When I was last in Sarajevo in January, I wrote that I could not imagine a future where I did not come back.
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend there’s more serendipity than self-determination in my return, but it’s nice to know my initial hunch was right.
I’m here volunteering with a small humanitarian NGO called Dråpen i Havet. They run a series of activities at a camp for people on the move in Ušivak, a village just outside the city. The work is interesting, challenging and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Outside of work, one of the things I’ve most enjoyed about being back here is colouring in my initial pencil sketch of the city from a few short days in January. I’ve added depth, shadow and texture to what I knew was an all-too-quick portrait of Sarajevo, and those details have gone some way towards doing justice to the intense complexity of this wonderful place.
In a futile attempt to stave off my consistent diet of baklava and long nights in smokey bars, I've joined a gym- a basic, no-frills place housed inside a complex used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, and seemingly untouched since.
What started as a fitness activity has become a cultural immersion experience. To sign up, I handed over 50 BAM (US$27.50) in cash for a month and that was it. No forms, no contact details, none of the pesky paperwork. They don't even have my name. To get to the door, I walk past a sex shop and down a long alley filled with graffiti and broken glass. The front of the gym is a stuffy cafe with people lounging on chairs smoking cheap cigarettes. I swipe my dongle at the always-empty front desk and walk through.
The gym is small, with no outside windows or air conditioning. EDM remixes of 2000s pop songs blast out of enormous speakers. The roof leaks indiscriminately and the weights look like they were used to hit people with in times gone by. The clientele is almost exclusively bald men with no necks and arms the size of my legs. Everything in the gym is scratched, bent or half-broken except the long walls of mirrors, which are all spotless.
It's fantastic.
Sarajevo has two football teams in the 12-team Premier League of Bosnia- FK Sarajevo and FK Željezničar. Whilst I was too late in the season to witness one of their famous Sarajevo derbies, I was able to get to a home game for each team before the season ended.
FK Željezničar 3 : HŠK Posušje 0
“Željezničar” means railway worker, a nod to the club’s founders in the 1920s. Their 13,000-seat stadium was on the front lines for parts of the siege of Sarajevo in the 90s and though it has been remodelled since, neighbouring apartment blocks still wear fist-sized holes in their facades from where bullets struck the concrete.
Željo has consistently been one of the top clubs in Bosnia, last winning the league back-to-back in 2011-12 and 2012-13, and coming runners-up four times since then. Their largest claim to fame outside of Bosnia is being the club to have produced the striker Edin Džeko, who has won the Bundesliga with Wolfsburg, two Premier Leagues with Manchester City, a Serie A golden boot with Roma, two Coppa Italias with Inter Milan, and currently captains the Bosnian national team.
With the infinite wisdom of hindsight, it is rather funny that Željo sold him in 2005 for just €25,000, and thought they’d won the lottery at that.
On matchday I bought a ticket from one of the booths on the stadium concourse: for 10KM, (US$5.50) I had an unallocated seat in the East stand, looking out into the sharp afternoon sunshine.
In keeping with their origins there is a gloriously blue-collar attitude to everything at Željo, from the plain blue and white match kits to the uncomplicated, hardworking style of football they play.
As a long-suffering former season ticket holder of the lacklustre Wellington Phoenix FC, I am familiar with unflashy, pragmatic football, and have grown to love its straightforward beauty. Its features are simple: tackle hard, swing countless crosses into a tall, physical striker, and run all day long.
And boy can they run.
Right from kick-off it was obvious that on this day, HŠK Posušje were no match for Željo’s skills, speed or ball movement. On the rare occasions when Željo didn’t have the ball, they pressed up like wolves, invariably forcing an error and sprinting away in attack once more. The fans could smell goals in the air and began riding the game like surfers, jumping to their feet as each ball was launched forward.
There was a brief moment of respite at the 10-minute mark when Željo subbed off the retiring Samir Bekrić (a symbolic gesture as he wore the #10 shirt), who played over 200 games for the club in 3 separate stints in between seasons for teams in South Korea, Kazakhstan, Iran and Uzbekistan (!).
After a rousing standing ovation and the appropriate dose of smoke bombs and flares from the club’s ultras, the Maniacs, it was back to business.
Through all of this, the man next to me remained seated and roundly unimpressed. It was clear he was a seasoned veteran and not one to get caught up in all the frivolous excitement happening around him.
Željo were attacking from right to left in the first half, and every time the ball was about to be crossed in he would throw out his left arm towards the goal as if guiding it in himself, and then when it invariably missed its mark he would let his hand drop to his thigh with a loud thwack of disappointment.
And so the first half progressed – Željo in near-complete control of the game but unable to score the goal that seemed destined to come.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
The second half began as a continuation of the first, the attacks on goal becoming more vicious with each passing minute. With his team now attacking to the right the man next to me switched hands, his arm cast out like an actor in the midst of a Shakespearian soliloquy, the thwacks on his thigh intensifying as frustration started to creep in.
A special mention must go to Željo’s right winger, the Ghanaian Joseph Amoah. As the second half deepened, he set off on a series of terrifying strafing runs at Posušje defenders. He ran like a man possessed, his feet a blur across the scorched grass as he jinked left and right, a mesmeric cocktail of supreme athleticism, confidence, and raw speed.
If the pitiful Posušje left-back ever had the misfortune to be passed the ball, he would suddenly come under attack from Amoah, a relentless heat-seeking missile in blue and white who would jockey and scrap and shirt-pull until he won the ball back, or the defender simply kicked it away into the stand.
It was ruthless psychological warfare.
Amoah seemed to gain energy from running rather than expend it, and I’m convinced he could have kept on going all night if his team needed him to.
A goal finally came – to Armin Hodžić, a gifted midfielder with barrel-like calves who smashed the ball home from close range and sent the stadium into delirium. It was like a pressure cooker going off: what had seemed so inevitable for over 80 minutes had finally happened. It was no surprise that Željo then scored twice more in quick succession as Posušje collapsed in a miserable heap, the last goal scored, fittingly, by Amoah.
That win, and a win the following week away from home, confirmed a third-placed finish for Željo and ensured they will start in the first round of qualifying for the Europa Conference League next season.
FK Sarajevo 2 : FK Igman Konjic 4
After all the fire and glory of the previous weekend, I should have foreseen that the following Sunday’s match would be somewhat of an anticlimax.
FK Sarajevo plays its home games in the stadium that hosted the Winter Olympics opening ceremony. The bowl for the Olympic flame is still there, towering over the rows of green seats.
Culturally, Sarajevo is a vastly different team from Željo. There is a more corporate, middle-class, slick feel to the club, with its burgundy kit, lucrative sponsorship deals and Malaysian businessman owner.
This is a team used to winning, and it’s something their fans clearly expect. Each year, they vote for the club’s best player award. Since 2003, it has gone unawarded five times, the fans wanting to show their dissatisfaction with the team’s performances by not holding a vote.
In the worst of those seasons, Sarajevo finished 5th.
Compared to the crackling atmosphere across town, here the stadium had the sleepy energy of a village cricket match. The stadium announcer tried desperately to eek some enthusiasm out of a sparse crowd ahead of kick-off, but the most he could muster was polite applause.
Sarajevo scored within 2 minutes; a bizarre, easy goal met more with disbelief than celebration by the fans around me.
Almost as soon as things were going well, they began to go very, very wrong. Though overall a sharp team in possession (which they consistently dominated) and when attacking on goal, Sarajevo’s defenders began to commit a litany of cataclysmic errors in their own penalty area, leading them to concede two quick goals and fall behind.
The fans grew restless. A man behind me yelled "CARTON!!" every time there was a foul and brayed his approval when the referee dutifully responded with a yellow card. Two girls in front of me began ploughing vigorously through a pack of cigarettes and doom-scrolling on Instagram. Another strange goal – a 40-yard thunderbolt that slipped through a dozen legs on its way into the net- somehow brought Sarajevo back level at 2-2, but this was only a temporary respite.
The defensive shambles continued in the second half, a tragicomic slow-motion car crash that leaked another two goals, to nobody’s real surprise.
It became infectious, spreading a vicious paralysis through the rest of the team until no amount of wild handwaving or miracle switch-passes could get them out of trouble.
Fans began clapping and cheering ironically when the ball got kicked out or timidly passed back to the Sarajevo goalkeeper, and people headed for the exits with 15 minutes left in the game.
Later that evening the team’s Facebook page was full of comments congratulating Igman on their victory – promoted to Bosnia’s top league that year they finished a credible 8th and secured another season in the top flight.
As for Sarajevo, this loss (combined with Željo's win) meant they finished the season in 4th, outside the qualifying spots for European competitions.
I wouldn’t be holding out hope for that player of the season award.
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