Bosnablog

Built as the centrepiece of the 1984 Winter Olympics, the Koševo stadium is carved deep and bowl-like into the hillside, barely emerging above the line of the hill. Its banks of seats curve around its running track in a gentle superellipsis, ringing the central football pitch and sloping upwards irregularly, each stand reaching a different height. Everything is rounded apart from the pitch, which seems to stand in stark rejection of this annularity, a swarm of rectangles improperly and incompletely enclosed by the grand oviform of the stadium.

Though Koševo is ordinarily the home of FK Sarajevo, I had come to watch FK Željezničar, the other Sarajevo team, who play their Champions League and UEFA cup games in the larger of the two stadiums. Their opponents were Hapoel Tel Aviv, the current Israeli champions; the winner would progress to the third qualifying round of the Champions League, though there was little hope for Željo who went into the game 5-0 down on aggregate, having put on a dire display in the first leg.

The spirits of the fans were not dampened, though. On the south stand to my right were Željo’s ultras, the “Maniacs”, the most hardcore fans who normally occupy the south curva of Željo’s Grbavica stadium. From before kickoff until after the final whistle, they became a seething mass of jumping and chanting, relentless, appearing as one huge organism that had spread across the curva. This was not the choreographed tifo of Italian ultras, but organic; the only organisation was the continuously beaten drum that kept the rhythm of the ceaseless chants.

Even the poor quality of the football on offer could not dissuade them. Though Željo came close to scoring twice in the first half, the result was never in doubt; if the tie had not been dead at 5-0, then it was surely killed by Hapoel’s 76th minute goal, a scrappy bundling from a shoddily defended indirect free kick. But still the ultras sang, their spirits as undiminished as they had been at kickoff. The chants seemed to lack the sarcastic putdowns of their English equivalents—though that might simply have been a consequence of the foreign opposition—but instead brimmed with self-confidence: if you weren’t convinced Željo were the best before the match, you surely would after 90 minutes of deafening persuasion. The result? What did the result matter?