Over bacon and eggs in Knightsbridge one morning, the pocket-size Slovenian President Milan Kucan admitted: “Slovenia’s football success is a surprise to the football world, but also to Slovenia.”
He was not kidding. Just as Kucan may be the world’s smallest president, Slovenia with its 1 989 000 inhabitants will be the smallest country at the World Cup. Only Northern Ireland has ever qualified for the tournament with a tinier population. But what is most remarkable about Slovenia’s achievement is that it has come without either good players or a national passion for football.
The mountain republic is very good at sport and wins a lot of Olympic medals, but its specialities are basketball, rowing, handball and, in particular, the various disciplines of skiing. There is even a Catholic shrine to mountaineering below Mount Triglav. However, in the days when Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia it left football to the Croats and Serbs.
In fact, almost the only cliché about Slovenia used to be that it was a country where classical music concerts drew larger crowds than football matches. In the capital Ljubljana, a pretty but deserted town of coffee houses and monuments, a place where you could believe the Hapsburg Empire still exists, the truly glamorous occupation for a young man remains poetry.
A few young Slovenes have laid their quills aside to make a career in football, but they must often have regretted their decision. After Slovenia made it to Euro 2000 and did well, drawing 3-3 against Yugoslavia in the competition’s wildest match, every midsize European club just had to have one of those darling Slovenes. They were the pashmina scarves of the season. Almost the entire squad went abroad, where almost all of them ended up on the bench.
Of the Slovenian team that overcame Romania in the World Cup play-offs, about half were reserves at their clubs. Mladen Rudonja, who scored the crucial goal in Bucharest, was not even that. “Portsmouth was not my lucky club, I don’t know why,” he reports in mournful mittel- European tones over the telephone.
Rudonja joined Portsmouth in 2000, but his last first-team appearance was in March 2001, and in his last reserve match against Luton he refused to go on for the second half, apparently on the grounds that he got kicked in the reserves. A club spokesman says: “It would be fair to say he found it hard to adapt to the physical side of the English game.”
You might think Rudonja is the victim of cultural misunderstandings, ditched by an ignorant club manager despite shining for his country. That is not quite true. Though a forward, “Turbo Rudi” played his first 52 matches for Slovenia without scoring a goal. Slovenia’s manager Srecko Katanec once remarked that if Rudonja ever did score he would resign. When the goal finally came, taking Slovenia to the World Cup, the manager grunted: “He’ll have to decide what I do,” while Rudonja mused: “Even a blind hen finds the wheat occasionally.”
He is now a national hero almost on a par with the 19th-century poet France Preseren. This bodes well for Amir Karic, a Slovenian international who didn’t play in Bucharest, a condition he is used to since he never plays anywhere else either. Karic joined Ipswich in the summer of 2000 and made three appearances in his first season (each time as a substitute in the Worthington Cup) before being loaned to Crystal Palace in March. He started in three games for Palace, all of which they lost, and after just 12 days (is this a record?) was sent back to East Anglia.
Slovenia does have one excellent footballer in Zlatko Zahovic, but he and several other important players were injured for their last few qualifying matches. Given that much the same squad gained only one point in their qualifying campaign for the 1998 finals, it would appear Katanec is the world’s best football manager.
Slovenians explain that the former Sampdoria defender has created a team with unity of purpose.
Rudonja claims: “He is the manager and he is our friend. We are just one big family.” Such solidarity, adds Kucan, “is not very typical of the Slovenian character, because we are more individualistic”.
Yet the country has united behind the team as it united behind Kucan on the evening in June 1991 when he proclaimed Slovenia’s independence on Ljubljana’s Revolution Square. “Now that we have acquired our own state,” the poet Nico Grafenauer once asked in a manifest, “do we Slovenes also have a national goal, or does no such goal exist?”
Well, Slovenia’s goal has turned out to be the World Cup. This season the national team regularly filled the roofless national stadium to its 10 000 capacity, outdrawing in the process some renowned symphony orchestras. The last group match against Russia was watched on TV by 73% of the population, and one wonders whether anyone at all missed the final game against Romania. Every Slovenian citizen can watch the team knowing that if there are a couple more injuries, he or she could be picked for it.
Now the 10 employees of the Slovenian Football Association are desperately trying to cope with the calls from all over the world. “We can expect the invasion of the Japanese,” one told me dolefully the day after qualification. Playing in the World Cup won’t so much improve Slovenia’s image as create it from scratch. Next month hundreds of millions of people will watch a team from a country they had either never heard of or had always confused with Slovakia. (In the first few months after independence, Slovene skiers winning races abroad were generally fêted with the Czech national anthem.) “Perhaps after 1991, qualifying for the World Cup is the event that has promoted Slovenia most around the world,” says Kucan.
Marjan Setinc, the Slovenian ambassador in London, adds that football has been his meal ticket into the British establishment. “In Britain, almost everybody you meet in politics is supporting some club or other, often in their constituency. So almost everybody has this information about Slovenia.”
Slovenia’s image-makers are looking forward to the World Cup. In a group with Spain, Paraguay and South Africa, the team might actually progress. The joy is that it doesn’t really matter. Over the past decade the mountain republic has become wealthy and peaceful and is quite happy as it is. There will be none of the snarling nationalism that characterised the Croat and Yugoslav teams at the last World Cup.