of vodka to underline its importance, was to football, and
its ability to draw people together. Trite and sentimental, perhaps, and
wholly disregarding of the rampant corruption, but at the time nothing had
felt truer.

ii Armenia
When they made the trip to Armenia to face Dinamo Yerevan in September
1949, Dinamo Moscow were on their way to a fifth league title. After
thirty-five minutes, though, they found themselves 3–0 down, and, despite
pulling one back two minutes before half time, there was still a real
possibility of a shock that could have derailed their championship charge.
That, clearly, wouldn’t do, so General Blinov, deputy minister of the
Ministry of State Security, telephoned the government room at the stadium
and ordered the Armenian Minister of the Interior, Comrade Grigoryan, to
take measures to ensure victory for Dinamo Moscow. Hearing the
conversation, one of the heads of the Sports Committee of the Armenian
Republic, an apparatchik whose name survives only as Simonyan, is said to
have gone pale and whispered, ‘The people will not understand.’ Grigoryan,
though, went to the Yerevan coach, Boris Apukhin, and explained the
situation. He responded by replacing one of his experienced defenders with
a youth-team player. Even worse, when the teams came out for the second
half, a sinister figure in a black coat took up a position behind the Yerevan
goal, every now and again hissing ‘Miss!’ when the goalkeeper went to
gather a shot. Dinamo Moscow, not surprisingly, came back to win 4–3.
Dinamo Yerevan’s next game was away to Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), a
trip that necessitated a flight via Moscow. On arrival in the capital the
players were thanked by General Blinov, and each given a gift of 2,500
roubles.
Were they cheated? Were Dinamo Tbilisi prevented from winning the
title? Were Dynamo Kyiv really opposed by Moscow? When everybody
accuses everybody else, it is hard not to conclude that conspiracy is just an
easy excuse. That tale has obvious elements of mythology, but the gist is
probably true: no nation has been so put upon as the Armenians. In his final
public speech, delivered in Liverpool in 1896, William Gladstone spoke of
them as ‘a martyred people’ and said, ‘Of all the nations of the world, no
history has been so blameless as the history of the Armenian people’. The
following century brought massacres at the hands of two different enemies
and a devastating earthquake; suffering has become a national
characteristic.

The first thing that struck me about Armenia was how much smoother the
road became once I’d crossed the border from Georgia. The second, when
our minibus stopped by a low hut just before the road wobbled into a steep-
sided cutting, was that the smell of damp woodsmoke mingling with coffee
steam is the greatest known to man. That was a chilly morning, the cloud
squatting low over the Caucasus and casting everything in soft focus, but,
sitting outside on a rough-hewn bench, eating lamb freshly grilled over an
open fire, was one of those moments when all seems perfect with the world.
That journey from Tbilisi to Yerevan is one of the most beautiful I have
ever made, seven hours of rocky crags, deep gorges and mist-shawled
valleys. Even the border post, by a bridge strung high above a frothing
river, was spectacular, the view itself well worth the $20 bribe I had to pay
for a visa.
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. That first evening I
wandered up through Victory Park towards the huge statue of Mother
Armenia that glowers down from the plinth on the hill where Stalin used to
stand, past the fountains that, at the time, the government couldn’t afford to
run, and paused on the way back for a beer or two. On the wall of the tennis
club opposite, I noticed, there were three huge photographs of Andre
Agassi. That seemed a little odd, but then again, I reasoned, it was a tennis
club. As I walked back towards the hotel, though, I became aware that
Agassi was everywhere – his face on billboards, his name scrawled in
graffiti.
Agassi is, as the receptionist in the hotel told me, ‘Armenian by blood’.
So, too, are Youri Djorkaeff and Alain Boghossian, both of them members
of the France squads that won Euro 2000 and the World Cup two years
earlier. 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. There is a curious sense
in examining Armenian football that Armenia is not the place to start.
Certainly Djorkaeff, brought up in Décines near Lyon, is highly sensitive
to his dual background. ‘My first country is France,’ he explained, ‘but I
would never forget that I have a very strong Armenian streak, and that when
I speak up for that, I am speaking not just for a cause that is mine, but also
my grandparents’. That runs in my blood.’ He is Armenian through his
mother, while his father, Jean, who also played for France, is a Kalmuck,
one of an ethnic group based on the north-western shore of the Caspian Sea.
Djorkaeff first visited Armenia in 1999 to play for France in a friendly. It
was a trip that clearly left a lasting impression. ‘My father was the only one
who had been to Armenia,’ he said. ‘When I set off I was there to win a
match, but now I recall faces, images. I saw Lake Sevan and Echmiadzin
[the religious capital], and of course I liked them, but I wasn’t there to be a
tourist. I walked in the street and met people. It really was extraordinary.
They treated me like a head of state. I’d had no idea how they saw me in
Armenia. President Kotcharyan gave me an Armenian passport, which is a
symbol for my family, our history, Décines and the Armenians of France. I
want to share these honours with all the Armenians I represent. When I was
champion of Europe or the world, it was the Armenians of France who were
champions of the world.’
There is a sense, not merely from Djorkaeff, that to be an Armenian is
something that transcends national boundaries, that there is something that
binds all Armenians, wherever they live. Djorkaeff spoke of a strength
drawn from a common sense of adversity, of a will to survive that is passed
on through the generations. ‘All people who have suffered draw strength
from their misfortune, and the trace of their trials is without doubt
registered in the genes,’ he explained. ‘When you have grandparents who
have suffered, who have lived through things through which you will never
live, you don’t have the right to complain, but there is a lesson to be
learned, and it can really become a strength. My grandparents never
complained and that has served as an example to me.’
In that context it is perhaps not surprising that it was at the Armenian
Theological Seminary in Calcutta, the destination of one of the earliest
migrations, that, in 1890, the first Armenian football club was established.
By 1900 there were two Armenian clubs in the Turkish port of Izmir (or
Smyrna, as was) and, before long, Tork and Araks were founded in Istanbul
(then Constantinople). Armenians also had significant parts to play in the
development of the game in various parts of the Russian empire. Martin
Merzhanov, the founder of the seminal magazine Football-Hockey Weekly,
for instance, although born in Nakhichevan-na-Donu, was of Armenian
heritage, as was the Kuban-born Abram Dangulov, who managed Krylya
Sovetov and Spartak Moscow and discovered a number of greats including
Nikita Simonyan. It was not until 1920 that the first official game was
played on Armenian soil, Kumayri (which became Leninakan in Soviet
times and is now Gyumri) beating Yerevan 3–1 in the English Garden in the
capital.
The first Armenian championship was established in 1936, and was won
by Dinamo Yerevan, with Spartak Yerevan finishing second. Both applied
to the Supreme Council for Physical Culture to be admitted to the Soviet
Supreme Championship. The request was met, but in a typically puzzling
way, with Spartak being placed in Group D (the fourth division) and
Dinamo in Group E (the fifth); the result, according to Ghazaros Teknejyan,
Spartak’s goalkeeper at the time, of lobbying by Nikolay Starostin, the
chairman of the Spartak Voluntary Sports Society. It was only after the
Second World War and the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians that football really took off in what remained the smallest of the
Soviet republics. Even then, though, Armenian clubs seem never to have
been taken particularly seriously, to have been there primarily to make up
the numbers and reflect the greater glory of those clubs preferred by the
state.
Ararat Yerevan would become the great Armenian team, but Dinamo
Yerevan were the first to play in the Soviet top flight, earning promotion in
1948. Success, though, was denied them by the usual tangle of
Machiavellian intrigue and the fact that they weren’t very good. There is,
for once, clear evidence of interference, although it seems less that
Armenians were targeted than that they were considered exploitable.
Inspired by their goalkeeper Sergey Zatikyan – who kept twenty-seven
clean sheets that season, including twelve in succession – Spartak went
unbeaten through the 1954 season to finish top of one of the three parallel
second divisions, and reached the Cup final, where they had realistic hopes
of upsetting Dynamo Kyiv. Unfortunately, 1954 was the 300th anniversary
of Ukraine’s unification with Russia, and so, at least if the Armenian
version of the story is to be believed, the authorities in Moscow decided it
would be fitting if a Ukrainian side won the Cup, a gesture the noted
Russian referee Nikolay Latyshev, who took charge of the 1962 World Cup
final, supported wholeheartedly enough to disallow an apparently legitimate
Spartak goal, deny them two penalties and then allow a Dynamo winner
from an offside Mikhail Koman. As if Latyshev’s performance weren’t bad
enough, Axel Vartanyan, the doyen of Soviet football historians, later
uncovered a document from a conference of Soviet football doctors the
following January in which the Dynamo Kyiv physio Yuriy Bezyinnyi
admitted his players had habitually used illegal stimulants that season.
Vartanyan, it should be added, despite being of Armenian blood himself, is
extremely doubtful of claims that that Cup final was fixed.
The sense of grievance in Yerevan, though, was only to intensify. Spartak
finished fifth of six in the promotion playoffs that year and so remained in
the second division, but the following season they were on course to finish
top again (this time the second flight was split into two rather than three
groups), when they met Dom Ofitseov Sverdlovsk, an army team and their
main challengers, in Yerevan on 9 October. With five minutes remaining,
and the scores level at 2–2, Haroutiun Karajyan scored what seemed to be
the winner Spartak needed to go top of the table, only for the Moscow-
based referee, a Comrade Shvetsov, to rule it out, igniting a near-riot in the
Hanrapetakan Stadium. As the disorder spread into the streets, players and
officials had to be secretly transported from the stadium. The leadership of
the Armenian Sports Committee was dismissed, but a protest was sent to
the Section of Soviet Football (SFS) nonetheless, and they ordered the
game to be replayed in Odessa. Very early in the rematch, Sverdlovsk were
awarded a penalty, which they converted to secure their promotion.
Spartak Yerevan did finally win their promotion to the top flight in 1959,
but it was Ararat Yerevan who gave Armenian football its greatest moment.
They took their place in the Supreme League in 1966 and never
relinquished it, and, with such players as Eduard Markarov and Arkady
Andriasyan – not to mention Sergey Bondarenko, a player who scored so
often with long-range drives that it became a common joke to say that ‘he
had scored from the fish shop’ that stood a couple of miles down the road
from the Hrazdan Stadium – became one of the dominant forces in Soviet
football in the early seventies. The golden year was 1973, when, under
Nikita Simonyan, they did the double. ‘It was much harder to win the
league with Ararat than it was with Spartak Moscow.’ Simonyan told me.
‘We had some good players, but essentially we were a provincial side. I had
to change my personal style, because the players had a different mentality.
We had two Ukrainians in the side, but they had lived in Yerevan from
childhood, so they had adopted the spirit of the people. Players from the
south are more skilful, more technical, even if it is bad for the team as a
collective. You have to stick them to each other.’

Ararat, named after a mountain that most Armenians believe should lie on
their side of the Turkish border, even more than Dynamo Kyiv, became a
locus for nationalism. ‘In Ukraine there were five teams.’ Simonyan said,
‘but in Georgia or Armenia only one, so these really were the teams of the
republic. They were financed from the budget of the republic, and the
politicians paid a lot of attention to the performance of the team.’
Fans would chant ‘Haya-stan, hoop-tor’ (Come on, Armenia’) or simply
‘Hayar’ (‘Armenians’) followed by three short claps, both refrains that were
taken up by the independence movement. That nationalist spirit had its most
obvious outpouring on the night of the Cup final in 1973, when Ararat,
facing Oleksandr Sevydov’s Dynamo Kyiv, had the chance to avenge
Spartak’s defeat to the same opponents nineteen years earlier. It was, by all
accounts, an outstanding game, which, with two minutes remaining,
Dynamo were leading 1–0. Sevydov then decided to withdraw Oleh
Blokhin and Victor Kolotov, two of his best players, and, a minute later, the
Ararat number eight Levon Ishtoyan broke into the box and slammed an
equaliser into the top corner. In extra-time he added a second to the
disbelief and delight of the 15,000 Armenians in the Luzhniki. Back in
Yerevan, car horns were sounded through the night, nationalist songs were
sung and, in tribute to Ishtoyan, the number eight was painted on the back
of the Lenin monument in Republic Square.
The paint was soon removed, and Lenin too has now disappeared, the
place where his statue stood marked only by a patch of dead grass. Ararat,
similarly, are not what they once were. Now that independence has been
won, there is no need to use their games as a stage to protest for it, and their
crowds have slumped to only a few hundred; perversely, Armenian football
is now suffering because they have stopped being persecuted. Ararat were
even suspended from competition for the 2003 season after their head
coach, Arkady Andriasyan, refused to allow one senior and four junior
members of his squad to join up with the Armenia squad for training
matches in Israel, concerned, he said, over safety. Ararat’s sponsors reacted
by dismissing Andriasyan and merging Ararat with another team they
backed, Lernagorts from Kapan. They appointed a new coach and director,
but Andriasyan’s suspension was lifted on the eve of the thirtieth
anniversary of the double success, and he was reappointed coach at the
beginning of 2005. With the emergence of powerful sponsors from the
diaspora – the American businessman Hrach Kaprielian and Vardan
Surmakesh, the president of the Swiss company Frank Müller – they
welcomed Andriasyan’s return with bullish noises about restoring the team
to its former glory. Whether that is possible, given the apathy that
independence has brought, is doubtful.

About sixty miles north of Yerevan is Tsakhadzor, which was once a state-
of-the-art Soviet Olympic training complex, and now operates as a half-
hearted tourist resort. The name means ‘Valley of the Flowers’, and when I
was there, it seemed the flowers were reclaiming their valley. It was an
eerie place, set high in the mountains, the wind whistling through its
emptiness as though it were a lost Inca city, abandoned in a moment at
some unknown catastrophe. It was there, in 1987, that Robert Emmiyan set
the European long-jump record with a leap of 8.86 metres, which, at the
time, was the second-longest jump in history. A decade and a half later,
though, the sandpit was waist-high in rosebay willowherb. A few yards
away, across a cracked and faded running track, was an overgrown football
pitch. Climbing a little through the pines, I came to the swimming pool,
empty but for a sludgy covering of dark-green weed. Just above that was
the gymnasium, on the wall of which, beneath a stylised mural of a
gymnast, was written the Olympic motto: Citius, altius, fortius. Bleak irony
was a particularly Soviet trope.
The catastrophe here, though, is not unknown. On 7 December 1988,
Armenia suffered a massive earthquake that claimed over 30,000 lives and
destroyed huge numbers of buildings. The quake was centred near the
northern city of Spitak, but it is estimated that a third of the country was
affected. The economy was further destabilised by the war with Azerbaijan
over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which led to the influx of
several hundred thousand refugees. By 1993, many Armenians could
survive only with the help of relatives from abroad, while electricity was
often available only for an hour or two a day. Conditions got so bad that
around a million Armenians left the country in the five years following
independence. Investing in sport would have been a ludicrous extravagance.
In football, the first years after independence, as they were elsewhere,
were marked by confusion over the league structure, withdrawals,
walkovers, bankruptcies, and politicking within the federation. Presidents
arrived and disappeared almost as regularly as match-fixing was alleged.
Remarkably, the first independent championship was won jointly by Shirak
Gyumri, a team from the area worst affected by the earthquake. Poignantly,
the brochure they produced ahead of that first season contained the pictures
of three players – Albert Akimyan, Sargis Sahakyan and Gevork Vardikyan
– who had been killed in the disaster. Led by their controversial president
Garnik Khachatyan, they were the only team to compete in each of the first
twelve championships, winning three of them, despite paying wages of only
around $50–100 a month and refusing to sign any foreign players. They
finished bottom of the eight-team first division in 2004, but retained their
place in the top flight not, the Football Federation of Armenia announced,
‘as indulgence to some particular team, but as the first step of planned
enlargement of the league to fourteen clubs’.
It is Homenetmen, though, whose progress is most representative of the
chaos of the Armenian league. By the second season they had acquired a
sponsor and were known as Homenetmen-AOSS, and the year after that
they became ASS-SKIF. They were back to plain old Homenetmen for the
transitional 1995 spring season, by which time Homenmen, an entirely
different team, had emerged. Homenetmen then became Pyunik (which
translates as Phoenix) and won the championship in 1995–96, retaining it
the following season.
In 1999 (the seasons having reverted to spring-autumn), Pyunik’s founder,
Ruben Hayrapetyan, withdrew his financial backing, and the entire playing
staff joined Kilikia. They then lost a relegation play-off, but Homenmen,
who were by then known as Erebuni, withdrew from the following season’s
championship along with FK Yerevan, allowing Kilikia to retain their place.
They played the following season without incident, but in 2001 were
expelled from the league for nonpayment of fees after playing a single
match. Confusingly, that match was a 3–2 defeat against a side called
Pyunik. They had been restored by Hayrapetyan, and took their place in the
first division after Armenikum, one of the promoted sides, were disbanded
by their sponsors. The new Pyunik went on to win the next four
championships, including a run of fifty-nine games unbeaten between
October 2002 and November 2004. The excellent rsssf website, in an
exasperated footnote, explains it has taken the decision to refer to this new
entity as Pyunik [II].
The first three of those championships were won at a canter, but,
gradually, other teams are beginning to challenge their dominance. Banants,
for instance, who finished third in 2004, show how clubs can regroup after
financial difficulties. They were founded in 1992 by Sargis Israelyan, who
demanded his side should play open, attacking football. That May they
were rewarded with victory over Homenetmen in the first independent
Armenian Cup final, but, three years later, they went out of business.
Israelyan refounded the club in 2001. ‘The team of the nineties was better
equipped technically and played more romantic football,’ Israelyan said.
‘Nowadays our teams are more athletic and rely on pace and the functional
qualities of players. That it is now a prerequisite for success.’ The club also
now runs a football school – ‘an economic necessity’, according to
Israelyan; pragmatism is replacing romance, and the traditional, free-
spirited Armenian style is disappearing.

Perhaps it was because I’d significantly overpaid him, but the taxi driver
who brought me back from the cathedral at Zwartnots was hugely friendly.
He knew about a dozen words of English, and I about half that in
Armenian, but he gave me some apricots, bought from an old woman by the
side of the road, and then, after I had somehow explained that I wrote about
football for a living, he insisted on taking a detour. ‘No extra, no extra,’ he
assured me. As he turned a corner, I saw, looming ahead of us, the new
national stadium, itself a symbol of Armenia’s economic upturn. Modern
stadia tend to follow a similar pattern from Manchester to Mali – all
functional concrete and coloured steel – but the Hanrapetakan was a
welcome exception, featuring, midway up the main stand, a number of
archways in which stood bronze statues of figures from classical
mythology.
I wandered admiringly up and down the car park for a while, then the
driver beckoned me to a gate at one end of the stand. It was locked, but
between the hinges and the wall there was a gap, through which, after much
badgering from the driver to overcome my nervous reluctance, I squeezed.
Inside, the ground was decorated in a more orthodox fashion, although the
normal rounded rectangle was pressed out at one side to accommodate the
100m track, so from above it would have resembled a giant omega. After
drifting aimlessly around for a bit and trying out a few seats, I realised that
once the adrenaline rush has passed, there’s not a lot you can do after
breaking in to a national stadium, so I broke out again.
The next morning, I took the misguided decision to have breakfast at the
hotel. A wizened old man in a stained maroon uniform slapped a plate of
limp salad and tough cheese down in front of me, and then gave me a
thimbleful of thick orange-coloured juice. I drained it, and asked if I could
have some more. The waiter looked at me, snapped ‘No’, turned away and
wandered off to be surly elsewhere. The Soviet hangover, clearly, has not
entirely gone.
Generally, though, Armenia, like a Pyunik, is on the rise. The water
features leading up to Mother Armenia are working again, the Northern
Avenue – designed by the great Armenian architect Alexander Tamanyan in
the 1920s but never built – is finally being constructed and the roads have
been improved so the journey to Tbilisi takes only four and a half hours.
Tsakhadzor is being restored, and Republic Square now boasts 2,750
fountains. The football, too, is improving, and great hope rides with Edgar
Manucharyan, a talented young forward who joined Ajax in the summer of
2005.
If international success remains a long way off, there are at least signs of
clubs establishing themselves on pragmatic, businesslike lines; although it
would be naïve to imagine that that does not also probably mean the
involvement, at some level, of Armenia’s criminal oligarchies. ‘Football is
like grape juice,’ the Armenian writer Armen Nikoghosyan put it. ‘From
this, young wine can be prepared, or, if you wait a while longer, a stronger
wine. You can take from this, spirit for the production of vodka, or distil the
spirit one more time, pour it into oak casks and wait until it has become
cognac. The more effort and money we spend, the more Armenian football
will develop, but at the moment we can speak only of a positive tendency
after years of fermentation.’
True as that may be, Armenia’s greatest contribution to world football
remains in having provided the cognac with which Valeriy Lobanovskyi
pickled himself.

iii Azerbaijan
On the Tuesday, the sky was blue, the weather was warm and the sun shone.
Azerbaijan and an England World Cup qualifier seemed a very pleasant
way to earn a living. Baku, though, is not known as the city of the winds
without reason. By the Wednesday morning, the sky was sepia and 70
m.p.h. gusts and squalls of rain were pummelling the town. This, Richard
Williams of the Guardian discovered with remarkable alacrity, was the
Khazri. Covering England seemed suddenly a dreadful punishment dreamed
up by a malevolent god. There was a roof on the press box at the Tofik
Bakhramov Stadium, but given the wind was blowing straight across the
pitch, driving the rain horizontally, it hardly mattered. There was water on
the desks, there was water on the chairs, and there was water in our laptops.
The marquee where the post-match press conference was supposed to be
held blew down.
It was so windy that even when there was a phone signal, which wasn’t
often, it was virtually impossible to hear the person at the other end. The
Financial Times had to send me my wordage by text. Then, just as I was
panicking about how to file, an Azerbaijani man in a beehive hat turned up
and gave everybody a cable to connect to the local Ethernet, which,
miraculously, worked perfectly. It didn’t stop the cold, though. My hands
were a pale mauve by the time the game came to an end, but I’d got enough
of my match report done that, once the crowd had thinned, it seemed safe to
nip off to the toilet. It wasn’t the best convenience I’ve ever used, a badly
tiled hole in the ground that was full to the brim and more, but it was only
after I’d finished that the real flaw in the design became evident: as well as
a bolt on the inside of the door, there was one on the outside, and somebody
had locked it. I hammered on the door, to which a child’s voice replied:
‘Ten dollar’.
In retrospect, given there was urine and worse slopping about my feet, it
doesn’t seem that bad a deal (particularly if I could have got a receipt off
him to claim expenses), but, quite aside from the fact that I had no money
on me, after three hours of shivering frustration I wasn’t about to be held to
ransom, so I attacked the door with fury. Much pounding of fists and
several screamed threats later, I realised that the kid had slipped the bolt. At
that moment, though, a battalion of the Azerbaijani army decided to leave
their positions around the perimeter of the pitch and return to the car park
by a route directly between the toilet and my laptop. As I stood on a
concrete outcrop watching the soldiers stream from a vast pool amassed
behind one goal, the FT rang. I explained I’d file as soon as the army had
got out of my way, and held up the phone. I don’t know how many of the
1,500 pairs of feet they heard tramping past, but by the time the last soldier
was out of the way, they’d hung up.
It was, I confess, a huge relief to get back to the hotel and warmed up that
night, but by the morning I was feeling very sorry for Azerbaijan. The fans
who had packed the press stand in the belief the roof might somehow keep
off the horizontal rain had been remarkably good-humoured. They greeted
every thirty-yard drive (and there were many) from an Azerbaijani forward
with a sharp intake of breath as though it had skimmed just wide, before
laughing uproariously because sometimes it hadn’t even reached the goal
line. The antics of Jakhangir Gasanzade in the Azerbaijan goal –
unorthodox, bordering on the inept – were treated almost as a form of
stand-up comedy. Yes, everything surrounding the match had been chaotic,
but it was hardly anybody’s fault that the Khazri had sprung up at just the
wrong time and ruined what was probably the biggest match ever to be
played in the country.
Actually, it wasn’t just the wind. David Beckham had done his bit to take
the lustre off the game, first by flying into a challenge with Ben Thatcher in
the qualifier against Wales the previous Saturday and fracturing a rib, and
then by charging into him again moments later, manufacturing a booking so
that he served a suspension while injured and thus wiped his disciplinary
slate clean. Everything leading up to the Azerbaijan match was dominated
by Beckham’s admission that he had deliberately engineered the yellow
card; the match became a mere side issue to yet another Beckham saga. Sir
Geoff Hurst said he had brought the nation into disrepute and should be
stripped of the captaincy. Sven-Göran Eriksson, normally so placid and
diplomatic, finally snapped in a press conference: ‘Jesus,’ he said to yet
another question about on-field ethics. ‘I’m not a schoolteacher or the father
of a Sunday school.’ It was all great copy and all great fun, particularly as
nobody really took Azerbaijan seriously.
The people who missed out, though, were the Azerbaijani fans. Walking
through the old town of Baku on the morning of the game, I was accosted
by three kids, probably eight or nine years old, knocking around a saggy red
football. In the small square beside the Maiden’s Tower, we had a quick
kickabout while they, apparently delighted to have met a real live
Englishman, rattled off the names of most of the England squad. Then one
of them, with a look of hurt, said, ‘Why no Beckham?’ I tried to explain,
clutching my ribs and waving imaginary yellow cards, but rather wished I’d
followed the example of Matt Dickinson from The Times who, asked the
same question that evening, opened his mouth as if to launch into a full
account, then thought better of it, and simply said: ‘It’s a long story.’
 Azerbaijan had played Italy two years earlier, but it seemed that the arrival
of England had been even more keenly awaited. That was partly because
recent draws against Northern Ireland and Wales had fostered a belief that
Azerbaijani football was on the rise, but more because Azerbaijan’s greatest
moment in football is inextricably linked to England’s. The national
stadium in Baku is named after Tofik Bakhramov, the linesman who judged
that Geoff Hurst’s shot on the turn ten minutes into extra-time in the 1966
World Cup final had bounced down off the bar and over the line, putting
England 3–2 up against West Germany. Crassly, English fans have spent
four decades being grateful to a ‘Russian’ linesman.
All technological evidence now suggests that Hurst’s shot came down on
rather than over the line, but it would be a brave man to say that in
Azerbaijan. When Gamid Gamidov, the sports editor of the Azeri Echo,
suggested Bakhramov had got his most famous decision wrong, he was
deluged with letters accusing him of, to use Hurst’s phrase, bringing the
nation into disrepute. Arguably Bakhramov did that himself with a
comment he is supposed to have made on his deathbed. Asked by a reporter,
desperate to have his final thoughts on the controversy, how he could be
sure the ball had crossed the line, Bakhramov apparently answered with a
single word: ‘Stalingrad.’
Gamidov may have his doubts about that decision, but when I suggested
to him that naming a stadium and erecting a statue (Hurst was in Baku to
unveil it) of a referee and linesman was perhaps a little unusual, he looked
at me uncomprehendingly. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He was a very good referee.’
That’s as may be, but the lionisation of Bakhramov also speaks of a dearth
of very good players. Azerbaijan’s best was probably Anatoly Banishevsky,
who is famous mainly for scoring with a header from forty yards in a
friendly for the USSR against Brazil in 1965. The following year he was the
inspiration behind the Neftchi side that finished third in the Soviet Supreme
League, the highest position achieved by an Azerbaijani club. Truly, 1966
was Azerbaijani football’s annus mirabilis. That season, over 40,000 would
regularly turn out for home games, but, whether because of the relative lack
of success or because of the large number of Russians working in the oil
industry on which the club was based, Neftchi never seems to have had a
nationalist focus. Azerbaijani football’s nadir is equally obvious: the spell
between May 2002 and May 2003, when the championship was suspended.
 The Azerbaijani Football Federation (AFFA) was founded in 1992 under
the leadership of Fuad Musaev, who had run football in the republic during
Soviet times. He was, by all accounts, tough, passionate, charismatic and
forthright. He oversaw AFFA’s affiliation to UEFA and FIFA and secured
funding for the building of an 8,000-capacity stadium in Baku. He had only
two flaws: he was widely believed to be embezzling AFFA; and he showed
blatant favouritism to Safa, who played in the stadium he had built.
It was in the 2001–02 season that matters came to a head. Several
newspapers reported – although without, it must be said, much in the way
of hard evidence – that Musaev had diverted $35million of UEFA and FIFA
subsidies into a personal bank account in Switzerland. On the playing side,
the championship was sliding into disarray. Virtually every club seemed to
be in financial difficulty. The Ministry of Finance sold Dinamo Bakili’s
ground without their consent. Araz Nakhichevan – who had initially been
suspended from the league for non-payment of their subscription fee, and
had only been reinstated after another club, Vilas Masalli, were dissolved
shortly before their opening match of the season – withdrew from the
league after finishing the first part of the season in the lower half of the
table and so being condemned to the relegation play-offs. ‘The system is
unacceptable.’ their director Sudzhethan Novruzov suddenly decided.
‘Playing for the bottom six places is absurd and we can’t afford to waste
money on it.’
It was on 2 April that farce became crisis. Going into injury time, Khazar
University were holding out for a goalless draw away to Safa in the second
round of games in the championship play-off. Injury time, though, went on,
and on, and on, until finally – the official record says after five minutes,
others claim it was after as long as twenty-seven – Safa were awarded a
controversial penalty, which they converted to win 1–0.
The president of Khazar at the time was Hamlet Iysahamli, who remains
director of the university. I met him in his office on campus, a large, book-
lined room noticeably devoid of football memorabilia. He could, he told
me, have become a professional chess player, but chose instead to become a
professor of mathematics. With his soft, slightly high-pitched voice, gently
crinkled face and attitude of benign detachment, he is an unlikely rebel, but
it was he who brought down Musaev. Others saw Musaev as a corrupt
tyrant, but Iysahamli spoke of him almost as a student who had
disappointed.
‘Under his presidency,’ Iysahamli said, ‘the federation was not run
according to any rules but by what was in his own mind. He was in general
a kind person, eager to develop football, but at the same time his ideas were
untidy, and he had been one of the secretaries of the Communist Party in
Soviet times so he was used to getting his own way. He had some ideas
about which teams should be first and second. Safa was his team and he had
the idea that if most of the good young players could be put into that club, it
could provide some kind of a base for the national team.’
The idea in itself was not a bad one. In Latvia, Skonto have effectively
served as a nursery for the national side, Dynamo Kyiv provided the base of
the USSR team in the seventies and eighties, and the great Hungary side of
the 1950s was forged at Honvéd. The problem, though, was that a lot of
talented young players preferred to play for Khazar University, where they
could study for a degree as well as playing football. ‘Our team was a little
better, more disciplined and a little brighter,’ Iysahamli said, ‘and he didn’t
like it.’
There had been numerous allegations of match-fixing and a ‘refereeing
mafia’ before, but it was events at the Safa Stadium that forced Iysahamli to
act. ‘It was 0–0 at ninety minutes,’ he said. ‘There had been five minutes
added at the end of the first half, then five minutes added at the end of the
second, and then again five minutes. Then in the twenty-seventh minute of
added time, one of their players went down in the box, no contact – penalty
– 1–0.’ He shook his head as though still baffled by the obviousness of the
scam. AFFA’s disciplinary committee initially ordered the game to be
replayed, but that decision was overturned on appeal. ‘So I said that after
that we could not continue to play in the league,’ Iysahamli went on,
sounding almost apologetic. ‘Musaev said that it wasn’t him, but that the
referee was crazy and stupid and so on, but everybody understood. Then I
rang my colleagues at the other clubs and invited them to come out with
me. All of them stopped playing in the championship.’
On 12 April, the only game played in the championship play-off was
Safa’s 0–0 draw at home to Kapaz. By 4 May, with Neftchi taking the lead
in the revolt, a new championship had been convened outside of AFFA’s
jurisdiction and without Safa. UEFA, whose policy in such instances is
always to support the national association, refused to ratify it. Although
Khazar joined the new competition, Iysahamli insisted he thought it was a
bad idea and always sought reconciliation. ‘It became a struggle for power,’
he explained. ‘Other people wanted to be president and Musaev used that to
his advantage. So we had three groups: the president, the Neftchi faction
who wanted their own league without any federation, and those like us who
wanted one championship under the flag of the federation but with different
rules.’
By the following November, the league had not restarted, so Neftchi
organised an eight-club tournament – without Khazar – to celebrate their
65th-anniversary. Karabakh-Azersun Agdam took the title, beating Neftchi
on penalties in the final. If that raised hopes that the league could be
reconvened in some form, though, they were dashed four days later, when
FIFA imposed a blanket ban on Azerbaijani clubs taking part in
international competition, and, bewilderingly, decided that only Musaev had
the right to lift the ban – as and when he decided that the situation had
stabilised. The wrangling continued, with Musaev countering threatened
votes of no confidence by insisting he could not call elections until the
championship was under way again.
Even when, in January, the six regional football federations and eleven
clubs took legal action against AFFA demanding the formation of a new
association, Musaev seemed untroubled, but then the Ministry of Taxes
began proceedings against AFFA to recoup a deficit of £300,000,
apparently tax owed on gate receipts and TV revenues from the Euro 2004
qualifier against Italy. AFFA insisted they owed only £60,000, but their
property and the Safa Stadium were seized, and the apartment of Oktay
Zeynalov, the director-general of the federation, searched. He was arrested
at the beginning of April, and immediately blamed Musaev for the shortfall.
Iysahamli, who was a member of the executive committee throughout,
explained how every time issues of accounting were raised, Musaev would
say he was just about to have everything audited by a major Western
company.
On 4 March, frustrated by the continued support given by UEFA and
FIFA to Musaev, the eleven rebel clubs agreed to return to AFFA, on the
condition that elections be held. AFFA replied with a list of fourteen
requirements for each club to meet before the championship could be
resumed, many of which were considered unreasonable. That led to another
unofficial tournament, ten clubs taking part in the optimistically named
Unity Cup, which was won by Neftchi.
By that stage the Ministry of Justice had begun proceedings against AFFA
on the grounds that, as elections for the presidency should have been held
the previous May, it was in violation of its charter. That finally moved the
executive committee of AFFA to act, and on 7 April they attempted to hold
an extraordinary general meeting. Musaev, knowing he would be forced to
resign if fourteen of the twenty-one members of the committee voted
against him, countered the threat by denying them access to the AFFA
headquarters. The delegates held their meeting on the street outside and
resolved that the championship should start on 20 April, and that a
conference to elect a new president should be convened for 30 April. As
only eleven members of the committee voted, though, leaving them three
short of a quorum, Musaev declared their resolution void and dismissed the
two vice-presidents who had organised the meeting.
A week later, the clubs and AFFA finally reached an agreement of sorts
on the start of a new championship, determining both the format of the
competition, minimum squad sizes, and registration fees, but the next day
FIFA disqualified AFFA, an action in which they were soon followed by
UEFA. Members of AFFA’s executive committee responded by writing two
letters: one to Musaev, encouraging him to open dialogue with his
opponents; and another to the presidents of FIFA, UEFA and the Russian
Football Union explaining the details of their dispute (when in doubt, it is
still to Russia that the former Soviet republics turn).
UEFA responded in time-honoured fashion by establishing a committee,
of which Iysahamli was a member. A new constitution was drawn up, and
the championship finally began on 17 May. Musaev agreed to hold
elections before the end of the year, but, filibustering magnificently, he
managed to put them off until 29 December, when the Neftchi president
Ramiz Mirzoev, who was also president of Azeri Neft Ianaga – the former
state oil company – was elected, apparently on the assumption that, being
independently rich, he would be less drawn to corruption.
The first impact of Mirzoev’s appointment was to make the government
more kindly disposed to football. Banks, factories and oil refineries have all
been persuaded to sponsor clubs, while in the city of Yevlakh a group of
businessmen got together to set up their own team, Karvan, in the summer
of 2004. They were immediately admitted to the Premier League as it
expanded to eighteen teams. There have been casualties, though. The league
table is still riddled with asterisks denoting name changes as sponsors come
and go and clubs shift from city to city. Khazar Sumqayit, promoted in
2003, have disappeared completely, while Safa withdrew from the league
during the winter break in 2004-05 citing financial difficulties.
Referees are now paid five times what they were in Musaev’s time, and
the result is that they too seem less prone to accept financial inducements.
Just as important, from both a coaching and a symbolic perspective, in
February 2004 Carlos Alberto Torres, he of the thunderous right-foot shot
that rounded off Brazil’s 4–1 victory over Italy in the final of the 1970
World Cup, was appointed as national coach. The money to fund those two
initiatives, though, had to come from somewhere, and it seems at least in
part to have come from the pool for paying the national team’s bonuses. In
Musaev’s day they used to get $3,000 to play, but even if they’d beaten
England the players would have received only $2,000. That, inevitably,
caused resentment among certain players, most notably the goalkeeper
Dmitri Kramarenko. He announced the week before England arrived that he
would not play for the national team again while Mirzoev remained
president of AFFA – which at least gave the crowd the delights of
Gasanzade’s manic flailing.
His team-mate at the Russian second division side Baltika Kaliningrad,
Emin Agaev, withdrew in sympathy. Others, though, just seemed happy that
Azerbaijani football was up and running again. Kramarenko, after all, had a
history of absenteeism. Nobody else has been the victim of so many late
strains, family crises and mysteriously cancelled flights. In August 2001,
puffed by a move to Dinamo Moscow, he rejected a call-up for World Cup
qualifiers against Moldova and Macedonia FYR, citing the poor standard of
Azerbaijani football. A year later, having been persuaded back into the side,
he failed to turn up for a Euro 2004 qualifier in Helsinki, claiming that
thieves had broken into his car and stolen his passport. Most fans I spoke to
in Baku seemed to acknowledge he was significantly the best goalkeeper in
the country, but regarded his loss as an acceptable, perhaps even inevitable,
sacrifice.
 There were changes too at Khazar University, with Iysahamli stepping
down as president as the International Bank of Azerbaijan invested in the
club, which has been renamed Inter Baku. As elsewhere, money (some
legal, some not), finally, is talking. ‘In the new situation it was impossible
for the university.’ he explained. ‘When I understood that under the new
situation four or five clubs would have a budget of one million US dollars,
we had to change. When my team was set up our budget was one hundred
thousand dollars. So now they have more money and I’m sure they’ll do
very well.’ I was just wondering whether there was a note of regret in his
voice when he laughed. ‘Actually, at the moment,’ he said, ‘they’re only
twelfth.’
*
By the time Azerbaijan arrived in Newcastle for a World Cup qualifier in
March 2005, Kramarenko had returned, but the optimism had evaporated,
its last traces dispelled by an 8–0 defeat to Poland the previous Saturday.
The top scorer in the Azerbaijani league, Zaur Ramazanov, had just been
suspended for attacking a linesman; Carlos Alberto had fallen out with most
of his creative midfielders, while the irregularity of his visits to Baku was
becoming a source of concern. ‘He is picking the team by remote control,’
moaned Rasim Kara, the coach of Khazar Lenkoran. Carlos Alberto
resigned soon after.
Most of the criticism, though, was reserved for Mirzoev. ‘He is lazy,’
Iskender Javadov – one of the legends of Azerbaijani football – said in
calling for his resignation. ‘Mirzoev should visit regions, meet with
representatives of the clubs. He believes he did a great thing in appointing
Carlos Alberto, but it was only self-promotion. They spoke of qualifying for
the World Cup, but now only fools can dream of it.’
Speaking of dreaming fools, AFFA attempted to put together a bid to host
Euro 2012, which, given the problems in Azerbaijani football, falls into the
category of running before you can crawl. Quite aside from the extinction
of several clubs, allegations of match-fixing have resurfaced, leading
Mubariz Mansimov, the owner of Khazar Lenkoran and the biggest investor
in Azerbaijani football, to threaten to withdraw his club from the league.
Yet, as Iysahamli pointed out, for Azerbaijan the present situation
represents an improvement. ‘I don’t think the situation is really excellent,’
he said. ‘We still have many problems, but now we have some kind of rules
and people are following them. There is a lack of tradition, though, and this
country has many problems that inevitably influence football. The rule of
law is not always there, but I believe the situation is better than it was.’
 8 RUSSIA
Fallen Idols

When Eduard Streltsov arrived at the dacha of Eduard Karakhanov on 25

May 1958, he had the world at his feet. He was twenty, widely recognised
as one of the best footballers on the planet, and handsome to boot. He was
as near as the Soviet Union got to a celebrity. A fortnight later, on the
opening day of the World Cup, the USSR drew 2–2 with England in
Gothenburg. Streltsov wasn’t there. The finals would be dominated by
Brazil, and by the emerging talents of the seventeen-year-old Pelé. In
Russia they believe it could have been Streltsov’s tournament, but he was in
jail, awaiting trial for rape. He was convicted and sentenced to twelve years
in the gulag. His guilt, though, remains questionable, and there are those
who believe he was set up.
What happened at Karakhanov’s dacha that night is the grand mystery of
Russian football. There are a million explanations bound up in a million
conspiracies, and the testimonies of those who were there have been
skewed by time and drink, and possibly by deliberate falsification. There is
even a campaign posthumously to clear Streltsov’s name, led,
incongruously, by the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov and
Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow.
 If you want to know about Soviet football, at least a dozen people had told
me, you must talk to Axel Vartanyan. Born in Tbilisi, he worked for many
years as a schoolteacher, but is now the prime archivist of football in the
Soviet era. I went to meet him at his apartment in an eastern district of
Moscow.
Vartanyan is a not a tall man, and, with his thinning bouffant of snowy
hair and his well-filled waistcoat, there is something of the hobbit about
him. We chatted in his study, a room crammed with books and files,
newspaper cuttings and photocopied documents, all meticulously annotated
in his tiny, crabbed Cyrillic. The advent of computers seemed to have
passed him by. After about three hours – by which time our conversation
had drifted to my pet theory that a glut of great wingers in the early fifties
(Matthews, Finney, Shackle-ton, Robb, Astall …) had contributed to
England’s tactical Luddism – he asked his wife to bring a pot of tea and
some marzipan cake (he doesn’t drink coffee – bad for his heart), and then
we talked some more. Poor Vladimir, formerly onefootball’s correspondent
in Russia, who was acting as my fixer and translator, looked exhausted. We
spoke of many things, but, mostly, we spoke of Streltsov. ‘For me,’
Vartanyan said, ‘Streltsov is a weakness. I had no idols but him. Not just for
his skills, but as a person, for what he represents.’
Before I met Vartanyan I had half a notion that Streltsov represented
something quite profound. After talking to him, I was convinced of it.
Streltsov, I would argue, has immense symbolic value. I would say he has
come to stand for nothing less than the unblemished soul of Russian
football. In a world of intrigue and state oppression, Streltsov was
heroically independent.
*
While others remember the 1952 Olympics as the first flowering of
Hungary’s Aranycsapat, in the USSR it is recalled for causing the break-up
of what was arguably the greatest club side Russia ever produced – CDSA
(or CDKA, as they were until 1950), the army side. In seven seasons they
won five Soviet titles and three Cups, playing a brand of dashing but
organised football that, along with their military ranks, earned them the
nickname ‘the Lieutenants Team’. They were coached by Boris Arkadiev,
whose book Tactics of Football became a bible for coaches across Europe
in the years immediately after the war. An eccentric who would take his
players on tours of art galleries, he stands in the direct line from Chapman
and Meisl, alongside Guttmann, Bukovi and Sebes, as one of the great
pioneers, developing the W-M in Russia and becoming, in 1940, the first
coach to experiment with two full-backs and two centre-backs. It was he
who, at Dinamo Moscow, encouraged players to switch positions
(‘organised disorder’ as it was quickly dubbed) and developed the
passovotchka style with which the Dinamo tourists bewildered Britain in
1945, although he had been sacked a year earlier after a Cup defeat to Zenit
Leningrad (now Zenit St Petersburg). Dinamo’s loss was very much
CDKA’s gain.
Understandably, it was CDSA players who made up the bulk of the USSR
side in Helsinki. Bulgaria were beaten 2–1 in the preliminary round (Great
Britain’s amateurs, incidentally, lost 5–3 to Luxembourg at the same stage),
but the first round proper paired the USSR with Yugoslavia, silver-
medallists four years earlier. The Soviet authorities had always been uneasy
about games against foreign sides – when CDKA lost twice on a three-
match tour of Czechoslovakia in 1947, it led to a two-year moratorium on
games against foreign opposition – but the pressure to beat Yugoslavia was
even more extreme. Tito, playing off East against West, had led his
federation into a position of non-alignment with Moscow, and, as a
consequence, Stalin was desperate to see Yugoslavia defeated. The Best
Friend of Sportsmen had previously paid football little attention – although
a half-hour demonstration match between Spartak and Spartak Reserves put
on for him in Red Square in 1936 was extended to forty-three minutes
because he seemed to be enjoying himself so much – and when he did for
once take an interest, things went badly. The USSR came from 5–1 down to
draw 5–5, forcing a replay, which Yugoslavia won 3–1. ‘It was not a
football match, it was a political game.’ said Stjepan Bobek, who scored
Yugoslavia’s second goal in the replay. ‘I remember seeing the headline:
TITO 3 STALIN 1’. Stalin was furious, and disbanded CDSA ‘for
damaging the prestige of the Soviet state’. Three players – Konstantin
Kryzhevsky, Anatoly Bashashkin and Konstantin Beskov – were suspended
for life, and even they were probably grateful their fate hadn’t been any
worse. After all, Konstantin Schepotskyi of Dynamo Kyiv had been
arrested in 1938 and tortured for seven years to try to make him confess to
being a Polish spy, and his only crime had been not to wear a medal given
him to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution.
Stalin’s death in March 1953 eased the pressure to an extent, CDSA were
re-formed as CSKA and Kryzhevsky, Bashashkin and Beskov were all able
to resume their careers; but football in the USSR was still a precarious
business in desperate need of a tonic. How, after all, could Soviet players
have performed at major tournaments knowing the potential consequences
of defeat? Streltsov, cocky, charismatic and preternaturally gifted, suffered
no such fears. He seemed the answer to their prayers. ‘His influence on us I
would call a hypnosis by individuality,’ his biographer, Alexander Nilin,
wrote. ‘He had a magic that made us expect the impossible … the boy came
to us from the land of wonder.’
It was in April 1954 that Streltsov made his debut for the first team at
Torpedo Moscow – a club based on the ZIL car plant – becoming, at the age
of sixteen years, eight months and twenty-four days, the youngest
goalscorer in the history of the Soviet league. The following season, he
finished as the league’s top scorer and earned an international call-up for a
friendly against Sweden in Stockholm. Too young said the doubters, but
Streltsov got three in a 6–0 win, becoming the first player to score a hat-
trick on his debut for the USSR. That game has since taken on a mythic
status in Russia, a glimpse of what might have been; three years later,
without Streltsov, it was to Sweden that they lost 2–0 in the World Cup
quarterfinal.
Streltsov had that happy knack of always turning it on when it really
mattered, and he was the undoubted star of the 1956 Olympics. The USSR
beat West Germany in the first round, Streltsov scoring the winner, then
needed a replay to see off Indonesia in the second, setting up a semi-final
against Bulgaria, who, having received a first-round bye, had reached the
last four by beating Great Britain 6–1. The Soviets struggled against the
fresher Bulgarians and matters got even worse when their right-back
Nikolay Tyschenko broke a collarbone. With substitutes yet to be
sanctioned for official competition, he had the injury set in plaster and
returned to the field, but could do little other than trot around on the right
flank trying to avoid confrontation. It was still goalless at ninety minutes,
but Bulgaria took the lead through Ivan Kolev early in extra-time. By then,
Valentin Ivanov was also hampered by injury, leaving the USSR effectively
down to nine men and trailing.
The day before meeting Vartanyan, I had met Konstantin Kleshchyov, the
editor of the Russian sports weekly Sovetsky Sport. A confirmed cynic, he
is well aware that the Streltsov myth has benefited from his arrested
potential, that by not playing during what would presumably have been the
peak of his career, Streltsov was spared the possibility of disappointing his
public. Even he, though, seems not to doubt that Streltsov is the greatest
talent Russian football has known. ‘He was a player who could stand like
this for ninety minutes,’ he said, putting his hands on his hips, ‘then score
the crucial goal.’ In Melbourne he not merely did that, equalising after 112
minutes, but also laid on the winner for Boris Tatushin four minutes later.
Bizarrely, Streltsov was then dropped for the final against Yugoslavia
because the USSR coach Gavriil Kachalin liked his strike-pairing to play
together at club level. With Ivanov, his team-mate at Torpedo, injured,
Streltsov was replaced by the thirty-year-old Spartak Moscow forward
Nikita Simonyan. Anatoly Ilyin scored the only goal of the game,
condemning Yugoslavia to their third silver in successive Olympics and
giving the USSR their first success in international football.
Simonyan is one of the most successful figures in the Soviet game. He
won four league titles and two cups as a player, and four cups and two
league titles as a coach. ‘The Olympics was the highlight, no doubt about
that,’ he said when I met him at the RFU building near the Luzhniki
Stadium. On the wall of his office was a photograph taken on the boat on
the way home from Australia (twenty days to Vladivostok, then eight more
on a train to Moscow), the triumphant eleven who played in the final
standing squinting into the sun, arms wrapped around each other’s
shoulders. As if prefiguring the days when the authorities would
deliberately airbrush him from history, Streltsov is not there. ‘They wanted
only those who had won medals,’ Simonyan explained. In those days if you
didn’t play in the final, you got nothing. Simonyan, recognising Streltsov’s
contribution in the semi-final, offered him his medal, but Streltsov refused.
‘He said to me,’ Simonyan recalled, ‘“Nikita, I will win many other
trophies.”’ Streltsov did gain some reward, though, as every member of the
squad was awarded the Merited Master of Sport degree (ZMS), the highest
honour that could be bestowed on a Soviet sportsman, and something that
guaranteed a higher wage.
The first cracks emerged later in that 1956 season. A natural target for
opposition defenders, Streltsov began to collect bookings as he took his
retribution. Then, on 11 April 1957, in a league game between Torpedo and
Spartak Minsk played in Odessa – it was common for spring matches to be
staged in the south, away from the worst of the weather – provoked by a
series of bad challenges, he was sent off for the first time in his career,
having lunged two-footed, studs up, at the opposing number five,
Vyacheslav Artemiev. Vartanyan has studied both articles in newspapers
and the official referees’ reports and believes Streltsov was more sinned
against than sinning. ‘During games he was regularly kicked.’ he said.
‘There were dirty tricks against him and he was tackled from behind, but as
a rule he would not react. Sometimes he did get wound up and he did react,
but he would always do it openly – walk up to his opponent and hit them,
no dirty tricks.’
Fair play is one of Vartanyan’s hobby horses; he insists that he cannot
recognise Diego Maradona as a genius because of the handball against
England in the 1986 World Cup, and laughed off my suggestion that Terry
Fenwick’s brutality in that quarter-final surrendered any English claim to
the moral high ground. He is critical also of Valeriy Lobanovskyi, whom he
is convinced fixed games. Oleh Blokhin, he says, has admitted as much to
him, while the party themselves reprimanded Lobanovskyi after a televised
goalless draw between Dynamo and CSKA Moscow in Kyiv in May 1987.
Despite the occasional disciplinary problems, Streltsov remained a
formidable player. He married in June 1957, and celebrated by hitting
thirty-one goals in twenty-two games between 21 July and 26 October, a
little under a hundred days. The following month, though, Streltsov and his
Torpedo team-mate Ivanov missed a train from Moscow bound for the East
German city of Leipzig, where the USSR were to play a World Cup
qualifying play-off against Poland. The railway minister – for nothing, of
course, could be done without the involvement of politicians – ordered that
the train be stopped in the Moscow suburb of Mozhaisk, where the players,
who had taken a taxi, joined the rest of the squad. That incident might have
been forgotten, particularly as Streltsov scored in a 2–0 win, but a few days
before a USSR trip to China in January 1958, he was involved in a brawl
with police near the Dinamo metro station. He was convicted of ‘minor
hooliganism’ and sentenced to three days in jail. The All-Union Committee
of Physical Culture (VSFK) met on 4 February, and, at the request of both
Torpedo and the USSR national side, stripped him of his ZMS. He was also
withdrawn from the USSR squad, and took his place in an initial forty-man
party for the World Cup only after making a public apology.
Preparations for Sweden began with a training camp at Spartak’s base at
Tarasovka, a few miles north of Moscow. On the evening of 25 May, the
final day of training, Tatushin, Streltsov and their team-mate Mikhail
Ogonkov left the camp for a party hosted by Eduard Karakhonov, an army
officer recently returned from the Far East. On the way, they were
introduced to two women – the twenty-year-old Marina Lebedeva and her
friend Tamara Timkina. Most witnesses seem to agree that Marina seduced
Streltsov, and they almost certainly spent the night together. The next
morning, Lebedeva sent a brief letter to the Moscow public prosecutor: ‘On
25 May 1958,’ it read, ‘in a dacha next to the school in the village of
Pravda, I was raped by Streltsov Eduard. I ask that he be brought to justice.’
Timkina wrote a similar letter, accusing Ogonkov.
Only Ogonkov and Tatushin made it back to Tarasovka. ‘Strelstov never
turned up at the camp that morning,’ Simonyan said. ‘There were rumours
that something had gone on, then the police came. They told us what had
happened. We had been in the training camp for a long time, and that
morning we were going home.’ By then Streltsov had already been arrested.
Ogonkov and Tatushin were picked up later that day and by mid-afternoon
all three were being held at the Butyrka jail in Moscow. When news of the
arrest broke, 100,000 workers at the ZIL factory threatened to march in
protest, but their demonstration was called off when it was revealed that
Streltsov had confessed.
On 27 May, the VSFK imposed on Streltsov a life ban from football. The
same day, Timkina withdrew her accusation, and Ogonkov and Tatushin
were released the following morning. On 30 May, Lebedeva sent another
letter to the public prosecutor: ‘I ask that the criminal proceedings against
Streltsov Eduard Anatoliyevich be stopped, because I forgive him,’ she
wrote, although the implication of that is still that she had been raped. Then
she had another change of heart, and withdrew the second letter. A day
later, the USSR’s final twenty-one-man World Cup squad was delivered to
FIFA. Streltsov was not on the list, and neither were Ogonkov and Tatushin,
both ostensibly left out for having missed training. Streltsov’s case was
rapidly brought to court, and, on 24 July, three days after his twenty-first
birthday, he was convicted and sentenced to the gulag.
Was he, though, guilty? His confession is not the conclusive evidence it
might seem, because it quickly became apparent that he made his statement
only after being told that he could go to the World Cup if he admitted his
guilt. For Vartanyan, and for many others, there is evidence that there had
been a campaign against Streltsov for over a year before the incident at
Karakhanov’s dacha.
That he drank is indisputable. Ivanov was three years older than Streltsov,
and seems obsessed by his former team-mate’s death from throat cancer in
1990, when he was fifty-three. ‘In life he was too good and kind,’ he said.
‘It was the fans who killed him. Everybody wanted to drink with him, and
he got more and more fans. He was playing for the factory team … working
class, you know … and they would come after work and say “let’s drink”. If
he had refused they would have said he had snubbed them, and of course
that had an impact on him.’ Vartanyan, equally, put Streltsov’s early death
down to his good nature rather than the more obvious cause of smoking.
‘He was exposed to radiation in the camps,’ he said, ‘and then in 1986 he
played in an exhibition game in Chernobyl after the disaster, and that
pushed him over the edge.’
Streltsov also seems to have been something of a womaniser. Again, that
in itself probably would not have been a problem, had it not been for his
relationship, if indeed there was one, with the daughter of the Culture
Minister Yekaterina Furtseva, the only woman ever to become a member of
the Politburo. Svetlana Furtseva was sixteen, and apparently besotted with
the nineteen-year-old Streltsov. Her mother, a favourite of Khrushchev, met
Streltsov early in 1957 at a reception at the Kremlin to celebrate the
Olympic victory. She mentioned his probable marriage to her daughter, to
which he replied, ‘I already have a fiancée and I will not marry her.’ As if
that weren’t humiliating enough, he was later heard to say to a friend,
depending which account you believe, either ‘I would never marry that
monkey’, or, ‘I would rather be hanged than marry such a girl’. From then,
if the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, his card was marked.
 Certainly the reaction to his sending-off in Odessa that April appears
excessive. The headline in Sovetsky Sport read: ‘This is not a hero’ and
several letters were printed, supposedly from members of the proletariat,
condemning Streltsov as an example of the evils of Western imperialism.
The practice was common enough for dissident writers and politicians, but
for footballers it was unheard of. Vartanyan has analysed all the sendings-
off between 1954 and 1958. ‘Of forty-five dismissals,’ he told me, ‘twenty-
eight were for fouls worse than Streltsov’s, but eleven of those cases were
never mentioned in national newspapers. In fifteen, the papers simply stated
such-and-such was sent off. Only the two cases involving USSR
internationals got any attention, but neither of them provoked the criticism
Streltsov got. There can be no doubt there was a campaign against him.’
Well, perhaps. It is difficult to know exactly how he can rate the severity
of fouls – particularly in the absence of video evidence – and the actions of
a celebrity naturally draw an exaggerated attention. A few days after the
match, though, Streltsov was called before the Section of Soviet Football
(SFS), and his ZMS withdrawn. On only one other occasion during
Streltsov’s career was such a serious punishment imposed, and that on a
player who had head-butted an opponent. On 20 April, though, the decision
was rescinded, and Streltsov was instead banned for three games. Again,
though, it does not require plotting in the Kremlin for bureaucrats to make
an example of a popular, high-profile player.
The SFS seems never to have warmed to Streltsov. An internal memo
even criticised the timing of his wedding. ‘We found out before the
important friendly against Romania that he had married,’ it read. ‘This
shows how weak the educational work at Torpedo is.’ Communist Party
archives, similarly, reveal a degree of distrust, and Streltsov, having
attracted the interest of clubs in France and Sweden following tours with
Torpedo, was marked down as a possible defector. ‘Streltsov,’ his file reads,
‘according to a verified source, said to his friends in 1957 that he was
always sorry to return to the USSR after trips abroad.’
And then there is the matter of why Karakhanov asked the players to his
dacha. He was, at best, an acquaintance of Tatushin, and, while it is
certainly possible that he just liked the idea of having three footballers at his
party, there are those who see something more sinister in his invitation. It is
suspiciously convenient, they say, that he had returned from serving in the
Far East a matter of days earlier.
All that, though, is circumstantial. More concrete evidence of a plot
comes from an interview Kachalin gave Vartanyan shortly before his death.
‘When I tried to help Streltsov,’ he said, ‘I was told by police that
Khrushchev himself had been informed about the case. I then dashed to a
regional Communist Party committee headquarters and asked the First
Secretary to suspend the case until the end of the World Cup. I was told that
nothing could be done, and they pointed meaningfully upwards. I
understood then that it was the end. I heard that Furtseva had it in for
Streltsov, but who knows exactly what happened?’
What is incontrovertible is that something did. ‘They went to the dacha
…’ Ivanov said. ‘It’s a dark story. Who raped whom, it’s hard to say. I think
if a girl goes to the suburbs for a night … then a guy is waiting for her as it
were … and she is the same … but I don’t believe it was a set-up, no.
Maybe it was the host of the dacha. I don’t know who raped her, but she
said it was Streltsov. So it’s a dark story.’
Perhaps significantly, none of the players to whom I spoke were prepared,
even now, categorically to defend their team-mate. Viktor Shustikov joined
Torpedo six months before Streltsov’s arrest, and went on to make a record
427 appearances in the Soviet league. ‘Streltsov was good-natured and
simple,’ he said. ‘He always helped the younger players, and it was always
easy to play alongside him because the other teams would send players to
mark him.’ Age, though, had caught up quickly with Shustikov, and he
struggled to recall his playing days with any great clarity. Asked about the
rape and the conspiracy theory, he simply spread his hands. ‘I don’t
remember,’ he said, ‘but I did hear that he had refused to marry Furtseva’s
daughter.’
Most odd, though, was Simonyan’s reaction. ‘What happened with
Streltsov you cannot explain,’ he said. ‘It is a mysterious thing. He wrote to
his mother saying he was taking the blame for someone else. It was the
system that punished Streltsov. I don’t know for sure if there was a rape on
the part of Streltsov, but he and the girl slept together.’ He shrugged. ‘He
was young, a bachelor, unmarried …’
Actually, of course, Streltsov had married just under a year before.
Perhaps that is an indication he didn’t take his vows particularly seriously,
perhaps Simonyan’s memory is just faulty. As he broke off, Simonyan
reached into a drawer in his desk and took out a book. He opened it and
removed a photograph which, without a word, he then handed to me. The
print showed four images. Two were of a dark-haired young woman –
Lebedeva. In one, she was lying back on what appeared to be a hospital
bed, apparently asleep, her eyes ringed with bruises. The other two were of
Streltsov. In the more striking, his face, captured in profile, was streaked
from nose to cheekbone with three parallel scratches. There is, of course,
the possibility that the photographs were doctored, or the injuries inflicted
at a later date, but Soviet justice rarely required quite such damning
evidence.
Lebedeva herself has disappeared, the last sighting of her coming in 1997,
when, the day after the annual ceremony held by Torpedo at Streltsov’s
grave, a club director called Yury Zolotov went to the cemetery to tend the
flowers that had been left. As he approached, he saw a woman kneeling by
the graveside, weeping. He recognised her as Lebedeva, but as soon as she
became aware of his presence, she rushed away.
Guilty or not, the machine soon went into action against Streltsov. That
June, amid stories from the World Cup in Sweden, the official newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda reported an incident that had taken place on 8
November the previous year, a fortnight before Streltsov and Ivanov had
missed the train to Leipzig. ‘He burst into a flat that was unknown to him,’
the article read. ‘He scared those who were sleeping in it and began
furiously to smash plates and glasses.’ Streltsov’s friend Galina
Chupalenkova, though, gave a rather different account. She said that
somebody came up to Streltsov, and smacked him in the face. Streltsov then
gave chase, and ended up running into a basement flat. Although there was
a disturbance, nothing was broken, and he reached an out-of-court
compensation settlement with the occupants.
That aside, Streltsov’s history was quietly erased. An official football
directory from 1959 lists the five goals he scored for Torpedo in 1958 as
having been ‘scored by other players’, while his part in the 1956 Olympic
squad was expunged. Komsomolskaya Pravda, the story of the smashed
crockery aside, mentioned Streltsov only once in the years immediately
following his conviction, and that was a clumsy character assassination.
‘Streltsov,’ it claimed, ‘is less than a primitive man. His incompetence in
the simplest matters provoked amusement and smiles among his friends in
the team. He openly thought that the city of Sochy [a Black Sea resort
where Soviet clubs often held their pre-season training] was on the Caspian
Sea. He thinks that sea water is only salty because herring swim in it.’ He
may – although it seems scarcely credible – have been confused about the
location of Sochy, but the jibe might seem more convincing if the second
allegation weren’t lifted straight from Chekhov’s short story ‘Examine’.
Streltsov’s first months in the gulag at Lesnoy were tough, and he appears
to have struggled to come to terms with his sudden fall from grace. ‘In his
first year in the camps he never stopped believing that they would come and
set him free,’ wrote Nilin, ‘that there was somebody in Moscow working on
his behalf. That’s why he wasn’t hard, why he wasn’t inventive about
fighting for survival.’
An eighteen-year-old thug who went by the nickname of Repeinik (a kind
of burred grass) took against Streltsov, and taunted him at every
opportunity. Before long, Streltsov snapped, and he attacked Repeinik, who,
it later emerged, was an informer for the authorities. The other prisoners
held a meeting in the camp boiler room, and decided that, in their
terminology, Streltsov had to be ‘set on the clock’, that is, killed. He was
badly beaten – the prison report says ‘either with an iron bar or the heel of a
shoe’– but survived, whether because of his robust constitution or because
the camp guards couldn’t countenance the death of such a noted figure is
unclear.
After his recovery, Streltsov was moved to another camp, and gradually
life became easier. While the suggestion that he was excused from the main
labour of chopping down trees to entertain guards with his ball skills seems
implausible, it certainly is the case that he earned a respect in prison
because of his reputation as a footballer. ‘At Torpedo we never forgot about
him while he was in prison,’ said Shustikov. ‘Our coaches sometimes
visited him, and once I drove his mother to see him after he had been
moved to a camp at Tula [about 130 miles from Moscow]. We would
always tell him about Torpedo, about the team.’
It is what happened after his imprisonment, though, that makes Streltsov
truly remarkable. He was released in 1963 after serving five years of his
twelve-year sentence and, prevented from returning to top-level football by
the VSFK’s ban, he began playing for ZIL’s Department of Technical
Supervision (OTK) in the factory league. Not surprisingly, they won all
eleven of their games that season, and Streltsov began to be sneaked into
increasingly important fixtures.
A petition signed by a thousand factory workers was sent to Leonid
Brezhnev, then the secretary of the Communist Party, asking him to rescind
Streltsov’s suspension. The Ideological Section of the Party Central
Committee, though, opposed the move. ‘In contravention of the
suspension,’ they wrote, ‘the heads of the factory sports organisations have
twice – in May and June 1963 – let Streltsov play for Torpedo’s reserve
team … and once in a friendly match in Gorky [now Nizhny Novgorod].
Before the match in Gorky it was deliberately announced on the public
address system at the stadium that Streltsov would play. When the directors
of the Central Council of the Sports Societies Union tried to stop him, the
majority of spectators chanted “Streltsov, to the field”, until it was decided
to let him play to avoid crowd trouble. This was all done to publicise
Streltsov and have him readmitted into the first team. We therefore propose
that the request to lift the ban on Streltsov be rejected.’
Brezhnev marked the letter ‘Agreed’, but, after ousting Khrushchev in
October 1964, he sanctioned Streltsov’s return. ‘He didn’t play for a year
after being in prison,’ Shustikov said. ‘He worked for the factory, and
played for a factory team. But sometimes we would take him to away
matches. The club management was concerned that the fans would boo him
for what he had done, but on the contrary I remember something that
happened when we took him to a game in Kharkiv. He sat in the stand and
the public went mad insisting we should field him. After the match, to mark
the occasion, they drew a circle in chalk around the chair in which he had
sat.’
Ivanov similarly remembered the warmth with which Streltsov was
greeted. ‘After he returned to Torpedo, we travelled and in every town we
met somebody who had been in prison with him,’ he said. ‘That was
another thing that killed him. They all wanted to drink with him. So what
with the fans and those people, all wanting to drink … That is why he
retired a little earlier than the rest of us.’
That first season back was spectacular. Torpedo were a decent side, and
had won the title without Streltsov in 1960, but he made them brilliant.
Prison, according to Ivanov, hadn’t changed Streltsov. ‘It only made him
bolder,’ he said. ‘He still had his health, and talent is talent. He was the best
player in the USSR.’ Torpedo lost only two games in that 1965 season and
claimed the second league title in their history. Streltsov returned to the
national team, scoring twenty-five goals in thirty-eight games, and in both
1967 and 1968 he was named Soviet Player of the Year. He added a Soviet
Cup-winners’ medal in 1968.
It might not have been quite the level of success of which he had boasted
to Simonyan in 1956, but after losing almost seven years of his career, it
was remarkable enough. Perhaps the metaphor is too easy, but it isn’t
difficult to see why Russian football is so drawn to a talent who withstood
state oppression and emerged triumphant. Certainly that is how Vartanyan
views him – as a glorious martyr. The problem, of course, is that that
interpretation requires him, despite the scratches, to be innocent.
Conscious that Vartanyan and I had rambled on for the best part of six
hours, that night I bought Vlad dinner as a thank-you for interpreting. You
might have thought that a day spent discussing the dangers of drinking in
Russia would have taught me a lesson, but no. There was beer and there
was vodka, and, while I certainly hadn’t had a skinful, by the time I got on
the Metro to go back to my hotel, I’d had enough that the warmth of the
train, after the cold of the night, sent me to sleep.
(The Moscow metro, incidentally, is fantastic, its only fault being the
general reluctance of passengers ever to raise their eyes. There was a glitch
in a football game I had on my Commodore-64 whereby two players
running square into each other would stick, feet pedalling furiously and
shoulders wobbling, but neither able to slide past the other. Muscovites on
the metro are pretty much the same, all bowed heads and shoulders tensed
for impact. It also perhaps says something about the Russian psyche that
where the indicator boards on the London Underground give you something
to look forward to by counting down to the next train, the clocks in Moscow
count up, showing by how much you missed the last one.)
I was awakened by a soldier at Shchyolkovskaya, the last stop on the
purple line, at around 2.30, by which time I’d been relieved of my wallet
and my phone. I still had my metro pass, but the trains had stopped running
for the night, leaving me stranded, approximately ten miles from my hotel
with fourteen roubles (about 28p.) in my pocket and the temperature
significantly below zero. It occurred to me even at the time that the
situation was not unlike that faced by Michael Douglas in The Game, but
given his immediate reaction, as far as I could recall it, was to run about
randomly in a flouncy shirt, I realised I was on my own, and so, asking the
soldier for directions, I set off to walk and/or hitch. After about a mile I met
a couple who spoke enough English to take pity on me and pay for a taxi
back to the hotel. Sometimes all of us are reliant on the kindness of
strangers, and to them I am immensely grateful. Certainly the next time I
meet a distressed Russian blundering around Wandsworth in the early
hours, I will do all I can to help.
*
The following day we headed up to Tarasovka, where Spartak still have
their training base. Spartak are by some distance the most successful
Russian club of all time, having won twelve Soviet championships, and
nine of the first ten Russian league titles. More recently, though, they have
had their problems, being left behind as big business and the oligarchs’
discovery of their love for football has elevated the likes of CSKA and
Lokomotiv.
Spartak, despite much grumbling, still play at the Luzhniki, the stadium
that hosted the opening and closing ceremonies at the 1980 Olympics. I first
saw it in 1992, as I headed south on a bus across the Steppes towards
Tambov (annoyingly, a few days later it was there that Spartak beat
Liverpool 4–2 in the Cup-Winners’ Cup, but school trips rarely take
account of such things). Back then, it loomed through the November sleet
as something unspeakably Soviet: imposing, forbidding and concrete. It was
still known as the Lenin Stadium, and it still looked essentially as it had in
1982 when it was the scene of what many consider football’s worst stadium
disaster.
Almost a decade later, I returned for Spartak’s derby against CSKA to find
it transformed, a new roof glinting splendidly in the spring sunshine, bright
plastic seats replacing the old benches, and the desks in the press area vast
and topped with mock-marble. Lenin still shook a Communist fist by the
main entrance, but there were few other reminders of 1992. On the pitch
too, there was a sense of the old order being overturned. With Rolan Gusev,
that most frustrating of wingers, outstanding, Spartak were picked apart,
and were fortunate to lose only 3–0. That night, as I walked back past the
Bolshoi Theatre to my hotel, a shaven-headed CSKA fan reeled up to me.
‘We kicked their asses,’ he belched in a fog of vodka-breath. ‘Ten years we
have waited, but the revolution has begun.’
At the time I was sceptical – CSKA, after all, had beaten Spartak 4–1 in
1998 to little effect – but the fan was right. That season CSKA lost the title
to Lokomotiv in a play-off, with Spartak eleven points adrift in third; in
2003, as CSKA took the championship, Spartak finished a lowly tenth; and
in 2004 Spartak were only eighth. The years of Spartak domination are
over, and Russian football has entered a more competitive, brighter age.
Spartak, nonetheless, remain Russia’s most popular club thanks to their
reputation for having maintained their independence in Soviet times. Like
Streltsov’s, though, the preservation of their reputation has required some
discreet pruning of the actuality.
In the entrance hall of the training base at Tarasovka hangs a photograph
of an old man. Russia is full of photographs of old men, but this one, more
than most, is worthy of reverence. It is Nikolay Starostin, the man who took
MKS – a club based on a catering firm – restructured and refounded them
as Spartak in 1935, was sentenced to ten years in the gulag and returned to
lead the club as they became the most successful Russian side in the USSR.
Life wasn’t easy for Starostin. He was left as his family’s main
breadwinner when his father died in the typhoid epidemic of 1920, but
managed to support his mother and three brothers by playing ice hockey in
the winter and football in the summer. All of his brothers – Alexander,
Andrey and Pyotr – played for Spartak, while Nikolay ended up captaining
the USSR at both sports.
If those who eulogise him are to be believed, his downfall had its roots in
a game in Georgia in the mid-1920s in which he outplayed the opposing
left-half, Lavrenty Beria. As head of the secret police, Beria went on to
become, after Stalin, the most feared man in the USSR. His position made
him, ex officio, president of Dinamo Moscow, although his first love
remained Dinamo Tbilisi. Whether being nutmegged really turned Beria
against Starostin is impossible to say – there is no evidence beyond
Starostin’s word that the game even took place, and Beria certainly never
played at a top level, but Spartak’s success certainly irked him. They won
the championship in 1938 and 1939, and, even worse, in 1939 beat Dinamo
Tbilisi 1–0 in the semi-final of the Cup, thanks to a goal from Andrey
Protasov. Dinamo protested that the ball had not crossed the line, but the
VSFK allowed the result to stand. Spartak then won the final against
Stalinets Leningrad, only for the VSFK – Starostin suggests on Beria’s
orders – to decide that the semi-final should be replayed after all. Spartak
this time won 3–2, Georgy Glazkov scoring a hat-trick, and were named
Cup winners.
Three years later, Starostin was arrested. To Spartak fans, the delay was
caused by the fact that it was only under the cover of war that such a
prominent figure could safely be put on trial. In his autobiography Football
Through the Years, Starostin says that during interrogation at the Lubyanka
he was accused of having plotted to assassinate Stalin during the forty-
three-minute exhibition in Red Square in 1936. This, of course, was a
ludicrous charge, the only evidence being a photograph found in his flat,
showing Starostin and his team-mates in a car that passed close to Stalin as
they arrived for the game. Besides, two referees – Vladimir Stripikheyev
and Vladimir Ryabokon – had been shot in 1937 over similar allegations; if
there had been a shred of evidence against Starostin, he would surely have
been interrogated then. Nonetheless, Starostin and his brothers were each
sentenced to ten years in the gulag – another example, the modern
mythology would have us believe, of the machine crushing an individual,
and doing down Spartak as it did so. ‘My brothers and I did not exist by
ourselves,’ Starostin wrote. ‘People saw us as embodying Spartak. Beria
was dealing not just with four men, but with the passions of millions of
ordinary Soviet people.’
His book, though, is not exactly a document of unadulterated veracity.
Starostin, for instance, claims he came up with the name Spartak after
reading a book about a Roman gladiator, even though there had been
sporting clubs called Spartak from the mid-twenties, long before he became
involved with MKS. Equally, if Beria really were fixing games, he must
have been extraordinarily bad at it, given that Dinamo Tbilisi did not win a
single trophy until eleven years after his death. Nor does Starostin’s
relationship with the football authorities seem ever to have been so bad as
he made out; it was his influence that saw Spartak Yerevan admitted to the
fourth division of the Soviet League in 1937 while Dinamo Yerevan, who
had finished above them in the Armenian championship, were consigned to
the fifth. Equally, it is likely that the truth behind his imprisonment was
rather more prosaic, that he was jailed for a simple fraud. (I have seen
documentary evidence to support this claim, but for legal reasons I cannot
reveal what.)
Starostin, anyway, was not above offering inducements to help his side.
Towards the end of the 1969 season, when he was head of the club (the term
‘president’ was frowned upon), Spartak had to play CSKA twice in quick
succession. They won one game and drew the other and, as a consequence,
took the title; a few weeks later, several CSKA players moved into new
apartments provided by Moscow City Council, with whom Starostin had
always maintained excellent relations.
Starostin’s version of the legend nonetheless endures, and so does the
persecution complex of Spartak fans. The day before I watched CSKA beat
Spartak, I met Oleg – one of the most strident voices in the chat-room on
the club website – in a Czech bar near Moscow Zoo. He was a huge man in
his early forties, muscle just beginning to run to fat. His hair was cropped
short and neatly parted, and he wore the sort of wide-lensed gold-framed
glasses that mark people out as either computer technicians or violent
nutters. As it turned out, he was both.
He ordered a glass of wine – his doctor had told him to cut back on the
booze – and unzipped his navy and red Russia tracksuit top to reveal a
green T-shirt on which was printed a picture of a pig and a set of scales.
‘This is my club,’ he said. ‘The 100kg Club. There are fifty-two of us,
Spartak fans from across the globe – Calgary, Berlin, Dallas, Melbourne –
and we go to all the Champions League games. We were on the beach at
Estoril one year and one of us said, “Hey, we are all big guys. We could all
eat 100kg of meat.” That is why we are called the 100kg Club.’ Meat is
very important to Spartak fans. They have now appropriated the term, but
for years opposing fans would taunt them with chants of ‘Meat, Meat’, a
supposedly insulting reference to their origins in the catering trade.
Oleg began supporting Spartak as a boy, when he spent six years at their
football school near his home in the north-east of Moscow. Locality in
Moscow, though, usually has little to do with affiliation. With a few notable
exceptions – Zenit represent St Petersburg, and Anzhi certainly stand for the
Caucasian south – the same is true of most of Russia. After all, even if you
count only European Russia (it is rare for Siberian teams to take a place in
the top flight, although Tom Tomsk were promoted in 2004 along with, pity
the schedulers, the Chechen side Terek Grozny), the country has an area of
seventeen million square kilometres. Fans who live in Arkangelsk to the
north or Perm to the east lie around 1,000km from the nearest top-flight
side which, in distance terms, is like living in London and supporting Sparta
Prague. The selection of clubs is thus more to do with ideology than
geography.
Of course, those who worked in the railways tended to support
Lokomotiv, and those with military connections favoured CSKA, but, for
many, Spartak – funded loosely by the trade unions but essentially
independent – represented a welcome alternative, free of the state, and for
that they were persecuted; that at least is the romanticised version. The fact
that they won twelve Soviet league titles suggests that, certainly once Stalin
had died and Beria been executed in 1953, the repression was minimal. It is
even harder to take them seriously as a club of dissent when fans proudly
count among their number Konstantin Chernenko, who succeeded
Andropov as president in 1984, and died to be replaced by Mikhail
Gorbachev a year later.
Not, of course, that I dared say any of that to Oleg, who, despite nine
league titles in ten years, still insisted on a cosmic conspiracy against
Spartak. His prime target was Moscow Council, whom he blamed for
forcing Spartak to use the Luzhniki. In that, he had a point. The Luzhniki,
magnificent as it is, is an absurd setting for Russian league football. It is
shared by Torpedo and Spartak, but whichever side is at home it is rare that
more than 15,000 of its 80,000 seats are filled. It, like everything in
Moscow, arguably like Russia itself, is just too big. Even for the derby
against CSKA when there were 50,000 there, the stadium felt empty and
any atmosphere was dissipated. Those are the practical, modern reasons for
wanting to leave, but for Spartak fans the Luzhniki was the setting for the
darkest moment of their past.
On 20 October 1982, an unusually cold night even by the standards of the
Russian autumn, Spartak beat the Dutch club Haarlem 2–0 in the second
round of the UEFA Cup. Only 10,000 turned out to watch, so police
crammed them into one section of the stadium. With Spartak leading 1–0
and the game heading into injury time, hundreds of fans made for the exits,
only for Sergey Shvetsov to add a second. Many of those already on the icy
steps behind the stand turned back to join the celebrations, but ran into a
wall of other fans on the way out. Police refused to open any other exits,
and with supporters stumbling and slipping in the darkness, dozens were
trampled or crushed to death.
Some estimates suggest as many as 340 were killed, but the official death
toll stands at sixty-six, a figure the late Leonid Romanov, a former head of
the Spartak fan club, believed to be reasonably accurate. With Brezhnev
ailing fast and Andropov not yet installed as his successor, the USSR could
not countenance such a tragedy, and so a cover-up was put into effect.
While many suspected something awful had happened, it was only in 1989
that the full story became known. By the morning after the disaster, the
bodies had been removed, and, to try to play down the scale of the horror,
families, monitored by police, had to pay their last respects forty minutes
before the dead were buried in a mass funeral.
Spartak, understandably, want a home of their own, but plans to build
their own stadium – of a more realistic size and without the running track –
have persistently been blocked by the city, which doesn’t want to lose the
rent that Spartak pay to use the Luzhniki. It doesn’t help the conspiracy
theories that Luzhkov, the mayor, who is in his sixties and, in Vlad’s words,
‘bald, like Lombardo’, plays football twice a week with Yury Belous, the
president of FK Moskva. ‘Luzhkov is the centre-forward, of course,’
Kleshchyov told me, ‘and Belous, the playmaker.’
Belous, a successful entrepreneur, somehow persuaded Luzhkov that
Moscow council, in order to promote the city, needed to buy half the shares
in what, when it first splintered from Torpedo Moscow, was Torpedo-ZIL,
and, after a couple of seasons as Torpedo-Metallurg, is now FK Moskva.
Five clubs from the capital, apparently, just weren’t enough. I saw FK
Moskva beat Zenit 3–2 in the Petrovsky Stadium in St Petersburg, a game
that effectively ended Zenit’s chances of qualifying for the 2005–06 UEFA
Cup. They were one of those sides you love to see as a football tourist,
packed with players you vaguely remember from elsewhere who, when
you’re sitting alone in a freezing press box exhausted after a fretful sleep on
the night-train, are as welcome as old friends.
There was the diminutive former Steaua Bucharest midfielder Pompiliu
Stoica, surprisingly but effectively converted into a left-back; there was
Mariusz Jop, last seen at Wisia Krakow, dominating the centre of defence
alongside Jerry-Christian Tchuisse, who was born in Cameroon but is now a
naturalised Russian, and would have played for the national side had it not
been for objections from right-wing groups; and, there, providing a cameo
distillation of his career by coming on with three minutes to go to slice a
chance horribly and then get booked, was Amir Kari , signed by Ipswich
after Euro 2000 when Slovenians were indispensable accessories for any
self-respecting mid-ranking club, but never good enough to be fielded by
them in a league game.
What is enticing for the outsider, though, is not necessarily good for
Russian football, and with their Romanians, Poles, naturalised
Cameroonians and Slovenians – not to mention a Moldovan, a Bosnian, a
Lithuanian, a Ghanaian and an Argentinian – FK Moskva are typical of
Russia’s modern footballing problem: the mediocre league of nations. There
are mumblings about the stifling of young Russian talent, but the clubs that
have money – and a lot of them now do – continue to buy foreign. It might
not quite be so ludicrous as it was when Arsenal Tula sent Yevhen
Kucherevskyi to Brazil to sign a team, but the preference is still for off-the-
shelf exoticism.
The other effect of such cosmopolitanism is the erosion of the ‘Russian
style’. It was never so obvious or so defined as the hard pressing of the
Ukrainians or the dribbling of the Caucasian states, but from the days of
Arkadiev onwards, Russian football has been neat and technically precise,
and has usually featured a sweeper. Those days are disappearing, flat back
fours are becoming more prevalent and the football is becoming
increasingly similar to that played in the West. That matters little from
anything but an aesthetic point of view, and perhaps a gut recoil from the
prospect of globalised homogeneity, but it is symbolic of a wider shift in the
Russian attitude.

FK Moskva did not exist when I met Oleg, and while it’s safe to assume he
would not approve, it’s also safe to assume the bulk of his hatred would still
be directed at CSKA, whose victory in the final Soviet championship he
insisted on seeing as evidence that they were favoured by the old regime.
The fact that it was only their second title since the disbanding of the
Lieutenants Team cut little ice. ‘If we lose the championship,’ he said (and
back then such a thought was scarcely credible), ‘I don’t mind so long as
we beat CSKA.’
 He wasn’t just talking about football. ‘Hooligans have regular fixtures,’ he
told me. ‘We arrange a place and meet outside town. Last year there were
three hundred of us and three hundred of CSKA and we won. It’s OK, there
are rules; everything is organised now, with the Internet. You can use fists,
or bottles, but no knives. It’s getting more difficult these days, though,
because the police have started using undercover agents. The best thing is
fighting with police in other countries. You throw things at them and then
they run at you, and you fight.’
Spartak have had a hooligan element since the seventies, when shaven-
headed thugs in their red-and-white colours would rampage through city
centres and daub their slogans on walls – further evidence, to those who are
looking for it, of the club’s renowned independence. The day after I met
Oleg, there were 149 arrests at the derby.
That game was the first definitive evidence of Spartak’s declining status.
That is partly the result of the increased wealth of Russian football and the
willingness of companies like Sibirsky Aluminium (SibAl) and Yukos to
sponsor clubs, but Spartak themselves have declined. Oleg Romantsev,
once simultaneously their coach, their president and the national coach, was
largely responsible for their rise, but he also has to take most of the blame
for their fall. The club were less dependent on state support than others, but
in the early nineties Spartak still benefited hugely from Romantsev’s policy
of scouring the former Soviet republics for young talent he could develop
and sell on. Players such as Alexander Mostovoi, Igor Shalimov, Dmitry
Radchenko and Valery Karpin passed through Spartak on their way to
western Europe and, at one point, player sales accounted for 70 per cent of
their annual budget.
‘He was hard on everybody,’ the Spartak midfielder Yegor Titov said. ‘He
was always demanding, but he was a fair man. As a coach or a manager I’d
put him on a level with Lobanovskyi. People ask if it was hard to motivate
ourselves in the years when we won the championship every season, but not
with Romantsev. Every draw was tragic for us, because as a punishment he
would lock us in here in the camp.’
Romantsev became coach of Spartak in 1988, elected by the players after
Konstantin Beskov was ousted following a dispute with Starostin, over, it is
alleged, Beskov’s unbending opposition to match-fixing. Five years later
Romantsev was appointed president after a vote of no-confidence – largely
by players whose contracts were about to expire – in the incumbent Yury
Shlyapin. He was highly successful, and, in 1998, after a string of dire
results led to the dismissal of Anatoly Byshovets, he was named national
coach for the second time.
The strain of occupying three roles, though, took its toll, and Romantsev’s
drinking became more pronounced. ‘He’s from Krasnoyarsk,’ Kleshchyov
said. ‘Siberians are big, strong people and when he was young he could
drink two bottles of vodka a day, but as he got older it began to affect him.’
He then told me about a Champions League game away to Lyon in 2001
when Romantsev, after a heavy night, turned up at an afternoon press
conference very much the worse for wear. ‘He didn’t know what he was
saying or doing,’ he said. ‘And when the players see that, they lose respect.’
Romantsev’s drinking continued at the 2002 World Cup, when Russia,
having beaten Tunisia in their opening game, lost their next two group
matches and were eliminated. After the defeat to Belgium, the midfielder
Alexander Mostovoi was asked jokingly if he’d had a vodka to ease his
disappointment. He responded by shaking his head. ‘That’s just for those
upstairs,’ he said. Romantsev has since given up alcohol, and shed several
pounds, but the damage to Spartak was done.
In 2000, Lukoil, one of Russia’s largest oil companies, agreed a
sponsorship deal with the club worth $3million a year, but that only made
things worse as Romantsev sold his shares to the senior Lukoil director
Andrey Chervichenko, a man Kleshchyov described as being ‘one hundred
per cent incompetent in football’. The main beneficiaries of that
incompetence were agents. In 2003, Spartak had eighty senior players on
their books, including seven goalkeepers. The main loser was Dmitry
Sychev, a scorer in that World Cup defeat to Belgium, and the latest in a
line of young forwards to have been promoted as the saviour of Russian
football. As an eighteen-year-old he earned $800 a month, but when he
came to negotiate a new contract, he asked for a raise to $5,000. Given most
of the rest of the first-team squad at the time earned between $10,000 and
$15,000, that might not have seemed unreasonable; Chervichenko, though,
not only refused, but also added a $6million buy-out clause to his existing
contract. Understandably frustrated, Sychev turned to the civil courts, an act
which, in itself, earned him a six-month ban. During his suspension he
signed a pre-contract agreement with Dynamo Kyiv, but eventually joined
Marseille for $3million, half of which Chervichenko ended up paying to his
agent. Like so many Russians abroad, he flopped dreadfully, scoring just
five goals in two seasons, and returned to Moscow with Lokomotiv in 2004.
Back home, he blossomed again, and hit fifteen goals as Loko won their
second title in three years.
After Romantsev’s departure, Titov, having helped them to six of their
nine league titles, was left as the great symbol of Spartak, the most potent
reminder of the golden years. He, though, missed the entirety of the 2004
season through suspension, having tested positive for bromantan (a
stimulant developed in Moscow to enhance alertness among Soviet troops
in Afghanistan) after Russia’s Euro 2004 play-off against Wales. When I
met him at Tarasovka in the final week of that season, he insisted he was
innocent. ‘I don’t know why it was positive,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows. The
sentence anyway was not fair. I was banned for a year and you see other
players who are only banned for a few months.’
When I spoke to him Titov was still at Spartak, so his protestations of
innocence and ignorance were perhaps to be expected. It is hard, though, to
believe that nothing was going on, and, in May 2005, following a lengthy
investigation by Sport Express, the RFU launched a full inquiry. According
to Sport Express, RFU tests found traces of bromantan in samples given by
Titov and the defender Yury Kovtun in early September 2003, and as a
result both were left out of the final Euro 2004 qualifier against the
Republic of Ireland (officially, Titov had a minor strain and Kovtun a
stomach upset). At the same time, three Spartak players – Roman
Pavlyuchenko, Alexander Pavlenko and Alexander Belozyorov – were
withdrawn from the Under-21 squad. Five days later, Spartak fired their
coach Andrey Chernyshov, his assistant Serhiy Yuran and a club doctor,
Anatoly Shchyukin – none of whom had been at the club for more than
three months. Chervichenko insisted it was because of ‘a lack of mutual
understanding with the players’ (and they had just lost 5–2 to Lokomotiv)
but he also spoke mysteriously of having a ‘nasty surprise’. Another doctor,
Artyom Katulin, was banned for two years by the RFU, although that
suspension was later halved.
When it became known that Titov had tested positive, journalists began to
recall other odd episodes. In Spartak’s 3–2 defeat to Dinamo in August
2003, for instance, the defender Maxim Demenko, having been substituted,
went and sat on the wrong bench for several minutes. ‘Everything was a
blur,’ he said. ‘I saw them put up the board with my number and I
applauded the fans, but after that I was oblivious to everything. Then our
players asked me why I’d gone to the Dinamo bench, and I didn’t know
what to say.’
The former Dynamo Kyiv captain Vladyslav Vashchyuk, who came on for
Demenko, spoke of players being given white pills, which they were told
were ‘salts’ or ‘minerals’. After the Dinamo game, he said, he saw several
players shaking.
‘Afterwards, when I found out about the doping, I understood what had
happened,’ Demenko went on. ‘I’d been tense, but I hadn’t known why.
Night came, but I didn’t want to sleep. It went on for five days. Lots of the
guys were complaining about it. We were on the verge of nervous
breakdowns. After the Dinamo game, I was vomiting, so I went to Katulin.
He said they’d given us nothing illegal and it was just because of the
pressure. How were we supposed to know? I missed all the 2004 season
because of the doping. My body stopped feeling pain and I ruptured the
ligament in my knee.’
Both Vashchyuk and Demenko expressed sympathy for Titov. ‘He was
just a scapegoat,’ Demenko said. ‘He paid for somebody else’s mistake.’
Perhaps Titov too, in time, will become another martyr to the system.
Certainly Kleshchyov, cynical as ever, believes he differs from other
sportsmen only in that he was caught. ‘I think, I hope, [he names a leading
Russian swimmer] is clean,’ he said, ‘but I have always been a romantic.’
His last comment, I presume, was intended as irony; if Kleshchyov counts
as a romantic in Moscow, then Russian football truly is doomed.
Desperate to regain their pre-eminence, Spartak paid a Russian record fee
of £7million to sign the Argentinian forward Fernando Cavenaghi from
River Plate in the summer of 2004. Typically for the way their fortunes
have turned, he scored just once in his nine appearances that season. Even
were he firing, though, Spartak could never dominate as they used to; these
days they are just one team among many. ‘It’s tough for us,’ Titov said. ‘We
got used to winning and now we have to recognise it is a different world.
We knew that the money would make it harder for us, but we didn’t realise
how much it would change things.’ The CSKA fan who accosted me
outside the Bolshoi that night was right: there has been another revolution.
 The Spartak of the nineties were a very good side, and they might have
enjoyed tangible international success had Romantsev not been so focused
on his policy of develop-and-sell. In 1995, for instance, Spartak won all six
of their group games in the Champions League, beating Blackburn,
Rosenborg and Legia Warsaw, but then sold Viktor Onopko, Stanislav
Cherchesov, Serhiy Yuran and Vasily Kulkov over the winter, and lost
tamely to Nantes in the quarter-final. That said, their route to pre-eminence
was eased by the chaos that existed in the rest of Russian football as clubs
tried and, for the most part, failed to cope with the changing financial
climate and privatisation.
Asmaral, perhaps, provide the most bewildering example. For a long time
they had ticked along as Krasnaya Presnya, an unassuming second division
side whose only claim to any kind of notoriety was as the club where
Romantsev began his coaching career. In 1990 they were bought by
Khusam al Halidi, an Iraqi businessman. He renamed the club using the
first syllable of the names of each of his three children and appointed
Konstantin Beskov as coach. The club finished seventh in the inaugural
season of the Russian championship in 1992, but Beskov resigned the
following year and Asmaral were relegated. Three years later, they slipped
into the third division and were disbanded.
Clubs appeared, clubs disappeared, and, Spartak aside, the old hierarchies
were overturned. Historically Lokomotiv were always Moscow’s fifth team
– ‘the fifth wheel of the cart’, as other Muscovite fans taunted them – but in
2004 they became only the second team to win two Russian titles, aided by
the Railway Ministry, which paid for their impressive new stadium and
training base. Typically, the minister who sanctioned that outlay, Nikolay
Aksyonenko, was deposed in 2002 after being accused of fraud. For all
Loko’s on-field success, though, it is CSKA who sit at the head of the
oligarchs’ table. They won the league title in 2003 and then, in 2005,
became the first Russian winners of a European competition, beating
Sporting in Lisbon to lift the UEFA Cup.
Having won the final Soviet championship, CSKA’s early years in the
Russian League were something of a non-event. Their comfortable but dull
mid-table existence, though, came to an end when the Defence Ministry
sold the club in January 1997. Within weeks, the new shareholders had
fallen out and two different CSKA ice-hockey teams applied for
membership of the league; the dispute eventually being settled when one of
the warring parties, Alexander Tarkhanov, sold his shares to Shakhrudi
Dadakhanov, a Chechen businessman. The following year Dadakhanov was
at the head of a Chechen consortium that bought 49 per cent of the club. He
was named club president, and persuaded Oleg Dolmatov to leave
Chernomorets and take over as coach. The move initially seemed inspired,
as CSKA won their final twelve games of the season – including that 4–1
win over Spartak – to finish second. Having budgeted for Champions
League football, though, they came only third the following season and lost
to the Norwegian side Molde in the second qualifying round of the
Champions League.
With the club facing financial ruin, the Defence Ministry began a struggle
to regain ownership, accusing the Chechen shareholders of supplying arms
and money to rebels in Chechnya. Dolmatov’s wife vanished – she has
never been found – and then, in 2001, Dadakhanov’s nephew, Aslanbek,
was arrested in Moscow after police claimed to have found $25,000 in
counterfeit notes and videotapes of Chechens shooting Russian soldiers in
his flat. Dadakhanov insisted the arrest was part of a plot to undermine his
leadership of the club, but eventually surrendered his shares, allowing a
takeover by the ministry, a Russian investment group called AVO Capital,
and Bluecastle Enterprises, a company based in Stevenage. Bluecastle
theoretically own only 49 per cent of the club, but would have a controlling
interest if there is any truth in reports of their links to AVO, who bought
26.8 per cent. When I checked in August 2004 – after Chelsea had drawn
CSKA in the Champions League – Bluecastle’s nominal director was Aman
Antoinette Khan, who was charged with representing the company to
Macasyng Holding BV, a Dutch-registered shell company managed by the
Rijnhove Group. They specialise in running beneficial trusts, which are
often a way of disguising ownership. There is nothing illegal in any of that,
but it is odd.
When, in March 2004, Sibneft, the oil company Roman Abramovich sold
for $13billion in September 2005, agreed a three-year sponsorship deal with
CSKA worth US$54million, the Moscow rumour mill began to turn,
particularly when it emerged that one of Macasyng’s directors was
Oleksander Garese, a Ukraine-born, France-based businessman who, in
1999, served on the board of Omsk Bacon, a subsidiary of Sibneft.
 There are those who saw the Sibneft deal as a sop thrown by Abramovich
to Russian public opinion, which is at least in part outraged by the transfer
of wealth drawn from Russian natural resources into the pockets of the likes
of Juan Sebastián Veron and Hernán Crespo. Luzhkov even accused
Abramovich of ‘spitting on Russia’ when he invested in Chelsea. Sibneft’s
CEO, Eugene Shvidler, who is often seen alongside Abramovich at
matches, insisted the sponsorship deal with CSKA was a ‘social
responsibility’, nothing more than an extension of the policy by which they
invest $10mm a year in the ice-hockey team Avangard Omsk and sponsor
the international biathlon championships in Khanty-Mansiisk.
There were others, though, who saw the formation of a network of clubs.
The theory, admittedly, is backed only by circumstantial evidence, and feels
at times like the kind of batty global conspiracy that would usually involve
the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians and lizards disguised as Henry
Kissinger; but it is undeniable that there are a lot of coincidences. Chelsea
already had strong links to Benfica and PSV Eindhoven, and, particularly in
the wake of Jiri Jarošik’s move to Chelsea, the suggestion was that CSKA
could be used as a conduit to move the best players from eastern Europe to
Stamford Bridge. With Europe covered (aside perhaps from Italy), the next
logical move was a bridgehead in South America.
Sure enough, in November 2004, a London-based group called Media
Sports Investments bought into the Brazilian club Corinthians. Again the
waters are muddy, but Berezovsky, having previously worked with Kia
Joorabchian, the Anglo-Iranian fronting the company, while denying direct
involvement with MSI, soon announced he would be investing in a new
stadium for the club. Given Berezovsky and Abramovich’s bitter falling-out
over the Sibneft buy-out, that only makes it all the more baffling that
Abramovich’s yacht, the Grand Bleu, was booked into the Puerto Madreno
marina in Buenos Aires when Corinthians bought the young Argentinian
forward Carlos Tevez from Boca Juniors for £10.5million – a truly startling
sum in South American football.
Then there is the fact that soon after the takeover, Corinthians signed a
cooperation agreement with Dinamo Tbilisi. Their president, Alberto
Dualib, insisted the deal was completely separate from the MSI investment,
but given that the Dinamo owner, Badri Patakartsishvili, was once a co-
owner of Sibneft with Berezovsky and Abramovich, it is hard not to start
drawing conclusions. Abramovich, it should be stressed, has always denied
any involvement with either Bluecastle or Joorabchian.
However, the outcome is the same. 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.
Shvidler is not the only link to Russian football’s elite among Abramovich’s
coterie. German Tkachenko, vice-president of SibAl and president of
Krylya Sovetov, is also a regular at Stamford Bridge and was even there
with the agent Pini Zahavi when Abramovich agreed to buy Chelsea. The
oligarchs’ investment has lifted Russian football, not quite to the levels of
the sixties perhaps, but certainly above any other league in eastern Europe.
Kleshchyov, uncharacteristically sanguine, believes this can only be for the
good, not merely in terms of financing the signing of top players, but also
because football to the oligarchs is ‘just another toy’. As he sees it, they
have so much money already there is no incentive to throw games and little
point in fixing matches to ensure a slice of, say, UEFA Cup advertising.
Football, anyway, has become an accepted part of Russian business, a way
of smoothing along deals. The agent and businessman Sergey Falkov
bought the second-flight side Zhemchuzhnaya to gain access to the mayor
and governor of Sochy, where he wanted to build a hotel. When the hotel
was built, he sold the club. To him, the deal made perfect financial sense:
the hotel project cost around £10m, while the budget of the club was only
£200,000. Where there is football, there is money, and, in Russia, generally
speaking, where there is money there is corruption.

In his playing days, Yury Tishkov was one of Russia’s brightest forwards,
top scorer in the UEFA Cup when Torpedo Moscow reached the quarter-
finals in 1990. Several foreign clubs took an interest in him and he would
have joined Sheffield Wednesday in 1994 but for a failed medical. A series
of niggling injuries forced him to retire in 1998, but he remained in football,
coaching Torpedo’s youth team and becoming an agent (something at which
he was, by all accounts, extremely good, gaining respect for his shrewdness
while remaining popular). ‘He was,’ Ivanov said, ‘a good guy in a dirty
world.’ In January 2003, aged thirty-one, he was stabbed to death outside
his home in Moscow.
 His killer was never caught, but there are few who do not link the murder
to the deal Tishkov had brokered a few weeks earlier that took the highly
promising midfielder Dmitry Smirnov from Torpedo-Metallurg (now FK
Moskva) to Spartak. Smirnov had for a while been threatening to leave,
having gone unpaid for several months, but when Norilsk Nikel took over
the club and cleared the debts (and changed the name from Torpedo-ZIL),
his grievance seemed to have gone. When he then departed anyway, it left a
bitter taste, and not just at Torpedo-Metallurg. CSKA believed they had first
option on the player, and their sense of indignation was hardy helped when
Tishkov described their conduct during negotiations as ‘idiotic’.
The idea that Russian football has suddenly become clean is laughable.
My last visit to Russia coincided with an assault on the FIFA referee
Nikolay Ivanov, who was beaten up near his home in St Petersburg shortly
before taking charge of a game between Krylya Sovetov and FK Moskva.
Earlier in the month a newspaper in Kaliningrad printed the transcriptions
of tapes indicating that Baltika, the local club, had attempted to fix matches
against Chernomorets and Spartak Moscow. The club insisted the tapes had
been faked.
Perhaps there is a positive in the fact that the newspapers are now
investigating corruption and doping, but even Vartanyan, who really is a
romantic, is sceptical. ‘Our football has never been independent.’ he said.
‘Once the influence came from the party, and now the influence is from big
business.’
Only Streltsov, the flawed but eternal martyr, stands aloof.
 EPILOGUE

Igor Akinfeev dives to his left and pushes away Moutinho’s drive. The ball
bounces to Tello and he drills it back the box, towards Liedson and Rogério,
who stand unmarked, onside, and two yards from an open goal. Rogério
jabs a leg at the cross, and 48,000 in the Estadio José Alvalade rise to greet
the equaliser. The ball, though, flicks his shin, cannons on to the post, and
rolls along the line into the arms of the prone Akinfeev. The goalkeeper
stands, looking almost bewildered that it is not 2–2, then hurls the ball sixty
yards into the path of Daniel Carvalho. The Brazilian, racing down the left,
outpaces the hapless Joseph Enakarhire, and crosses. Ricardo, the
goalkeeper, comes to gather but is defeated by the whip of the delivery,
leaving Vágner Love to lash the ball with gleeful abandon into an empty
net. What should have been 2–2 has become 3–1, and CSKA Moscow have
become the first Russian winners of a European trophy. The next day Sport
Express proclaims that Russian football will henceforth be divided into two
periods: Before and After Lisbon.
It is easy to read too much into results in a single competition, but that
success is nonetheless indicative of a general rise in Russian club football.
Six days earlier, a deal was announced taking Costinha and Maniche from
Porto to Dinamo Moscow for £14million – that is, two European Cup-
winners, who could easily have found teams in the Premiership, opted
instead to move to a club who can hardly even class themselves among the
Russian elite, having at the time not won the league for twenty-nine years.
Wherever the money has come from, it can hardly be denied that Russian
football is in more robust health than ever before. CSKA, Dinamo,
Lokomotiv, Spartak, Zenit St Petersburg and FK Moskva all have hugely
wealthy sponsors willing to invest in players, and willing to offer wages
high enough to entice those players from the West. The Russian league is
now as polyglot as the Premiership, which raises inevitable concerns about
the development of Russian players, but I doubt many Russian fans would
swap their situation with that of any other post-Communist country. Where
there are proven incidents of match-fixing and intimidation these will
probably be forgiven, and when society has problems as endemic as it is
does in Russia, their presence in football can hardly be helped.
Exceptional generations of players can make mugs of us all, but elsewhere
the situation is far worse. Poland and Hungary seem almost to have given
up – a sign, perhaps, of nations no longer desperate enough to require
validation through football, and not yet comfortable enough to invest it with
the faintly ludicrous importance it has in England today. Serbia and
Romania wonder how they can have fallen so far, so quickly. Georgia and
Armenia ponder the point of football when there are no Muscovites to
upset. Bosnia-Hercegovina slowly puts itself back together after war.
Everybody has their specific concerns: railing against corrupt owners,
mercenary players or a feckless football association; but everywhere outside
of Russia, the basic problem is money. There is very little, and what there is
has often been come by illegally. Those who are prepared to invest often see
the club as little more than a laundry. How, then, can Eastern clubs
compete? How can they build the facilities for the modern development of
players? How can they stop their best players leaving? How can they ever
build a side when they know any player who shows any talent will be
tempted away?
The answer is simple: without the help of an Akhmetov or a Sibneft, they
can’t. Perhaps the pace has increased, but this is a reality clubs have faced
domestically for years. Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk players moved to Dynamo
Kyiv, Beroe players moved to CSKA Sofia and Vojvodina players moved to
Red Star, just as surely as Crewe players moved to Liverpool. The
difference now is that the pyramid has become internationalised. An
Armenian forward joins Ajax, who hope in a few years to sell him on to
Barcelona. Karpaty Lviv sign a Nigerian, and look to pass him on to
Germany, England or Spain. That is the market.
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. Turkey, the Netherlands, France and, particularly,
Portugal have challenged the hegemony of England, Spain, Italy and
Germany of late, but essentially the big four expect to divide the European
silverware among themselves. Russia, perhaps, will join that list, but to fans
of, for instance, Steaua Bucharest, a second European Cup success is as far
away as a second league title is for Ipswich. They play their football at their
level, and then they turn on the television and watch the big clubs, with
their legions of foreign players, contest the big prizes.
National teams are a different matter. Great generations of players can
emerge anywhere at any time, and globalisation actually probably aids the
smaller, economically poorer nations in that their players, once sold abroad
(and settled – young talents can be ruined by being transplanted too early
from their natural environment), benefit from better training facilities and a
higher level of competition than they would enjoy in their homelands. It
may even be that regular first-team football is not essential: Greece, in
2004, certainly benefited from the fact that their players were on the whole
fresher than the bigger names from France, England, Italy and Spain. With
varying degrees of nationalistic feeling also playing their part, in fact,
international football seems to be becoming increasingly competitive.
*
Symbolically at least, Novy Arbat is the heart of the new Russia. It is tacky,
bright, brash and loud, a relentlessly, soullessly vibrant, neon-lit strip of
bars and clubs. It is not, in all honesty, my natural habitat, but I am there to
watch Chelsea, that other great symbol of the new Russia, play Everton in
one of the sports bars that have sprung up across eastern Europe over the
past decade.
As I go in, I have to pass through a metal detector. As the doorman says,
where there is gambling, it is better there are no guns. Downstairs, the huge
dark vault is split in two: to the left, a casino with roulette wheels and
blackjack; to the right, a disorienting array of televisions showing sport
from across the world. In one corner, a group of British expats watch Wales
play South Africa at rugby, in another two tall blond men gaze
dispassionately as Djurgården celebrate winning the Swedish Cup final. In
the middle, in front of the largest screen, is a blue-shirted horde. With
stilted inflection, they sing Chelsea songs, and then, having cheered a 1–0
victory, they roar on Crystal Palace as they gamely hold Arsenal to a draw.
It is not just because of Abramovich. In the manner of fans everywhere,
most of those in blue insist they had nailed their colours to the mast long
before Chelsea became the grandees they are today. ‘You started to see
people in Chelsea shirts and scarves from 1992 when [the goalkeeper]
Dmitry Kharine went there from CSKA Moscow.’ Valery Petrakov, the
head of the Moscow Chelsea Supporters Club, tells me. ‘And lots of people
chose Chelsea because of their reputation for violence.’
The following day, I watch the Manchester derby in the Bobby Dazzler, a
faux-Irish bar that is home to the Moscow Manchester United Supporters
Club. Needless to say, they despise the Ivan-come-latelies who have latched
on to Chelsea. The arguments, in other words, are the same as those in
which their English counterparts engage. I have been in similar bars and
heard similar arguments in Warsaw, Bucharest and Kyiv. Given there is an
ironic kudos to be gained from supporting smaller clubs (particularly when
they happen to wear the same colours as the local team), I have even, God
help me, in a bar in Ljubljana, discussed the form of the Yeovil forward Phil
Jevons.
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.
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Taubman, William, Khruschev: The Man, His Era (Free Press 2003)
Taylor, Rogan and Klara Jamrich (eds), Puskas on Puskas: The Life and
Times of a Footballing Legend (Robson, 1998)
Végh, Antal, Gyógyíthatatlan? [Incurable?] (Lapkiadó-Vállalat-Ország-
Világ, 1986)
Miért beteg a magyar futball? [Why is Hungarian Football Sick?]
(Magvet , 1974)
Vochin, Andrei, Super Steaua (Media PRO, 1999)
West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through
Yugoslavia (Macmillan, 1942)
Wilson, Andrew, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation (Yale Nota Bene,
2002)
Winner, David, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football
(Bloomsbury, 2000)
Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football (Bloomsbury, 2005)

Yearbooks

Goldblatt, David, The World Football Yearbook (Dorling-Kindersley)

Hammond, Mike, The European Football Yearbook (Sports Projects)

Magazines and newspapers (UK unless stated)

Aftonbladet (Sweden)
Champions
Daily Telegraph
Delo (Slovenia)
Ekipa (Slovenia)
Financial Times
FourFourTwo
France Football (France)
Gazeta Sporturilor (Romania)
Guardian
Independent
Independent on Sunday
Konsomolskaya Pravda (Russia)
Match (Bulgaria)
Observer
Prosport (Romania)
Przeglad Sportowy (Poland)
Rabotnichesko delo (Bulgaria)
Slobodna Bosna (Bosnia-Hercegovina)
Sovetsky Sport (Russia)
Sport (Serbia-Montenegro)
Sport Express (Russia)
Tempo (Serbia-Montenegro)
The Times
Voetball International (Netherlands)
World Soccer

Websites

Tamás Krauss’s essay ‘Soccer and Racism in Hungary or: What’s the Ajax-
Fradi Conflict All About?’ at
http://eszmelet.tripod.com/angoll/krauszang1.html

The unofficial transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the

Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for the case Miloševi ‘Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia
Herzegovina’ (IT-02-54), as archived at
http://mitglied.lycos.de./desarea/Dezo92002.html

On hooligan and ultra groups:

www.badblueboys.hr
www.hooligans.de
www.oaza.co.yu/sport/delije/prica-e.htm
www.ultrasworld.com

Statistics and news services:

Milos Radulovi ’s remarkable searchable European cups
archive at: http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~mirad/
www.rsssf.com
www.soccerassociation.com
www.soccerbase.com
www.uefa.com
 INDEX

Abkhazia, 230
Abramovich, Roman, 237, 296, 297, 303
A cimovi , Milenko, 127, 130, 132, 133
AC Milan, 38, 41, 110, 154, 191, 211, 229, 230
AFFA (Azerbaijani Football Federation), 256, 258, 259–61, 262, 263
Aftonbladet, 53, 54
Agaev, Emin, 262
Agassi, Andre, 242
Aghahowa, Julius, 25
Ajax, 14, 237, 252, 302
Akhalkatsi, Nodar, 234
Akhmetov, Rinat, 25–6, 27, 28, 38, 39
Akimyan, Albert, 249
Akinfeev, Igor, 300
Aksyonenko, Nikolay, 294
Alania Vladikavkaz, 235, 236
Albania, 171
Albanu, Dan, 224
Albert, Flórián, 89
Alberto Torres, Carlos, 261, 263
Aleksandrov, Hristo, 198
Aleksidze, Rati, 236
Alexanco, José, 210
Al Halidi, Khusam, 294
All-Union Committee of Physical Culture see VSFK
Alonso, Pichi, 210, 211
Al-Sharif, Jamal, 197
Arnica (company), 65
Arnica Wronki, 63, 65
Amokachi, Daniel, 196
Amoros, Manuel, 103
Anastasiadis, Angelos, 52
Anderlecht, 99, 209
Andone, loan, 203–4, 207
Andriasyan, Arkady, 246, 247, 248
Andropov, Yuri, 285, 286
Anzhi, 285
Apukhin, Boris, 240
Arad, 211
Araks, 244
Aranyscsapat (The Golden Squad), 69–85, 88, 93, 266
Ararat Yerevan, 10, 33, 244, 246–8
Araz Nakhichevan, 257
Archibald, Steve, 210
ARD TV 170
Arena, 150
Argentina, 46, 103, 152, 154, 196, 218
Arges Pite ti, 218
Arhar, France, 126
Arkadiev, Boris, 266
Arkan (Željko Ražnatovié), 109, 110–13, 114, 115, 119, 120, 161
Arkangelsk, 285
Armazi Stadium, 231–2
Armenia, 10, 240–52, 301
Armenian Sports Committee, 240, 246
Armenikum, 250
Arne Tabor 69, 145
Arrow Cross party, 95
Arsenal, 22, 27, 52, 149, 303
Arsenal Tula, 30, 288
Artemiev, Vyacheslav, 270
Arveladze, Archil, 236–7
Arveladze, Revaz, 236–7
Arveladze, Shota, 236–7
Asanovié, Aljosa, 152, 157, 162
Ashvetia, Mikhail, 236
Asmaral, 294
Asparuhov, Georgi, 190–2
Astra Ploie ti, 217
Athletic Bilbao, 87, 195
Atlético Madrid 13
Augenthaler, Klaus, 102, 103
Aumann, Raimond, 101, 102, 103
Australia, 150
Austria, 44, 49, 73, 76, 81, 97, 208
Austria Vienna, 195, 219
Auxerre, 156
Avangard Omsk, 296
AVH, 73, 86
AVO Capital, 295
Avramovi , Zoran, 119–20, 124
Azerbaijan, 35, 248, 252–63
Azerbaijani Football Federation see AFFA
Azeri Echo, 255
Babi Yar 11
Babunski, Boban, 149
Bacau, 218, 227
Bad Blue Boys see BBB
Baggio, Roberto, 197
Baia Mare, 218–19
Bakhramov, Tofik, 255–6
Baku, 252, 254, 255, 256, 262, 263
Bal, Andriy, 10
Balaj, Cristian, 228
Balakov, Krassimir, 197
Balan, Lucian, 210
Balaton FC, 95, 96
Bali, János, 93
Balint, Gavrila, 203, 211
Baloha, Viktor, 40
Baltika Kaliningrad, 262, 299
Balzac, Honoré de, 23, 28
Banants, 250
Bandurko, Oleksandr, 34–5
Baniak, Boguslaw, 54
Banishevsky, Anatoly, 256
Banja Luka, 180, 181
Barcelona, 148, 154, 196, 209, 210–11, 302
Bari (club), 161
Bari (place), 99, 107, 109, 111
Basałaj, Janusz, 47–8, 50, 66
Bashashkin, Anatoly, 267
Basle, 79
Basta, Dušan, 124
Basten, Marco van, 19
Batistuta, Gabriel, 201
Bayern Munich, 3–4, 20, 100, 108, 119, 170
Bay of Piran, 164
BBB (Bad Blue Boys), 109, 110, 155, 164–5
Becali, Gigi, 225, 226, 227
Becali, Giovanni, 224, 225, 227
Beckenbauer, Franz, 128
Beckham, David, 22, 148, 158, 254, 255
Bekalli, Mahmet, 107
Bekvalac, Dragoljub, 200
Belanov, Ihor, 13, 15, 21
Belarus, 10
Belchev, Georgi, 193
Belfast, 207
Belgium, 85, 87, 110, 290, 291
Belgrade, 1, 2, 12, 100, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120,
122, 157, 160, 161, 168
Belgrade University, 105
Belis, Vladimir, 217
Belodedici, Miodrag, 101
Belous, Yury, 287
Belozyorov, Alexander, 292
Bender, Manfred, 102
Benfica, 87, 191, 296
Bere ko, Igor, 149
Berezovsky, Boris, 237, 297
Beria, Lavrenty, 233–4, 282, 283–4, 285
Berlusconi, Silvio, 230
Bernabéu Stadium, 226
Berne, 84
Battle of, 80
 Miracle of, 81–3
Beroe, 193–4, ‘95, 301
Be ikta , 177
Beskov, Konstantin, 267, 290, 294
Bežigrad Stadium, 137, 139
Bezyinnyi, Yuriy, 245
BFS (Bulgarian Football Federation), 189
Bihac, 176
Bijeljina, 112
Bili , Slaven, 146–8, 149, 151–4, 155, 157, 162, 181–2
Bini , Dragiša, 101, 102–3, 114
Blackburn Rovers, 294
Blanc, Laurent, 148
Blatter, Sepp, 179
Blazevi , Miroslav, 146, 149, 153–5, l57, 174, 182
Bł kitnych Wronki, 65
Blinov, General, 240, 241
Blokhin, Oleh, 12, 13, 21, 247, 270
Bluecastle Enterprises, 295
Boban, Zvonimir, 110, 149, 151, 152, 154
Bobek, Stjepan, 267
Boca Juniors, 297
Boghossian, Alain, 242
Bognár, Gyö’rgy, 88
Bohinj, 3, 108
Boksi , Alen, 145, 149, 152, 157, 162
Bologna, 196
Bölöni, Laszlö, 205, 209, 210, 222
Bondarenko, Sergey, 246
Boniek, Zbigniew, 50, 51, 59–60
Borovo Selo, 108, 160, 161
Bordeanu, Valeriu, 227
Boris Paichadze Stadium, 231, 232–3
Borussia Mönchengladbach, 15, 99
Borysfen, 36
Boškovi , Branko, 119
Bosnia-Hercegovina, 112, 115, 166–82, 301
Bosnian Football Federation (NSBiH), 171, 179
Botev Plovdiv, 188, 190, 191, 192 198
Bottinelli, Massimiliano, 88
Bozsik, József, 69, 71, 74, 77, 78, 82
Bozsik Stadium, 69
Bra n, Milivoj, 143
Bradina, 168
Bragin, Oleksandr, 25–6
Bra ov, 228
Brazil 44, 46, 80, 87, 98, 128, 129, 151, 256, 161, 264, 288
Brezhnev, Leonid, 278, 286
Brijeli Brij eg Stadium, 180
Britain, 14, 29, 70, 71, 72, 266, 268
Brøndby, 138
Brussels, 99
Bucharest, 4, 159, 204, 205–6, 209, 212, 217, 220, 222, 223, 303
Buchwald, Guido, 197
Budai, László, 83
Budapest, 68, 70, 71, 76, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 88, 90, 93
Buenos Aires, 297
Bukovi, Márton, 73, 85
Bulgaria, 183–202, 266, 268
Bulgarian Communist Party, 188
Bulgarian Football Federation (BFS), 189
Bulgarian Socialist Party, 195
Buli , Juša, 113
Bumbescu, Adrian, 208
Bursaspor, 200
Bushi, Alban, 201
Buturugu, Cristian, 218
Buzánszky, Jen , 71, 73, 74–5, 77, 78
Byshovets, Anatoly, 290

a ak, 116
Calafat, 213
Calcutta, 243
Camataru, Rodion, 211, 212
Canal+, 50
Carl-Zeiss Jena, 234
Carvalho, Daniel, 300
Cas Poporului (House of the People),
Bucharest, 206
Caucasus, 10, 229–63
Cavan, Harry, 207
Cavenaghi, Fernando, 293
CDSA/CDKA, 266, 267 (see also CSKA Moscow)
Ceahlaul Piatra Neam , 219, 223, 224, 228
Ceau escu, Nicolae, 203, 205, 206, 209, 211, 212–13, 216, 222
Ceau escu, Nicu, 204
Ceau escu, Valentin, 203, 204, 208, 224–5
Ceau escu, Zoia, 216
Ceca, 112, 114, 115
eh, Nastja, 136, 139
elik, 176
Central Committee of the Communist Party, 85, 278
CFKA Sredets, 188, 193 (see also CSKA Sofia)
Chapman, Herbert, 72
Charles, John, 89
Charlton Athletic, 200
Channon, Mick, 45
Chechnya, 295
Chelsea, 158, 218, 221, 236, 295, 296, 297, 303
Cherchesov, Stanislav, 294
Chernenko, Konstantin, 285
Chernobyl, 272
Chernomorets (Novorossiisk), 295, 299
Chernyshov, Andrey, 292
Chervichenko, Andrey, 290–1, 292
Chievo, 118
Chile, 48, 124, 149, 150, 151
Chivadze, Alexander, 233
Cholaria, Valery, 235–6
Chornomorets Odessa, 7, 16,
Chorzów, 44, 48
Chumak, Viktor, 40
Chupalenkova, Galina, 276
Cimeroti , Sebastjan, 125, 139
Cimitirul Dorobân ia, 214–15
Clarke, Allan, 43, 45
Clough, Brian, 12, 17, 43, 50
Club Bruges, 169
Colari , Anton, 138, 142, 143, 144
Colo Colo, 109
Cologne, 237
Colombia, 198
Cooperativa, 218, 222, 228
Copado, Esther, 170
Copado, Paco, 170
Corinthians, 297
Costacurta, Alessandro, 148
Costinha, 300
Costner, Kevin, 166
Craiova, 208, 213, 214, 215, 228
Crespo, Hernn, 296
Crimea, 40
Croatia, 106, 108, 109–10, 145–66, 171, 172, 179, 182
Croatian Democratic Union see HDZ
Croatia Zagreb, 156
Cruyff, Johan, 3, 14, 15, 72, 128
Crystal Palace, 303
CSKA Moscow, 33, 34, 267, 270, 281–2, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 293, 294–
6, 299, 300–1, 303
CSKA Sofia, 183, 185, 186–7, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195–6,
198, 199, 200, 201, 301
CSM Resita, 208
Cupiał, Bogusław, 66
CWKS, 65
Cyprus, 168
Czechoslovakia, 89, 94, 266
Czech Republic, 131
Czibor, Zoltán, 77, 78, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87

Dadakhanov, Shakhrudi, 295

Daewoo, 66
Dalarna, 54
Danciulescu, Ionel, 227
Dangulov, Abram, 244
Danov, Hristo, 198
Daraselia, Vitali, 233, 234
Dayton Peace Accord, 178
Debrecen, 92
Debski, Jacek, 49–50
Defence Ministry, Russia, 294
Deichev, General Delcho, 194
Delije, 103–6, 109, 110, 111–12, 115, 116, 118, 119
Delo, 135
Demenko, Maxim, 292–3
Demetradze, Georgi, 235, 236
Denmark, 146, 152
Deyna, Kazimierz, 128
Dickinson, Matt, 255
Dilberovi , Suada, 167
Dimitrov, Dimiter, 200
Dimitrov, Georgi, 186
Dimitrov, Yancho, 193
Dinamo Bakili, 257
Dinamo Bucharest, 203, 204, 205, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 217, 221 222,
223–4, 225, 226, 227, 228
Dinamo Minsk, 10
Dinamo Moscow, 72, 240, 241, 262, 266, 282, 292, 300, 301
Dinamo Sports Association, 234
Dinamo Tbilisi, 66, 233–7, 238, 241, 282–3, 283–4, 297
Dinamo Yerevan, 240–1, 244–5, 284
Dinamo Zagreb, 109 110, 137, 154, 155–6, 161–2, 174, 181
Diósgy ri VTK, 96
Djindji , Zoran, 114
Djorbi , Ivan, 180
Djordjevic, Aleksandar, 149
Djorkaeff, Jean, 243
Djorkaeff, Youri, 242–3
Djurgården, 303
Djurovski, Milko, 145
Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, 10, 17, 18, 29–31, 40, 301
Dnipropetrovsk, 23, 29
Dobryk, Viktor, 33
Dokuchayevsk, 25
Dolmatov, Oleg, 295
Domarski, Jan, 45
Dom Ofitseov Sverdlovsk, 245–6
Donbass Palace Hotel, Donetsk, 6, 27
Donetsk, 6–7, 23, 25–6, 27, 40
Donetsk Clan, 38
Donev, Doncho, 198
Donkov, Georgi, 193, 198
Dostani , Ratko, 124
Dougan, Andy, 11, 12
Dracula, 213
Dragan, loan, 217
Dragolov, Vassil, 195
Draškovi , Vuk, 111
Drobeta Turnu Severin, 215
Drohobych, 34
Drzymała, Zbigniew, 64
Dualib, Alberto, 297
Dubrovnik, 109
Ducadam, Helmut, 210–11
Duljaj, Igor, 9
Dumitrescu, Ilie, 218
Dunakeszi, 96
Dunav Rousse, 194
Düsseldorf, 129
DVTK, 96
Dyachuk-Stavytskyi, Yuriy, 36, 37
Dyminskyi, Petro, 34, 35, 38, 39
Dynamo Kyiv, 7, 9–23, 27–8, 29–30, 31, 38, 39, 40, 89, 224, 229, 236, 241,
245, 247, 258, 267, 270, 291, 292, 301
Dyskobolia, 63, 64
Dzajic, Dragan, 112
Dziekanowski, Dariusz, 46
Dziurowicz, Marian, 49
Dzodzuashvili, Rezo, 238–9

East Germany, 18, 151

Eckel, Horst, 82
Eintracht Braunschweig, 15
Eintracht Frankfurt, 170
Ekipa, 131
Ekwueme, Emmanuel, 57
Electrodul Slatina, 209
Emmiyan, Robert, 248
Enakarhire, Joseph, 300
Engel, Jerzy, 42, 46, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60
Engel, Jerzy, Junior, 60, 61
England, 43, 44–5, 46, 48, 59, 62, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 160,
181, 191, 207, 252, 255, 264, 265, 270, 301, 302
Erebuni (formerly Homenmen), 249, 250
Eriksson, Sven-Göran, 158, 254
Espanyol, 139
Estadio José Alvalade, 300
Estonia, 153–4
Estoril, 285
EU (European Union), 92–3, 99, 124, 126, 201
Eusebio, 191
Everton, 147, 149, 303

FA (Football Association), 14, 72, 75, 96

Falkov, Sergey, 298
Farkas, Mihály, 90
Farkas, Vladimir, 90
Farrar, Dave, 128
Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 178
Fenwick, Terry, 270
Ferenc Puskás Stadium, 79 (see also Népstadion)
Ferencváros, 18, 69, 73, 74, 76, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94–5
Fergana, 35–6
Ferhatovic, Asim, 177
FFU (Football Federation of Ukraine), 29, 34–5, 37, 38
FIFA, 3–4, 49, 87, 124, 149, 150, 179, 207, 236, 256, 259, 260, 272, 299
Financial Times, 253
Finland, 106
Fiorentina, 91, 201
FK Austria, 48–9
FK Moskva, 287–8, 298, 299, 301 (see also Torpedo-Metallurg and
Torpedo-ZIL)
FK Sarajevo, 154, 172, 174, 176, 177
FK Slavija, 105
FK Yerevan, 250
Flacara Moreni, 209
Flakelf, 11
Football Association see FA
Football Federation of Armenia, 249
Football Federation of Ukraine see FFU/UFF
Football-Hockey Weekly, 244
Forbrich, Ryszard, 54–5
Ford, 205
France, 145, 146, 148, 185, 194, 196, 207, 242, 243, 274, 302
Franchi, Artemio, 91
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 166
Freiburg, 236
FRF (Romanian Football Federation), 217, 219–20, 222, 223
FSJ (Yugoslav Football Federation), 120–1, 149, 168
Fulham, 221
Furtseva, Svetlana, 273
Furtseva, Yekaterina, 273, 274, 275

Gaberšek, Borut, 144

Gagarin, Yury, 195
Galati, 208
Galeano, Eduardo, 89
Gamidov, Gamid, 255, 256
Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, 234
Ganchev, Grisha, 198, 199–200, 201, 202
García, Luis, 197
Garese, Oleksander, 296
Gasanzade, Jakhangir, 254, 262
Gavez, Miro, 138, 142, 143, 144
Gavrancic, Goran, 20
Gavrila, Colonel Nicolae, 208
Gazeta Sporturilor, 219, 221
Gentile, Louis, 178
Georgescu, Dudu, 211
Georgia, 229–40, 282, 301
Georgian Communist Party, 234
Georgian Football Federation (GFF), 235, 236, 239
Georgiev, Ivo, 198
Georgiev, Kotse, 190
Georgiev, Stoyan, 183, 184, 198
Germany, 11, 15, 18, 91, 94, 100, 146, 154, 197, 302 see also East Germany;
West Germany
GFF (Georgian Football Federation), 235, 236, 239
Ghana, 48, 131, 133
Ghencea Stadium, 210, 221
Giants Stadium, 197
Gingaras, Georgiu, 222–3
Ginola, David, 196
Gladstone, William, 241
Glanville, Brian, 207
Glazkov, Georgy, 283
Glentoran, 201
Gliha, Primož, 144–5
Global Soccer Agency Ltd (GSA), 60
Gloria Bistri a, 219, 223–4
Glushkov, Nikolae, 237
Gmoch, Jacek, 47–8
Go&Goal, 50
Golden Squad see Aranycsapat
Goodison Park, 70, 148
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 285
Gorica, 136, 138
Gorky, 278
Górski, Kazimierz, 46–7, 48
Gothenburg, 264
Grand Bleu, 297
Grasshoppers, 154
Grazer AK, 200
Grbavica, 167
Grbavica Stadium, 175
Great Britain see Britain
Greece, 52, 53, 149, 196, 302
Green, Geoffrey, 77–8
Green Dragons, 134, 137, 143
Griffiths, Mervyn, 82
Grigorescu, Nicolae, 227
Grigoryan, Comrade, 240
Grobari, 118
Groclin Grodzisk, 48, 63–5
Grodzisk, 63, 64
Grosics, Gyula, 78–9, 82, 83, 84–5, 86–7
Grozavu, Leo, 219
Gruji , Vladan, 180–1
GSA (Global Soccer Agency Ltd), 60
Guardian, 158, 252
Gusev, Rolan, 281
Guttmann, Béla, 73, 87

Haan, Arie, 209

Haarlem, 286
Hagi, Gheorghe, 205, 218, 222, 224, 225, 226
Hajduk Split, 137, 161–2, 174, 182
Halagian, Florin, 208
Haldan, Catalin, 217–18
Halilhodzi , Ahmed, 169
Halilhodzi , Djula, 169
Halilhodzi , Vahid, 169
Halmstad, 53
Halychyna, 34
Hamburg, 169
Handanagi , Enes, 143
Hanrapetakan Stadium, 245–6, 251
Hasi , Ermin, 143
HAŠK Gradjanski, 156
Hässler, Thomas, 197
Határ út, 68
Havalange, Joâo, 150
Haxi, Altin, 201
Hayrapetyan, Ruben, 249, 250
HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) 106, 109, 110, 155, 156
Hebar, 183, 184, 185
Hedeg s, András, 85
Hegyi, Gyula, 83
Helsinki, 51, 74, 262, 266
Herberger, Sepp, 81
Hertha Berlin, 64
Hidas, Gusztav, 85
Hidegkuti, Nándor, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83
Highbury, 22, 27
Hillsborough, 146
Hitler, Adolf, 94
Hoddle, Glenn, 132
Holland/Netherlands, 18, 110, 146, 302
Homenetmen (later Pyunik), 249–50
Homenmen (later Erebuni), 249, 250
Honvéd, 74, 75, 76, 84, 87–8, 90, 258
Hordiyenko, Olenka, 31, 32
Hordiyenko, Taras, 8, 24, 31, 32
Horthy, Admiral Miklós, 94, 95
Houllier, Gérard, 20, 196
Hrazdan Stadium, 246
Hrysyo, Yaroslav, 32, 35–6
HSK Zrinjski, 180
Hughes, Charles, 14
Hughes, John, 7
Hungarian FA, 87, 88
Hungary, 45, 68–97, 149, 19l, 239, 258, 266, 301
Hunter, Norman, 45
Hurst, Sir Geoff, 254, 255, 256
Husyn, Andriy, 9, 15

Iashvili, Alexander, 236

Idea, 66
Ihor (Dnipro fan), 29, 30
Ili , Saša, 119
Ilie, Costel, 223
Iliev, Nikolai, 196
Ilji , Mayor Velja, 116
Illgner, Bodo, 197
Ilyin, Anatoly, 269
Indonesia, 268
Inter Baku, 262
Inter Groclin Auto, 63, 64
International Bank of Azerbaijan, 262
International Board, 71
International Sports Management, 224
Iordanescu, Anghel, 208, 210, 225
Ioseliani, Jaba, 234, 235
Iovan, Stefan, 208, 209
Ipswich, 287
Iran, 154–5, 174
Ishtoyan, Levon, 247
Iskrenov, Bozhidar, 186, 187
Isias, Luis, 196
Israelyan, Sargis, 250
Istanbul, 244
Italy, 73, 106, 189, 239, 255, 259, 261, 302
ITI, 66
Ivankov, Dimiter, 200
Ivanov, Nikolay, 299
Ivanov, Valentin, 268, 269, 270, 272, 275, 279, 298
Ivkov, Kiril, 193
Iwanski, Maciej, 42, 52
Iysahamli, Hamlet, 257–8, 259–60, 261, 262, 263
Izetbegovi , Alija, 167
Izmir, 244

Jablonica, 168, 169, 170

Jamaica, 146
Jankovi , Boško, 124
Japan, 146
Jardel, Mario, 4
Jarni, Robert, 146, 149, 151, 152, 157
Jarošik, Kiri, 296
Jaross, Andor, 95
Javadov, Iskender, 263
Jeju, 125, 130
Jela i , Ban Josip, 164
Jenei, Emerich, 210, 224, 225
Jennings, Pat, 207
Jevons, Phil, 304
JNA (Yugoslav National Army), 160, 163
Johnston, Harry, 78
Jojko, Janusz, 52
Joorabchian, Kia, 297
Jop, Mariusz, 287
Jozi , Mirko, 150, 151
Jugovic, Vladimir, 149, 152
Juhász, Roland, 92
Juventus, 15, 195, 205, 219

Kachalin, Gavriil, 269, 274

Kádár, János, 76
Kaiserlautern, 91
Kaladze, Kakha, 229, 230, 236
Kaladze, Karlo, 230
Kaladze, Levan, 229–30
Kaliningrad, 299
Kalithea, 53
Kapaz, 258
Kaprielian, Hrach, 248
Kara, Rasim, 263
Karabakh-Azersun Agdam, 259
Karajyan, Haroutiun, 245
Karakhanov, Eduard, 264, 271, 274
Karas, Jan, 46
Kari , Amir, 287
Karpaty Lviv, 32–5, 36, 39, 40, 123, 302
Karpin, Valery, 289
Karpov, Anatoly, 265
Karvan, 261
Kashmerov, Milan, 195
Kasperczak, Henryk, 66
Katanec, Srecko, 99, 100, 122–3, l23–4, 125, 126–7, l28, 130, 131–2, 133,
134–5, 152, 166
Katulin, Arytom, 292, 293
KD investment group, 141
Kefo, 137–8, 143
Keleti Station, 70
Keown, Martin, 27
Kerepesi cemetery, 86
Kerkez, Dušsan, 180
Kežman, Mateja, 106
Khachatyan, Garnik, 249
Khan, Aman Antoinette, 295
Khanty Mansiisk, 296
Khapsalys, Oleksandr, 21
Kharine, Dmitry, 303
Kharkiv, 40, 279
Khazar Lenkoran, 263
Khazar Sumqayit, 261
Khazar University, 257, 258, 259, 262
Khobi, 230
Khrushchev, Nikita, 71, 86, 274, 278
Kijevo, 109
Kilikia, 249, 250
Kinkladze, Georgi, 236
Kipiani, David, 233, 234, 238, 239
Kishishev, Radostin, 200
Kispest (club), 74
Kispest (village), 69
Kispest-Honvéd, 87–8
Kispest-Honvéd Sports Circle Ltd, 87, 88
Kiss, Zsolt, 87–8
Kleshchyov, Konstantin, 268, 287, 290–1, 293. 297–8
Klinsmann, J rgen, 197
Klymenko, Oleksiy, 11, 12
Kobiashvili, Levan, 236
Kobuleti, 238
Kocsis, Sndor, 69, 74, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87
Köhler, Jürgen, 101
Kohlmeyer, Werner, 83
Kolev, Ivan, 268
Kolotov, Victor, 247
Koma, 143
Koman, Mikhail, 245
Komarov, Pavlo, 12
Komsomolskaya Pravda, 276
Koper (club), 138, 141
Koper (place), 164
Korotan Prevalje, 141
Korotkykh, Mykola, 11
Koševo Stadium, 171, 174–5, 177
Kosovo, 111, 113
Kosovksyi, Vitaliy, 145
Kostadinov, Emil, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198
Kosteli , Ivica, 165
Kosteli , Janica, 165
Kostov, Sasho, 193, 194
Kostunica, 116–17
Kotayk, 35–6
Kotcharyan, President, 243
Kotkov, Nikola, 191–2
Kovachev, Atanas, 194
Kovács, Attila, 88
Kovtun, Yury, 292
Krajina, 108, 109, 155
Kraków, 53
Kramarenko, Dmitri, 262, 263
Kranj, 165
Kranjska Gora, 165
Krasnaya Presnya, 294
Krausz, Tamás, 94
Kravs, Yevhen, 37–8, 38–9
Kremenliev, Emil, 197
Krsko nuclear power station, 163, 164
Krustev, Todor, 193, 194–5
Krylya Sovetov, 244, 297, 299
Kryzhevsky, Konstantin, 267
KSZO Ostrowiec, 51, 52, 54
Kucan, Milan, 126
Kucherevskyi, Yevhen, 30–1, 288
Kujuwiak Włocławek, 52, 55
Kula, 173
Kulchytskyi, Ihor, 32
Kulkov, Vasily, 294
Kumayri, 244
Kun, Béla, 86, 94
Kunitsyn, Serhiy, 40
Kuti, István, 96
Kuzmenko, Ivan, 12
Kuznetsov, Oleh, 19
Kyiv, 7–8, 9, 10, 18, 23, 27, 35, 36, 127, 145, 270, 303

Lacatus, Marius, 205, 209, 210

Lafchis, Tomas, 198
La Manga, 53
Landskrona, 53
Lantos, Mihály, 82
Laško, 130
Lato, Grzegorz, 45
Latvia, 10, 60, 258
Latyshev, Nikolay, 89, 245
Laudrup, Brian, 4, 100
Lazariuc, Ileana, 220
Lazio, 123, 158, 159, 161
Lebedeva, Marina, 271, 272, 275–6
Lech Poznan, 55, 62
Lechkov, Yordan, 197
Leeds United, 43
Legia Warsaw, 46, 55, 57, 60, 65–6, 294
Leipzig, 51, 270
Lenin, Vladimir, 6, 247, 281
Lenin Stadium (now Luzhniki Stadium) see Luzhniki Stadium
Leônidas, 44
Lernagorts, 247
Lesnoy, 277
Letica, Slaven, 164
Levski, Vassil, 186
Levski Kjustendil, 200
Levski Sofia, 200
Levski-Spartak, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189–90, 190–1, 192, 193–4, 195, 196,
198, 199, 200
Levytsky, Mark, 24, 26–7, 28
Lewis, Carl, 101
Li ka, Werner, 66
Liebrich, Werner, 79, 80, 82
Liedson, 300
Lineker, Gary, 46
Linfield, 235
Lisbon, 294, 300
Litex (club), 199–202
Litex (company), 198, 199
Lithuania, 10, 239
Liverpool, 13, 20, 22, 186, 233, 281
Ljubljana, 2, 127, 129–30, 133, 134, 139, 144, 14S, 304
Ljubljanska Bank, 163, 164
ŁKS Łód , 49, 51, 52, 54, 55
Lobanovskyi, Valeriy, 3, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16–22, 23, 27, 31, 89, 252, 270, 289
Lobont, Bogdan, 225
Łódz, 44
Lokomotiv Kyiv, 11
Lokomotiv Moscow, 281, 285, 291, 292, 294, 301
Lomax, Bill, 95
Lombard-Haladás, 96
Lóránt, Gyula, 76
Lorenc, Richard, 151
Lorimer, Peter, 43
Loški, the, 130
Love, Vágner, 300
Lovech (club), 199
Lovech (place), 200
Lovšin, Pero, 140
Lubanski, Włodimierz, 48
Lucescu, Mircea, 9, 25, 27, 203, 204, 206–7, 207–8, 211, 212
Luftwaffe, 11
Luhansk, 26
Lukoil, 290
Luxembourg, 79, 266
Luzhkov, Yury, 265, 287, 296
Luzhniki Stadium (formerly Lenin Stadium), 86, 247, 281, 286–7
Luzhny, Oleh, 20, 40
Lviv, 31, 32, 33, 37, 46
Lviv Regional Football Association, 32, 35
Lviv Region Communist Party, 33
Lyon (club), 290
Lyon (place), 13
Lytovchenko, Hennadiy, 30, 40
LZS Czarni Wromet Wróblewo, 65

Macasyng Holding BV, 295–6

Macedonia FYR, 158
Machos, Ferenc, 84
Magath, Felix, 170
Majearu, Mihai, 210
Maksimir Stadium, 109, 110, 164
Maksymov, Yuriy, 36
Malmö FF, 53, 54
Manchester City, 48, 64, 236
Manchester United, 20, 55, 227
Mancini, Roberto, 99
Mándi, Gyula, 85
Maniche, 300
Manolov, Manol, 188
Mansimov, Mubariz, 263
Manucharyan, Edgar, 252
Maradona, Diego, 160, 196, 270
Marakana Stadium, 98, 99, 102, 104, 106, 109, 112, 115, 117, 118
Marcos, 211
Maribor (club), 130, 133, 136, 139, 141
Maribor (place), 143
Marjanovi , Mirko, 117
Markarov, Eduard, 246
Markov, Plamen, 186
Marovi , Slobodan, 100–1, 107
Marseille, 3, 99, 103, 291
Marti , General Milan, 109
Maslov, Victor, 16–17
Mateut, Dorin, 211
Matthäus, Lothar, 197
Matuzalem, 25
Media Sports Investments (MSI), 297
Medimurje, 182
Medsana clinic, Bucharest, 217
Melbourne, 268–9
Merdzhanov, Boncho, 194
Merrick, Gil, 78
Merzhanov, Martin, 244
Metalist Kharkiv, 40
Metalul Bucharest, 215
Metodiev, Vassil, 188
Mexico, 46, 88, 189, 197
Michels, Rinus, 3, 14
Mierzejewski, Łukasz, 51
Mihailov, Bobby, 187, 188, 189, 198
Mihajlovi , Siniša, 99, 102, 149, 152, 158–60, 161
Mihajlovi , Toma, 150, 151
Mihov, Valentin, 198
Mijatovi , Predrag, 151
Mila, Sebastian, 48–9
Millwall, 15
Miloševi , Marko, 114
Miloševi , Savo, 172
Miloševi , Semion, 180
Miloševi , Slobodan, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118–19
Miłosz, Czesław, 59
Minchev, Tenyo, 195
Ministry of Defence, Bulgaria, 188
Ministry of Finance, Azerbaijan, 257
Ministry of the Interior, Georgia, 229–30, 233, 234, 235, 237
Ministry of the Interior, Ukraine, 19
Ministry of Internal Affairs, Bulgaria, 186
Ministry of Justice, Azerbaijan, 260
Mirkovi , Zoran, 157–8
Mirzoev, Ramiz, 261, 262, 263
Misimovi , Zvjezdan, 180
Miskolc, 96
Mitev, Yordan, 195
Mitkov, Vassil, 194
Miu, Iulian, 227
Mkhedrioni, 234, 235
MKS, 282
Molde, 295
Moldova, 10
Möller, Andreas, 197
Montana, 198
Montgomery, Jim, 43
Moore, Bobby, 48
Morlock, Max, 82
Morocco, 46
Morozov, Yury, 31
Mortenson, Stan, 78
Moscow, 10, 16, 33, 34, 71, 86, 237, 241, 245, 265, 270, 271, 285, 291, 294,
295
Council, 284, 286, 287
Metro, 280
Moscow Chelsea Supporters Club, 303
Moscow Manchester United Supporters Club, 303
Mostar, 168, 179–80
Mostovoi, Alexander, 289, 290
Moulin, Stéphane, 219, 220
Mount Ararat, 242
Mount Vitosha, 199
Moutinho, 300
Mretebi, 236
MSI (Media Sports Investments), 297
MTK, 73–4, 87, 89, 90, 92, 94–5
Mtskheta, 229, 231
Muharemovi , Dželaludin, 175–6
Mukachevo, 39
Mulali , Edis, 168
Mulina, Siniša, 180
Munich, 44, 59
Mura, 138, 141
Musaev, Fuad, 256–7, 257–8, 259, 260, 261
Musemi , Husred, 171
Musiał, Adam, 47
Muslin, Slavoljub, 115–16
Mutu, Adrian, 158, 159, 218
Muzurovi , Fuad, 171–2, 173, 174, 176, 177–8
Muzorovi , Mirza, 173
Mykhailychenko, Oleksiy, 15, 22–3

Nadj, Albert, 158

Naftex Bourgas, 200
Naftohaz Ukrayiny, 40
Nagorno-Karabakh, 248
Nagy, Imre, 71, 85, 86, 88
Najdoski, Ilija, 107
Nantes, 294
Naples, 106
Nastase, Adrian, 222
National Bucharest, 220, 221, 222, 226, 228
National Anti-Doping Commission, Romania, 217
Neaga, Adrian, 218
Nedelchev, Stoyou, 194
Neeskens, Johan, 128
Neftchi, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261
Neftyanik, 35–6
Népstadion, 79, 92 (see also Ferenc Puskás Stadium)
Netherlands see Holland/Netherlands
Newcastle, 263
Niculescu, Claudiu, 228
Nieto, Lopez, 20
Nigeria, 48, 196
Nikel, Norilsk, 298
Nikoghosyan, Armen, 252
Nikoli , Dejan, 117
Nikolov, Plamen, 186, 189
Nilin, Alexander, 267, 277
Nitu, Gheorghe, 217
NK Bežigrad, 145
NKVD, 11
NK Zagreb, 176
Northern Ireland, 207, 255
Norway, 59
Nottingham Forest, 186
Nova Ljubljanska Bank, 163
Novi Sad, 3, 100
Novruzov, Sudzhethan, 257
Novy Arbat, 303
NSBiH (Bosnian Football Federation), 171, 179
Nydotless Nyíregyháza, 96
Nyilasi, Tibor, 76, 84, 89
NZS (Slovenian Football Federation), 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 138, 139

Obili , 105, 112–14, 115

Obili , Miloš, 113
Oblak, Brane, 128, 129, 130–1, 135, 136, 140, 141, 162
Odessa, 2, 246, 269, 273
OFI, 52
OFK Belgrade, 123
Ogonkov, Mikhail, 271, 272
Oleg (Spartak Moscow fan), 284–5, 286, 288–9
Olimpia Ltd, 140, 142
Olimpija Ljubljana, 130, 134, 135–45
Olisadebe, Emmanuel, 57–8, 59
Olteanu, General Constantin, 204–5, 208
Oltenita, 217
Olt Scornice ti, 208–9
Omsk Bacon, 296
O’Neill, Martin, 207
Onopko, Viktor, 294
Orange Revolution, 39
Osterc, Milan, 222
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 166
Otpor, 115, 116

Padureanu, Jean, 219

Paichadze, Boris, 233–4
Paisley, Bob, 22
Palotas, Péter, 75, 84
Paltsun, Volodymyr, 32
Panathinaikos, 20, 52, 57, 201
Pan ev, Darko, 101, 102, 103, 107, 152
Pankisi Gorge, 230
Pankrti, 140
Pápa, 96
Pápai ELC, 96
Paraguay, 134
Paris, 77, 196
Parma, 66
Partizan Belgrade, 12, 99, 100, 106–7, 117, 119, 121, 122, 137, 145, 156,
182
Partizan Stadium, 118
Patakartsishvili, Badri, 237–8, 297
Paulyo, Volodymyr, 39
Paunescu, Viorel, 225
Pavelic, Ante, 161
Pavlenko, Alexander, 292
Pavlicic, Dubravko, 151
Pavlin, Miran, 140
Pavlyuchenko, Roman, 292
Pazardzhik, 183, 184
Pazaric, 173
Pedraza, Angel, 210
Peev, Georgi, 22
Pejovi , Igor, 149
Pelé, 98, 264
Peli , Vedran, 168
Penev, Dimitar, 197
Penev, Luboslav, 193, 195
Perm, 285
Perovi , Marko, 124
Petja (Delije member), 118–19
Petrakov, Valery, 303
Petre, Florentin, 218
Petrescu, Dan, 220
Petrovsky Stadium, 287
Pfügler, Hans, 101
Piechniczek, Antoni, 48
Pi ta, Jerzy, 64–65, 67
Pini, Piero, 88
Piotrcovia Piotrków Trybunalski, 55–6
Pirin, 185
Pirvu, Florin, 225
Piturca, Florin, 214, 215–17
Piturca, Maximilian, 215–16, 216–17
Piturca, Vasilica, 216
Piturca, Victor, 215, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227
Pjanovi , Mihjalo, 119
Plitvi e National Park, 108
Pogo Szczecin, 55–6
Poland, 42–67, 201, 263, 270, 301
Polish Football Federation see PZPN
Polkhovskyi, Serhiy, 20–1, 22, 23, 29, 40
Polonia Warsaw, 56–7, 60–1
Poltava, 27
Popescu, Gica, 218, 222, 223, 224
Popivoda, Danilo, 128
POPTV, 126, 130
Porto, 124, 189, 195, 300
Portugal, 46, 189, 224, 302
Posipal, Jupp, 80
Postelnicu, General Tudor, 208
Pozna , 62
Prahl, Tom, 53
Prašnikar, Bojan, 139
Prevlaka, 155
Primorac, 156
Primorje, 141
Princip, Gavrilo, 166
Prokopenko, Viktor, 27–8
Proleter, 113, 114
Prosine ki, Robert, 101, 107, 108–9, 140, 141, 148, 149, 150–1, 152, 154
Prosport, 219
Prostor, Jože, 137, 138
Protasov, Andrey, 283
Protasov, Oleh, 30
Psihomodo Pop, 166
PSV Eindhoven, 296
Ptak, Antoni, 55
Publikum, 138, 143
Puskás, Ferenc, 69, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79–80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 89
Putin, Vladimir, 237
Pyunik (formerly Homenetmen), 249–50
Pyunik (II), 250
PZPN (Polish Football Federation), 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 59, 60, 61,
66–7

Radchenko, Dmitry, 289

Radinovi , Duško, 101
Radomsky, Paul, 11–12
Rafsanjahni, Ali Akhbar, 174
Rahn, Helmut, 82 Railway Ministry, Russia, 294 Rajk, Läszlo, 86
Rákosi, Mátyás, 71, 74, 75, 85, 95
Rakovi , Ermin, 139
Ramazanov, Zaur, 263
Ramsey, Sir Alf, 43, 45, 78
Rangelov, Asparuh, 190
Rangers, 15, 103
Raniecki, Jan, 60
Rapid Bucharest, 211–12, 218, 221, 222, 228
Ratiani, Merab, 234, 235
Rats, Vasyl, 13, 14
Ražnatovi , Željko see Arkan
Real Betis, 172
Real Madrid, 38, 66, 99, 154, 226
Real Mallorca, 170
Real Zaragoza, 196
Rebrov, Serhiy, 15, 20, 40
Red Devils, 105–6
Redín, Bernardo, 198
Red Star Belgrade, 3–4, 12, 95, 98, 99–106, 107, 108–10, 111, 112, 113–14,
115, 116, 117–19, 120, 122, 123, 124, 137, 145, 150, 151, 168, 172, 181,
301–2
Reep, Wing Commander Charles, 14
Repeinik, 277
Republic of Ireland, 18, 70, 155, 158, 231, 292
Republika Srpska, 178, 180
RFU (Russian Football Union), 260–261, 292
Ricardo, 300
Rijeka, 154
Rijnhove group, 295
Rizak, Ivan, 40
Robb, George, 77
Roker Park, 89
Rogério, 300
Rogla, 108
Roma, 158, 159
Romania, 2, 4, 10, 90, 94, 203–28, 239, 274, 301
Romanian Football Federation see FRF
Romanian Referees’ Commission, 227
Romanov, Leonid, 286
Romanowski, Janusz, 57
Romantsev Oleg, 289–90, 293, 294
Rosenborg, 294
Rous, Sir Stanley, 75
Ruch Chorzów, 57
Rudonja, Mladen, 140
Russia, 5, 245, 264–99, 300–1, 302, 303
Russian Football Union see6 RFU
Russian Prosecutor General’s Office, 237
Rutkowski, Zbigniew, 55
Ruzi , Ljiljana (journalist), 1–2, 104, 115
Ruzi , Milena (journalist), 1–2, 104, 123
Ryabokon, Vladimir, 285

Saachi, Arrigo, 211

Šabanadževi , Refik, 107
Saboti , Seho, 149
Safa, 256, 257, 258, 261
Safa Stadium, 258, 259
Safiullin, Ravil, 26, 29
Sahakyan, Sargis, 249
St Petersburg, 2, 30, 285, 287, 299
Salihamidži , Ahmed, 168, 169, 170, 171
Salihamidži , Hasan, 167–71
Sálloi, István, 95, 96–7
Samagrelo, 230
Sammer, Matthias 151
Sampdoria, 99, 158
Sandu, Mircea, 220, 222, 223
Sandu, Raluca, 220
Santiago, 150
Sarajevo, 166–7, 168, 172, 173, 174–6, 178, 179
Sartid Smederevo, 3, 100
Savi evi , Dejan, 4, 101–2, 107, 152
SCA, 32, 33
SCA Karpaty, 33–4
Scala, Nevio, 25, 27
Schäfer, Hans, 82
Schalke 04, 66
Scheinflug, Les, 151
Schepotskyi, Konstantin, 267
Scherbytskyi, Volodymyr, 10, 19
Schmeichel, Peter, 146
Schollmayer, Jurij, 139–40, 141, 142
Schön, Helmut, 81
Schum, Yitzhak, 201, 202
Schüster, Bernd, 210
Scornice ti, 208–9
Scotland, 128
SCT, 135, 136, 137–8, 144
SDPU (Social Democratic Party of Ukraine), 38, 39
Sebes, Gusztáv, 73, 74, 75–7, 78, 80, 83, 84, 85, 90
Section of Soviet Football see SFS
Securitate, 205, 208, 209, 212, 222
Sekulara , Dragan, 151
Selan, Aleš, 126, 127, 141–2, 143, 144
Semeghin, Dorin, 225
Serbia-Montenegro, 98–124, 161, 162, 165, 172, 279, 301
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 111
Serbian Communist Party, 111
Serb Orthodox Church, 107
Serebrennykov, Viktor, 16
Seville, 209, 210
Sevydov Oleksandr, 247
Sewell, Jackie, 77
SFS (Section of Soviet Football), 246, 273–4
Shakhtar Donetsk, 7–8, 9, 10, 16, 22, 23, 24–9, 31, 38, 39
Shakhtar Stadium, 25
Shalimov, Igor, 289
Shankly, Bill, 22
Shanov, Hristo, 194
Shchyolkovskaya, 280
Shchyukin, Anatoly, 292
Sheffield Wednesday, 298
Shelbourne, 162
Shengelia, Ramaz, 233
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 234, 237
Shevchenko, Andriy, 15, 20, 38, 40, 41, 145
Shilton, Peter, 45
Shirak Gyumri, 249
Shlyapin, Yury, 290
Shovkovskyi, Oleksandr, 127
Shterev, Aleksandar, 191
Shumen, 198
Shustikov, Viktor, 275, 277–8
Shvetsov, Comrade, 245
Shvetsov, Sergey, 286
Shvidler, Eugene, 296, 297
Sibirsky Aluminium (SibAl), 289, 297
Sibneft, 237, 296, 297
Silvestre, Mikaël, 227
Simonyan, Nikita, 244, 246, 269, 271, 275, 279
Siófok, 95
Sion, 154
Sioni Bolnisi, 238
Sirakov, Nasko, 186, 187, 189, 196, 197, 198
SKA Rostov, 32
Škofja Loka, 127
Skonto Riga, 258
Slavchev, Georgi, 193
Slavia Sofia, 195
Slavkov, Georgi, 186, 187, 188
Slovenia, 2–3, 108, 109, 125–45, 162–5, 222
Slovenian Football Federation see NZS
ŠSmarna Gora, 132
Smirnov, Dmitry, 298–9
Smith, Walter, 15, 103
Snagov, 212, 213
Snuta, Mile, 104
Sochy, 277, 298
Social Democratic Party of Ukraine see SDPU
Sodržnik, Janez, 144
Sofia, 99, 186, 187, 190, 198–9, 214
Sokil Sports Club, 32
Soldatkin, Vladimir (fixer, translator and journalist), 265, 279
Sopron, 88
Souness, Graeme, 103
South Africa, 125, 134
South America, 296–7
South Korea, 59, 71, 79, 126, 127, 133, 134
Sovetsky Sport, 268, 273
Spain, 87, 125, 126, 152, 170, 172, 209, 302
Spartak Minsk, 269
Spartak Moscow, 30, 244, 267, 269, 271, 281–7, 289–94, 295, 299, 301
Spartak Plovdiv, 198
Spartak Sofia, 186
Spartak Varna, 193
Spartak Yerevan, 244, 245–6, 247, 284
Spasov, Emil, 186, 187, 189
Spasov, Ferario, 200, 201
Spitak, 248
Split, 147, 173, 182
Sport Express6, 292, 300
Sportul Studentesc, 224, 228
Sport World Partnership, 237
Srebrenica, 178–9
Stadio Olimpico, 159, 161
Stakhanov, Aleksey, 7
Stakhanovets, 7
Stalin, Joseph, 7, 86, 233, 266–7, 283, 285
Stalinabad, 241
Stalinets Leningrad, 283
Stamboli , Ivan, 111
Stamford Bridge, 296, 297
Stani , Mario, 152, 172
Stankovi , Dejan, 123
Stara Zagora, 193, 194, 195
Starostin, Nikolay, 244, 282, 283–4, 290
Start, 11
Stasiak, Mirosław, 52
Steaua Bucharest, 190, 203, 204–5, 208, 209–11, 212, 215, 221, 222, 224,
225–6, 227, 228, 287, 302
Stefan, Gheorghe, 219, 223
tefan cel Mare Stadium, 221
Stefa ski, Martin, 49, 51, 58–9, 61–2, 67
Stelea, Bogdan, 222, 224
Still, Athole, 160
Stima , Igor, 148, 149, 150, 162
Stinga, Ovidiu, 225
Stockholm, 89, 268
Stoica, Pompiliu, 287
Stoica, Tudorel, 208
Stoichkov, Hristo, 186–7, 189, 190, 195–6, 197, 198
Stoilov, Stoicho, 201
Stojanovi , Stevan, 100, 102, 103
Stoker, Bram, 213
Stojkovic, Dragan, 3, 103, 152
Strasbourg, 44
Streltsov, Eduard, 264–5, 267–79, 299
Stripikheyev, Vladimir, 283
Studio B, 116–17
Stuttgart, 186
Styria, 129–30, 133
Suker, Davor, 146, 149, 152, 154
Supreme Council for Physical Culture, 244
Surkis, Hrihoriy, 29, 35, 38, 40
Surkis, Ihor, 29, 38, 40
Surmakesh, Vardan, 248
Suši , Safet, 177
Sverdlovsk (Dom Ofitseov Sverdlovsk), 245–6
SV Hamburg, 169, 170
SV Ried, 231, 238
Sweden, 47, 53, 74, 76, 88, 110–11, 268, 271, 274, 276
Switzerland, 70, 75, 79, 85, 154, 235, 236, 257
Sychev, Dmitry, 291
Symferapol, 40
Sypniewski, Igor, 52–4, 55
Syrets prison camp, 11–12
Szabo, Jozsef, 9–10, 14–15, 23, 89
Szczecin, 56
Szeiler, József, 92
Szentes, Lázár, 92
Szepesi, György, 78
Szombathely, 2, 96
Sztipanovics, Barnabas, 139
Sz zs, Lajos, 91–2

Tamanyan, Alexander, 251

Tamše, Rok, 125
Tarasovka, 271, 281, 282, 291
Targamadze, Givi, 235, 237
Târgovi te, 213
Tarkhanov, Alexander, 295
Tata, 70, 84, 86
Tatabánya, 85
Tatushin, Boris, 269, 271, 272, 274
Tavriya Simferopol, 25
Tbilisi, 2, 229, 231
Tchuisse, Jerry-Christian, 287
Tehran, 174
Teknejyan, Ghazaros, 244
Tele-fonika, 66
Tello, 300
Tempo, 160
Ťepes, Vlad, 213
Terek Grozny, 285
Tevez, Carlos, 297
Thatcher, Ben, 254
Thern, Jonas, 53
Thon, Olaf, 100
Tigers, 111–12, 113
Times, The, 77–8, 255
Timi County, 212
Timi oara, 212
Timkina, Tamara, 271, 272
Tipuri , Jerko, 169
Tirana, 171
iriac, Ion-Ion, 220
Tishkov, Yury, 298, 299
Titkos, Pál, 85
Tito, Marshal, 3, 86, 106, 107, 128, 129, 152, 167, 180, 266, 267
Titov, Yegor, 289–90, 291–2, 293
Tkachenko, German, 297
Tofik Bakhramov Stadium, 252–3
Togo, 150
Tomaszewski, Jan, 43–4, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49. 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 59
Tom Tomsk, 285
Topalov, Grisha, 198
Tork, 244
Torpedo Kutaisi, 115, 238, 239
Torpedo-Metallurg, 287, 298, 299 (see also FK Moskva and Torpedo-ZIL)
Torpedo Moscow, 267, 269, 271, 274, 275, 276, 277–8, 279, 286, 287, 298
Torpedo-ZIL, 287, 298 (see also FK Moskva and Torpedo-Metallurg)
Total Football, 14, 72
Tóth, András, 92–3
Tóth, Mihály, 82, 83, 84
Tottenham Hotspur, 15, 132
Trabzonspor, 23
Trakia Plovdiv, 188
Trdinov Vrh, 164
Trelleborg, 54
Trendafilov, Boris, 194
Trianon, Treaty of, 94
Trusevych, Mykola, 12
Tsakhadzor, 248, 252
Tskitishvili, Levan, 236
Tsuladze, Natya, 231, 232, 238, 239
Tsuladze, Zaza, 230, 231, 238, 239
Tudjman, Franjo, 106, 107, 109–10, 146, 155, 156, 163
Tudor, Martin, 228
Tula, 278
Tumbakovi , Ljubisa, 119
Tunisia, 290
Turbina, 168–9
Turek, Toni, 82
Turkey, 18, 81, 88, 302
23 August Stadium, 210
Tymoschuk, Anatoliy, 7
Tyschenko, Nikolay, 268
Tyszkiewicz, Piotr, 52, 54
Tzvetanov, Tzanko, 196

UDBA (Yugolsav State Security Service), 110, 111, 135

UEFA, 13, 20, 114, 124, 138–9, 141, 158, 159, l75, 181, 219, 231, 236, 256,
258–9, 260, 261
Ugolshchiki, 7
Újpest Dózsa, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95
Ukraine, 2, 6–41, 127, 145–6, 245, 246
Ukrainian Communist Party, 10
Ukrainian Galician Army, 37
Ultras, 105, 155, 161
Universitatea Craiova, 204, 221, 222
UN Protection Force (Unprofor), 174, 178
Upton Park, 234
Ureki, 238
Urruti, Javier, 210
Uruguay, 80, 81
USA, 196
USSR, 18–19, 33, 86, 89, 256, 258, 264, 266–7, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272,
282
Usta e, 109, 161
Uzbekistan, 10, 35–6
Uzhhorod, 39

Vagonul, 211
Valencia, 195
Vlerenga, 66
Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium, 8, 23
Vardikyan, Gevork, 249
Vare anovi , Mirza, 172, 173–4, 177, 181
Várhidy, Pál, 77, 90
Vartanyan, Axel, 245, 265, 270, 272, 273, 274, 279, 299
Vashchyuk, Vladyslav, 292, 293
Vasilijevi , Goran, 99
Vassell, Darius, 239
Végh, Antal, 69, 91
Velchev, Boris, 194–5
Velev, Emil, 189
Velež, 168, 180
Velingrad, 194
Venables, Terry, 210
Venezuela, 87
Veron, Juan Sebastián, 296
Verona, 152
Vesselinov, Tsvetan, 191
Vevey, 154
Vidakovi , Risto, 172
Videoton, 89
Vidin, 213
Viduka, Mark, 156
Vieira, Patrick, 158, 159
Vilas Masalli, 257
Vili , Sadik, 179
Vilna Ukrayina, 32
Viola, 91
Viole, 133–4, 165
Vitosha, 188, 193
Vlaovi , Goran, 146
Voinov, Iliya, 187
Vojislav Koštunica, 116
Vojvodina, 3, 100, 301
Völler, Rudi, 197
Volodymyr (Dnipro fan), 29, 30
Volyn Lutsk, 38
Vorskla Poltava, 27, 40
Vraboriu, Stefan, 217
Vraca, 167
Vratsa, 191–2
VSFK (All-Union Committee of Physical Culture), 271, 278, 283
Vukcevi , Simon, 124
Vukicevic, Dejan, 149
Vukovar, 109, 112, 155, 157, 160–1
Vutov, Vitomir, 199–200

Waddle, Chris, 3, 103

Wales, 89, 254, 255, 291
Walter, Fritz, 82
Walter, Mariusz, 60
Warsaw, 56, 59, 303
Warta Pozna , 62
Watford, 40, 186
Wembley, 43, 44, 46, 70–1, 73, 76, 77, 191, 207
West, Rebecca, 166
West Germany, 44, 45, 79, 80, 81, 82, 103, 110, 129, 151, 255, 268
West Ham, 40, 147, 234
Whiteside, Norman, 207
White Terror, 94
Widzew Łód , 201
Wielkopolska, 62
Wilimowski, Ernest, 44
Williams, Richard, 252
Windsor Park, 207
Winner, David, 89
Winterbottom, Walter, 73
Wisła Kraków, 47, 53, 56, 6c, 66, 287
Witeczek, Marcel, 151
WIT Georgia Tbilisi, 231, 232–3, 238
Wright, Billy, 70, 77, 78
Wronki, 65

Yanchev, Kostadin, 187

Yankov, Plamen, 191
Yankov, Zlatko, 197
Yanukovych, Viktor, 38, 39, 40
Yaroslavskyi, Oleksiy, 40
Yasenov, Asparuh, 187, 188
Yeltsin, President, 237
Yerevan, 35, 241, 242, 245, 247
Yevlakh, 261
Yevtushenko, Vadym, 13
Yordanov, Evgeni, 185
Yotov, Velko, 193
Yugoslav Football Federation see FSJ
Yugoslavia, 3, 74, 94, 98–182, 185, 266–7, 269
Yugoslav National Army see JNA
Yugoslav State Security Service see UDBA
Yukos, 289
Yuran, Serhiy, 15, 292, 294
Yushchenko, Viktor, 38, 39, 40
Žabljak, 107

Zadar, 169
Zagł bie Łubin, 51
Zagreb, 2, 109, 110, 157, 163, 165–6, 171, 174
Zahaviè, Pini, 297
Zahovic, Zlatko, 12c, 126, 130, 131, 132–3, 134
Zaire, 128
Zakariás, József, 82, 84
Zakarpattya, 33, 39
Zatikyan, Sergey, 245
Zavarov, Oleksandr, 15
Zavrl, Rudi, 131, 134
Zdravkov, Radoslav, 187
Zelentsov, Professor Anatoliy, 15–16, 17, 19, 22
Železnik, 113
Zeljeznicar, 175–6
Zemljari , Janez, 135, 142, 144
Zenga, Walter, 220
Zenica, 174, 176
Zenit St Petersburg (Zenit Leningrad), 30–1, 266, 285, 287, 301
Zeynalov, Oktay, 259
Zhechev, Dobromir, 194
Zhekov, Petar, 193
Zhemchuzhnaya, 298
Zhivkov, Todor, 194, 195
Zhordania, Merab, 234, 235–6, 238, 239
Zico, 46
Zidar, Ivan, 135–6, 137, 138
ZIL, 267, 271, 278
Zlata Lisica, 165
Zolotov, Yury, 276
ZŠD Olimpija, 137
Zurich, 79
Zwartnots, 250
The goalkeeper Yuriy Degeren, in 1974, shows exactly why Shakhtar Donetsk need their five-star
training base.
Miners look on from the top of a convenient slag heap as Shakhtar beat Torpedo 2–0 in August 1966;
Oleh Blokhin, the greatest player of a great Dynamo Kyiv side.
Valeriy Lobanovskyi, as a dilettantish left-winger for Dynamo Kyiv taking on Neftchi’s Jashar Babyev
in a league game in Baku; and as ‘the Colonel’, Dynamo’s greatest manager, Ukraine’s Brian
Clough.
Mykhalo Koman, who got the winner in the 1954 Soviet Cup Final, goes close again for Dynamo
Kyiv; Oleh Bazilevich, a team-mate of Lobanovskyi, and later his first assistant coach, attempts a
bicycle kick.
Jan Tomaszewski, October 1973: Wembley’s greatest goalkeeping performance.
 ‘The finest team ever to sort out successfully the intricacies of this wonderful game.’ Billy Wright
exchanges penants with Puskás, prior to England being torn apart by the Hungarians at Wembley,
1953.
Sándor Kocsis leaps for a header in what should have been the Aranycsapat’s coronation, the World
Cup Final of 1954. They lost 3–2 to West Germany.
The mighty Ferenc Puskás.
The young Siniša Mihajlovic sporting the curls that earned him the nickname ‘Barbika’ (Barbie)
after joining Red Star Belgrade in 1991; Zvonimir Boban and Robert ProsineCki line up ahead of
Yugoslavia’s World Youth Cup semi-final against East Germany in 1987.
Zlatko Zahovi and Sre ko Katanec celebrate after beating Ukraine in a play-off to qualify for the
2002 World Cup; Red Star fans celebrate a goal in the derby against Partizan.
Georgi Asparuhov, the legendary Bulgarian, with his son in Sofia.
Restored after the revolution, the statue of Florin Piturca still stands alongside the mausoleum where
his father used to sleep.
A statue in the wall of the Hanrapetakan Stadium, Yerevan.
Having displaced Stalin, Mother Armenia stands guard over the capital.
The Armazi Stadium, home of WIT Georgia Tbilisi, Georgian champions in 2004.
Sunflower seeds and cigarettes. Traditional match-day fare in Tbilisi.
Anatoly Banishevsky, Azerbaijan’s most famous player and a keen amateur photographer.
Valentin Semiglazov in action for Neftchi against Dinamo Tbilisi.
Eduard Streltsov.
 Also by Jonathan Wilson

Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football

Sunderland: A Club Transformed
Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics
The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches
Jonathan Wilson is the football correspondent for the FINANCIAL TIMES,
and writes for the SUNDAY TELEGRAPH and GUARDIAN ON-LINE.
His work has appeared in the INDEPENDENT, INDEPENDENT ON
SUNDAY, FOURFOURTWO and WHEN SATURDAY COMES. He is the
critically acclaimed author of BEHIND THE CURTAIN: TRAVELS IN
EASTERN EUROPEAN FOOTBALL, SUNDERLAND: A CLUB
TRANSFORMED and INVERTING THE PYRAMID: A HISTORY OF
FOOTBALL TACTICS, which won a National Sporting Club award and
was shortlisted for the WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR.
 Copyright

AN ORION EBOOK

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Orion Books.

First published in ebook in 2012 by Orion Books.

Copyright © Jonathan Wilson 2006

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accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor
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‘The Creatures outside …’ © George Orwell from Animal Farm, reproduced by permission of Bill
Hamilton as the Literary Editor of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell

Every effort has been made to fulfill requirements with regard to reproducing copyright material, the
author and publisher will be glad to rectify any omissions at the earlist opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 4091 0904 4

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