For a non-Balkan casual WC watcher, the consistent success of Croatia and relative lack of success of Serbia never made too much sense: more or less similarly-sized countries with more or less similar physical attributes (height does matter in football), long and proud sporting cultures, but one often reaches WC semifinals and even a final, while the other doesn't get qualified.
I don't expect to get an unbiased answer for this, but still
Serbia is almost 2x the size of croatia in terms of population and area, so by no means they are similar in terms of size. Also same can be said about basketball, both countries have tradition but Serbia is currently world class, while Croatia cannot even qualify
Both countries are corrupt, but Croatia has a longer term vision. Why bed with Israeli now and ruin your topflight academies, while you can build stars that will rack you millions year over year?
Height only matters in football for certain positions by the way. The current top midfield players are rather short. Players on the wings are also quite short most of the time. Goalkeeper, Central Defence and Strikers seem to have an edge.
Football is probably the most corruption ridden sport here - from the bottom of the bottom leagues straight to the top. Individuals that break through internationally and start earning real money start acting like they forgot from where they came from. Dont even get me started on managerial role - last decent menager we had was Radomir Antic and after him probably Muslin, rest are forgettable...
Cus from lowest to highest position with the management for sports is lead by incompetent people, put in by more incompetent people who are part of the ruling political party which are incompetent yet again.
If the teams in Serbia were not part of political scene it would be so different. Not saying we would dominate, but the coach and others would actually have a say in things. Which players get to play, which do not, which can be kicked out. And honestly, aside from couple of players most of the team is either old or bad, which is okay for local leagues like our own league in Serbia, but in world comp, you can not go with players who can actively run 30 mins and next 60 spend walking around.
You can not have 4 players in defensive line setting up offside trap, where 2-3 players actually move and others are always late.
So long as politics is inside the teams, we will stay bad.
Hear me out. What if the Serb players bet on themselves loosing an unloosable game and made a bunch of money together with the people backing them (politics) ?
If that was the case Serbia would be bad in all sports but it is not. Basketball, Serbia regularly wins medals in all competitions. Individually, Serbian players were MVPs of the the NBA and Euroleague multiple times. Tennis, best player of all times. Waterpolo, one the best teams in history. We were more than decent in voleyball and handball in the past, but again, corruption takes its toll. On the other hand, Albania was never good in any sport, except maybe wrestling? They never even qualified for the World Cup and their best result in history is qualifying for the Euro twice. Also, Albania has never participated in a team sport at the Olympic Games. So if Serbia is shit, where does that put Albania?
Other Repubics besides Croatia are also shit in football nor do they have any noticable success. Even though Serbian football is utter shit they still have more success than Albania (winners of u20 World Cup, better ranked in FIFA, more World Cup appearances, better ranked in Nations League).
We got good footballers, individual players of world class.
But the national selection is a mirror image of our country, of the masses, the people collective.
Pavlovič. lol.. I recall times when we had Vidić, Ivanović, Subotić and Kolarov in the back line..
Pavlović as far as I remember him (I dont watch football for 15 years) just looks like a high effort tall wing back.. Nowhere near the mentioned players.
The drop is real, and even then our team was flawed af..
“i dont watch football for 15 years” than proceeds with the feedback on the situation in football is the most serbian thing to do connect with football
I only watched World Cup games, and those are the conclusions.
I don't need to pretend like Red Star and Partizan are football clubs, let alone follow whats going on.
But i accept your funny comment
We definitely had world class players before, especially when we had Vidic, buut nowadays who is even world class player anymore who play's for very strong club? I think that even quality of our players dropped overtime.
Imagine losing to Cape Verde haha. An entire country with less people than your capital. Not to mention the difference between both their fifa rankings
African division much easier?
Serbia played against England, Albania, Latvia, & Andorra. Seriously my guy? 4 out of 5 of these teams wouldn't qualify in Africa. Cape Verde had to beat Cameroon to qualify.
You seriously think Serbia can beat Cameroon? At being corrupt perhaps. Which is impressive, because Cameroon football association is among the most corrupt in Africa.
Druze hrvati lome u fudbalu, ne pratim nesto spec ove trenutno ali uglavnom igraju po skupim klubovima. Kad je reprezentacija u pitanju mrzi ih valjda ili tako nesto ?!
Alpine Serbs are also good in football, they were better than us in the last euro and even almost eliminated Portugal. So yeah Catholic and Alpine Serbs are no joke.
Basically corruption and planned destruction of our football since the 1990s when the state let the mafia in football from where they got money. This particular loss is because the players cannot openly boycott the team because the mafia will make their life hell, so they boycott by playing like shit and losing on purpose.
When Vucic falls the rebuilding will begin, until then there will be no results.
So, did it sounded harsh?
Because I just wanted to check?
Also just checked, water polo is apparently among the sports you know how to play.
Nice sport.
It was once a joke made by a Romanian comedian that once the stadiums quality improved we become worse at football because it is harder to play on bad stadium with hard balls(the balls weren't regular they were extra hard).
So maybe this is why you are winning, they see the quality of polls at the Olympics and are like "this is easier than home".
There was a strong sport culture in former Yugoslavia, that translated into Serbia.
Everyone stars some kind of sport, from a young age. It’s almost expected.
Also, on average, we are tall nation, so that helps in sports.
Yeah, the height average gives such an edge. Brazil excels at football because it's everywhere, but the sports we are good, it's because we have a sort of program on them.
By the way, do you guys start at a club or at school? What sport did you play specifically?
I’m a girl, so I did volleyball for maybe two and a half years, but I also played an instrument, and decided to prioritise that.
As for boys, mostly football, there are bunch of teams/schools/camps they can join, before they even start school. And then they train and compete, and some of them quit and some of them go to local leagues.
Also, we have basketball courts everywhere, and guys play outdoors all the time, recreationally, and it’s basically available for everyone.
So a lot of kids, especially tall kids go for basketball.
SO WHY DID YOU MENTION THAT YOU'RE A GIRL? IS THAT SO COOL, FRIEND?! YOU COULD HAVE SAID THIS AS A USER TOO! ARE YOU A GIRL, MY GOD? AMONG 3 OR 4 BILLION GIRLS, YOU MUST BE THE MOST SPECIAL, MY GOD!
Yeah, but we also have 200m of people, we should be better, haha. In a sense, we are a poor country, and infrastructure counts a lot - alongside with specific genetics and culture around the sport.
P.s: I am surprised that there has this dictomy of football/basketball being for men and volleyball for girls like in Brazil.
Well, I played volley and was called gay lol
It doesn’t matter, don’t cut yourself short. Being so successful at the most popular sport in the world is a great success, regardless of the population size.
lol, no one considered male volleyball players gay, we actually followed guys around, and watch them play, it just wasn’t first or second option for boys, like football/basketball.
Brazil is home of football, and also it's the most accessible sport out there. The population count is not THAT important, I mean you have nations of 1.5B people that never amount to anything in any major sport.
Former Yugoslav people have a mix of different factors going for them, one is average height being quite high, another is historical emphasis on sports in general and physical activity, then there's the geography itself, you have tourists who come and their legs kill them from the terrain which Balkaners are used to, and then there's just very competitive mentality of proving themselves
We called basketball dead before Alperen Şengün existed and players like Furkan Korkmaz and Cedi Osman were still bench warmers at the NBA. If a country had established culture on a sport at some point it usually bounces back sometime.
Unfortunately this is what happens when your whole Football Association is corrupt to the core, Nemanja Vidic tried to make things better but they didn't want him there and elected a senile old lapdog and yes man of the current regime, they did the same to Basketball and Waterpolo Association where Serbia is pretty successful in those sports , would not be surprised if downfall starts there too.
Same happened in Bulgaria, Berbatov tried to lead the organisation but the corruption led by a one fake hair guy did not let him. Later the fake hair guy was changed to another mini version of him who barely finished 8th grade at school. Later the fake hair guy died and everyone was sad because he was a goalie of the national team 30 years. The illiterate guy though is still leading the circus in memory of the fake hair guy. Rip peruka
Hear me out. What if the Serb players bet on themselves loosing an unloosable game and made a bunch of money together with the people backing them (politics) ?
Since Vučić destroyed FC Partizan. They created players like Mitrović and Vlahović, getting big bucks for players and bought cheaper but great foreign players. That had to be stopped. In no point of time we didn't had worse players than today and it will be keep getting even worse. Same in basketball.
I know this is just a friendly, but I mean losing that much to an island country that has less than a milion people. This is definitely an embaressment. There is a reason why I don't watch serbian football anymore.
You were right, I remember these matches. After the first match that was very bad for us, I was like "ok maybe they were relaxed to much, it's summer" But after the second match that was also awful, I was like "This is so bad, we are gonna screw in euro, but hey atleast we are there", I didn't even celebrate, I was just laughing at them. We had the easiest group in qualification for euro's, that we could ever had and yet we managed barely to go through.
As a portuguese, I'm aware of Cape Verde's quality. They're real pros, experienced, and play in good leagues. They're qualifying campaign was brilliant, basically qualified with one game left. Underestimate them at your own peril
Wait til you see how Bulgaria managed to speedrun from Golden Ball winner and 4th in the world to not qualifying for ANY big tournament since 20 years and counting. All within the span of 30 years total.
But this wasn‘t the question. I read about an article about serbia having one of the best academies for youngsters, plus the kids there were full of talent, but due to corruption an greed it all went in the wrong direction
That’s interesting, I just figured they don’t prioritize the infrastructure for that sport.
It’s bad enough Bosnia has so much politics in soccer, shame to see it’s not exclusive.
They are going through many changes and a transition period, such losses are to be expected. Cape Verde might not be a great team but they will be at the World Cup, it's not like losing 3-0 to Rwanda or something.
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