Ciro Blažević: The Former Iran Manager Who Brought Unity and Hope to Bosnia

Ciro Blažević is an exhausting man to interview. He fizzes with energy, is never able to sit down for more than a couple of minutes, always springing to his feet to demonstrate a point or act out a scene. In 46 years as a coach he has had 27 jobs, winning league titles in Switzerland and Croatia, and has led five national teams, including Iran (2002). In terms of measurable success, his finest hour came in 1998 when he led Croatia to the semi-final of the World Cup,though his greatest achievement might have been overseeing the rebirth of Bosnian football.

Blažević left the Bosnia national job in 2009 after a defeat to Portugal in the play-offs cost them a place in the World Cup. He was replaced by Safet Susic who, two years later, also suffered a play-off defeat to Portugal, this time preventing Bosnia from qualifying for Euro 2012. Two years on, though, Susic’s calm leadership carried Bosnia to the World Cup finals. It would be wrong to discount the importance of his tactical intelligence or his capacity for thinking clearly under pressure, but the sense is that Blažević’s reign was a necessary part of Bosnia’s development, that his zest and charisma created, almost from nothing, the dream that Susic was able to hone into a first World Cup qualification.

When Blažević took over in 2008, Bosnian football was a shambles. The previous coach, Meho Kodro, had been sacked for his furious reaction when the Bosnian football federation (NSBiH) had arranged a friendly against Iran without telling him (and without declaring $180,000 of the $300,000 fee they received for playing the game; it was never fully established whether that was a mere accounting error or whether there had been an attempt at embezzlement). Kodro’s departure left Bosnia without a coach for a friendly against Azerbaijan. The media, appalled by what had happened, decided to boycott the national team until Kodro was reinstated and took the decision to vigorously promote a charity match that was scheduled to take place in Sarajevo at the same time the national team played its friendly in Zenica.

The youth team Denijal Piric coach was given the unenviable task of acting as Kodro’s interim replacement. Of the squad he named, the Rangers defender Sasa Papac, the Lokomotiv Moscow defender Emir Spahic and Wolfsburg’s Zvjezdan Misimovic all openly refused to play, while 16 other players succumbed to mysterious ailments or discovered unavoidable family commitments. Piric began driving round Sarajevo, knocking on the doors of players to see if they were available. He sent a fax to NK Posusje telling them that Krstanovic had been called up, but given there are two Krstanovics at the club, nobody knew which one he meant. In the Hotel Herzegovina, where the squad was supposed to be meeting up, there was chaos. Nobody recognized anybody. The kit man, seeing a player wander in, thrust a key in his hand and told him to go to room 212 and hurry up and get changed, only to discover that it wasn’t a player at all, but a local meeting his girlfriend for an ice cream.

Fan groups backed the boycott. In the final six days before the game, only five tickets were sold through official sources. State television decided to show the charity game, in which many of the 19 refuseniks played. It is estimated that somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 fans turned up at the Kosevo Stadium to watch, many brandishing banners calling for the NSBiH committee to stand down. In Zenica, meanwhile, 250 police officers stood around providing security for a crowd of around 150 in a stadium that can hold 100 times that. With his scratch squad, Piric admitted he wasn’t worrying about the score, just fulfilling the fixture to avoid FIFA sanctions. “When Kodro was sacked, I thought everything would go down,” said the striker Edin Dzeko. Instead, something remarkable grew instead. To see Blažević in action in that last qualifying campaign was to witness a great demagogic politician at work. Before their final home qualifier against Turkey, around 300 fans waited outside the training ground to catch a glimpse of Blažević. Afterwards, he strode among the crowd, shaking hands, cradling babies and kissing women, posing for photographs with the oddly slapstick salute he had made famous during the 1998 World Cup.

“He would gradually motivate you,” explained the defender Slaven Bilic, a key part of Croatia’s team in 1998. “He knows every day in his head that he’s going to make a small incident to wake everybody up a bit ... and then he’s going to tell them to go out to a nightclub. At team meetings he’d be talking about, say, Estonia like it’s fucking Brazil. You know he’s lying; you know it isn’t true, but you say, fuck, yeah, it’s going to be hard. Or you’d be playing Argentina and he’d say, ‘Argentina, not a bad team, not a bad team, but none of their players play for the best teams in Europe’. So you’d look at him, and say ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ But it worked.”

That night against Turkey, Blažević waited in the tunnel for several seconds, perhaps a minute, after his players had emerged. He let the sense of expectation build and just as everybody was wondering where he was, he walked out, resplendent in a black shirt and white blazer. As he walked around the pitch to the dug-out, the whole stadium chanted his name. Even the Turkey fans, packed into a corner, applauded politely. This was masterful theatre.

Bosnia only drew 1-1 that night, though, and the doubts about Blažević’s tactical nous began to be raised again. They were raised even more vociferously after the play off. What he had done, though, was bring the nation together. “I am on a mission to bring peace among the people,” he said before that Turkey game. “We are too small a country to be divided. In my team, everybody likes each other, and I’m their dad. I am very proud that I can bring the people together in a way the politicians cannot. But my mission depends on results.” Each victory, he insisted, was “a few steps forward to the unification of the country.”

That, perhaps, is a little fanciful, yet there is no other arena in which Bosnia’s three ethnic factions come together as obviously, Bosnian Muslim women wearing headscarves fashioned from the national flag mingling with Bosnian Serbs carrying flags bearing the name of their capital, Banja Luka. Zenica is a predominantly Muslim area, but that night the whole stadium joined in chanting for the ethnic Serb goalkeeper Nemanja Supic. “When they are chanting ‘Nemanja’ for our goalkeeper,” Blažević said, “that’s my biggest victory.”

Supic has gone now, to be replaced by Asmir Begovic, and so too has Blažević. His part in Bosnia’s story, though, can never be forgotten. He took a team that was nothing and made it something, he generated almost through force of personality the possibility of qualification. It took Susic to finish the project, but without Blažević there wouldn’t even have been a project.