An afternoon mist is descending over Maksimir Stadion, enhancing the severity of its dramatic, precipitous angles. In a building across the way, Zvonimir Boban is explaining what brought him back. We are eating squid ink risotto in one corner of a room now configured as Dinamo Zagreb’s canteen; diagonally opposite is the spot where, fighting through the club’s youth system, a young arrival from Dalmatia used to sleep. “Emotionally it’s the biggest story of my life, this one,” Boban says, memories of this former dormitory leaping into his mind’s eye. “Where, if not here?”
He has, in some shape or form, been almost everywhere else. Boban has burned brightly but briefly in each of his various lives as a football administrator. The sport would look different were it not for his influence in senior roles at Fifa and Uefa across the past decade. Almost two years have passed since his high-profile resignation from the latter and there was always the sense Boban, opinionated and deeply principled, had further rungs to climb.
Instead his world has, in contrasting ways, shrunk and grown. The policymaking clout he held in Zurich and Nyon is no more; neither of those posts, though, came with the persistent public gaze and criticism that are part of the package as Dinamo president. The day’s newspapers pay testament to that with some scathing commentaries after a 3-1 Europa League defeat by Real Betis here the previous evening. “They say Jesus was a good man,” he says. “Better than any of us, that’s clear, no? They crucified him, so who are we not to be crucified in our everyday life?”
The sentence is typical Boban: a rhetorical force who swept back in six months ago, initially as CEO before becoming president via Dinamo’s first fully democratic election in September, to reshape the club he captained at 19 before leaving for Milan 34 years ago. The plan is to galvanise an institution tarred and scarred by the scandal-hit reign of the former chief executive Zdravko Mamic. He is undertaking the challenge without receiving a salary.
“All my life I was proclaiming love for Dinamo, for these people, for this city, for my country,” he says. “Then, at the moment when they are giving you the opportunity, will you say: ‘No, I’m 57, actually I’ll sit and rest on an island watching the sea and fishing’? If I didn’t do this it would be a betrayal of every value I have lived for.”
During three hours spent around Maksimir he will outline his vision but there are elephants to clear from the room, too. The most obvious is that stormy departure from Uefa, where he had been chief of football for almost three years, in January 2024. Boban felt Aleksander Ceferin had been out of line in proposing statute changes, subsequently passed, that would allow him to run for a fourth term of presidency. At the time he criticised Ceferin’s “personal aspirations”; in response, Ceferin told the Guardian that Boban “does not deserve my comment”.
Boban had been an influential, if sometimes frustrated, ex-player’s voice among the bureaucrats. So, any regrets? “I’m just sorry for the personal relationship with Aleksander, I’m sorry that this is what happened.” They have not spoken since. “We had a very nice relationship in these few years, and with the family as well. But I did what I had to do and I explained it very well. He chose his way, that’s it, and I wish him only the best.
“But I’m not regretting anything, not at all. I thought for two months before doing that. I didn’t react like a kid, like a spoiled child. I thought a lot. I took my time and left time for others to think as well. Everyone will live with their own decisions and their own consequences: myself, and others as well.”
He believes he would still be at Uefa had that rift not opened up. But it would have felt inauthentic to bottle up his grievances, just as it would when in March 2020, nine months into a spell as Milan’s chief football officer, he criticised their ownership in an interview that effectively forced his dismissal.
It begs the question of how he would have reacted if still in situ at Fifa, where he was deputy secretary general between 2016 and 2019 before joining Milan. Boban operated alongside Gianni Infantino to transform what, during that tenure, he said had previously been a “scared and lost organisation”. He stands firmly by their body of work, launching into a sprawling defence of the VAR project to which he was fundamental. Lots of analysis, he thinks, neglects to point out VAR’s role in making it harder to corrupt the outcome of a game.
“The integrity and transparency of football are now completely different,” he says. A rapid-fire recital of figures and statistics follows, contrasting the time lost through VAR interventions with the seven and a half minutes per game occupied by throw-ins.
Surely he would have walked, back then, in the event Infantino had pulled any of the stunts that have defined recent years at Fifa. Boban pulls few punches when addressing the “peace prize” for Donald Trump with which Infantino hijacked the World Cup draw.
“Disrespectful and irresponsible,” he says of his former boss’s actions. “I couldn’t watch it. I was surprised he started to think in this way, too political, obsessed with the politicians and all those stories.
“At the beginning it wasn’t like this. Everything was about football and footballers. We had to bring Fifa back in that direction and were doing it. Later, it has started to go in a different way. Gianni has always been accountable and very responsible, but he isn’t aware of what he is doing to himself and Fifa now. Thinking to do the best, but doing completely the opposite. It shouldn’t be a political organisation but now you’re doing this, it’s shameful.
“None of this can deny all the good things he’s done, and not because I was there. But on the other hand it shows that the way is lost. At least that’s how everything has been presented with this ridiculous piece of work. And I’m sorry for that. Sorry for Fifa, sorry for him, sorry for football.”
We have walked back over to Boban’s office and in walks Albert Capellas, appointed by him to head up Dinamo’s academy in June, for a brief introduction. Capellas spent more than a decade working with Barcelona’s youth and B sides. Boban’s plan is to blend a La Masia-style methodology with the heart that has helped launch scores of Croatian footballers to greatness.
“We would like to have one of the best football schools in Europe and I believe that, in a few years’ time, we will have it,” Boban says. “So that everyone knows that, if they are thinking about taking a player from Dinamo, it is an educated player.”
He thinks Dinamo can become a credible stop for youngsters from bigger leagues who need to refine their competitive edge. The 20-year-old Sergi Domínguez – “one of the best young defenders in the world, if not the best” – arrived from Barcelona during pre-season in a notable yield from the relationship. Dani Olmo once beat a similar path. Cardoso Varela, a former Porto winger who has just turned 17, is widely expected to swap Zagreb for the Camp Nou next.
Boban’s conviction is hypnotic. But can such methods be enough to make teams such as Dinamo competitive in a sport whose elite are unmoored and disappearing over the horizon? “I believe in time we can do it,” he says, citing Atalanta as the model of a club driven by smart decisions.
He will not broach criticism of the swollen new European competition formats, which he believes Uefa has executed well. Many inside the corridors of power would acknowledge it was Boban, in one of his most persistent set-tos with the executive committee, who talked the new Champions League down from a 10-game group format to its current eight.
Similarly, Boban was one of the Club World Cup’s chief proponents while at Fifa but had pushed for a tournament limited to 24 entrants played over 18 days, with three-team groups and knockout games going straight to penalties if drawn. He embarks upon a long denunciation of its present form. “Thirty-two teams and 30 days, you are killing the players,” he concludes.
Boban warms to his themes, among them what he sees as “another killer element” in the form of extra time, while puffing on a cigar. It is impossible not to fear he has been lost too soon to those guiding the game’s direction. Ceferin may well run unopposed for his next Uefa term in 2027 and, even in a largely sewn-up political climate, Boban would have backers. Wouldn’t he be tempted to give it a crack?
“No, no. I know, I know. There are people, a lot of them, they call me often. But this was the first real station of my football life and it will be the last. And it’s the one I love most, respect most. It’s an emotion that I can’t bring anywhere else. So what else can there be? What more?”
By now the Maksimir pitch is obscured by fog. Somewhere out there, in May 1990, Boban became a national hero when he launched a flying kick at a policeman as violence erupted during a match between Dinamo and Red Star Belgrade. Contrary to some interpretations it did not, by a long chalk, spark the bloody Yugoslav wars but overnight he became a towering icon of Croatian resistance. Croatia declared independence the following year.
“It was a collective moment, not mine. A collective moment of the Croatian youth who had never felt so much injustice and were rallying towards a Croatian cause. We were rebels, a resistance, but the real heroes are the guys who fought in the war for our freedom. It is much, much bigger than me.
“I was proud of us that day, proud of the young people and how we reacted. What were we looking for? Freedom. We did the right thing. It was nothing about nationalism, nothing about hatred between Croatia and Serbia, simply justice and freedom.”
Long before Fifa called Boban had completed a history degree, become a journalist, developed business interests. “Maybe the events at the time in former Yugoslavia pushed me towards studying,” he says. What did he learn? “That people don’t change a lot. What’s changing is our surroundings, the forms and materials. Ancient Greeks lived the same doubts, problems and fears as we do today.”
And nothing could ever change Boban. “You can read a million books or get a million diplomas but I’m a football player in my soul,” he says.
Sometimes he grabs a pair of boots and travels to the academy pitches with Capellas. There is not much cartilage in the knees but he will join in with the under-14s or under-15s; an attempt to live with the under-17s proved a step too far.
“What they see now can’t inspire them too much,” he says. “I never defend, always the joker. But since I was four or five, I thought if I had one mission in this world it was to play football. And with the best part of my heart, I’m still that kid.”
