Football Architects: How Croatia became world football's great overperformers

New York Times

17-07-2025

This is the third of a six-part series looking at figures who have played a pivotal role in a modern football success story. The first piece, on the rebuilding of Ajax, can be found here. Part two, on Belgium becoming No 1 in the FIFA Rankings is here.
Each article comes with a related podcast, which can be found here on The Athletic FC Tactics Podcast feed.
Croatia is a nation of fragile talent.
'You have to understand — there's three and a half million of us,' says Romeo Jozak, a man who, over the past 25 years, has held almost every significant role in Croatian football. 'We have some talent, but we don't have a huge pool of talent, right?
'So when we see a fragile talent — a talent that might not reach its full potential if it's not cherished — we have to nourish it. We had a tolerance for their mistakes.
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'We're not like France, we're not like Germany, we're not like the UK. When he was growing up, we didn't have 10 of Mateo Kovacic. We only had Mateo. We had one Luka Modric. We had one Mario Mandzukic.
'We had to look after them. This is what we had.'
In 2018, Croatia became the first team with a population under 10 million to reach the World Cup final in sixty years. Four years later, they reached the semi-finals. They are knockout-stage regulars — one of international football's great overperformers, whose successes eclipse many larger, better-resourced European neighbours.
Now, still in its infancy, Croatia has become synonymous with its elite talent — the likes of Modric, Ivan Rakitic, and Ivan Perisic — and a fierce, indefatigable personality.
Perhaps Croatia is a nation of fragile talent because, for the beginning of its history, Croatia was a fragile nation. It is a country that has been shaped by conflict, only declaring independence during the brutality of the Yugoslav Wars — which killed an estimated 130,000 people — in 1991.
Modric, the nation's greatest-ever footballer, saw his grandfather's body brought home, having been executed by Serb rebels while shepherding his goats. Dejan Lovren, Croatia's long-time centre-back, fled Bosnia as a three-year-old with his parents. Both grew up as refugees.
A remarkable number of players — including Modric, right-back Sime Vrsaljko, and goalkeepers Danijel Subasic and Dominik Livakovic — are from the coastal city of Zadar, one of the front lines of the war.
When the war started in the early 1990s, Jozak was an 18-year-old trying to make it as a professional player. Though he played for HNK Orijent, a first-division club from the western city of Rijeka, his career was ultimately ruined by a succession of left ankle injuries.
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'I'd have been playing top-tier football, but I'd have never made the national team or played for Dinamo Zagreb,' says Jozak. 'I'd have been close, I'd have been OK, but I would never have been the top player.'
Instead, he went on to hold several of the top jobs in Croatian football — heading Dinamo Zagreb's academy and becoming technical director of the Croatian FA, before returning to Dinamo as their sporting chief.
Arsenal noticed — attempting to hire him as academy director in 2013 after the retirement of the legendary Liam Brady.
But Jozak opted to remain in Croatia, where he had worked his way up from coaching Dinamo's under-11s to literally writing the nation's player development manual. Having worked alongside all of Croatia's modern greats, his tenures have coincided with the most successful footballing period of the nation's history.
'I was 18 when the war broke out,' says Jozak. 'I was quite old enough to be conscious of what was happening. I was raised on the Yugoslavian anthem, with a red star on my flag, and so it was strange — but obviously things weren't right. I was lucky I wasn't drafted by the army, which I easily could have been. The war was brutal. My close family were not affected, but some in my broader family were, or even killed.
'Later, when I was the technical director, these experiences were a factor. People were fighting for Croatia, people in living memory had fought for our freedom in a brutal, unpleasant way. And our team was made up of kids from that time — who had seen planes go over, dropping bombs, people being shot and killed. It was something we were processing.
'And so there was a patriotism factor, it did boost our motivation, make us the way we were. Yes, we had genetic talent, we were a passionate nation, but I'd say seven out of 10 players had this drive inside, and this hunger — a subconscious passion. We learned that you go beyond when you need to do something.'
One of the country's first significant moments as an independent nation came in the 1998 World Cup, when Croatia finished third. Their run included a 3-0 win over Germany in the quarter-finals, and a 2-1 victory against the Netherlands in the third-fourth play-off.
'After the war, we did not know how talented we were, or how good we'd be,' Jozak explains. 'Croatia — a new country. What was that going to be? It took me almost 10 years before football helped me take it in — when we finished third, I realised: 'Oh, listen — we're a country'.'
But the players in that team — the likes of Davor Suker, Slaven Bilic, and Zvonimir Boban — had all grown up as part of Yugoslavia. The incipient country's FA recognised the need for a uniquely Croatian pathway of talent development. For several years, results did not live up to the nation's early promise — Croatia did not qualify for Euro 2000, while they failed to escape the group stages at their next three major tournaments.
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But at the academy level, beginning in the 2000s, players were beginning to come through. In 2001, Jozak was working as the head coach of Dinamo Zagreb's second team when a 16-year-old Modric arrived at the club.
'Did I notice something, did I see something?' says Jozak. 'At 18, he wasn't one of the most talented prospects, we couldn't say: 'We knew the guy'. I didn't. Nobody knew. He was just a young, skinny blond guy.
'But the one thing that was inescapable, that is fact, and that is a key part of his play now is that he was so protective of the ball. When he was playing as a No 6, in defensive midfield, we subconsciously knew that he was not going to lose the ball. He could be pressed in the back by two guys — where if you lose the ball, you'll likely concede — and he was always switching, turning to the side, and wiggling out. In his first touch, he perfectly set up his body position — and he's still doing it now, at nearly 40.
'And at that time, I remember being concerned when we played away — he was 17, we were Dinamo, and there were some big guys who wanted to be aggressive. But he'd just calm everyone down — not with fancy moves and touches and dribbling, but with his running, his reliability, his aggressive defending. We still see each other and speak about these times — I'm so privileged to be at least one puzzle piece in his own big picture.'
But Modric did not emerge from a vacuum. Over the course of the 2000s, Croatia had been implementing a series of youth reforms to help develop players — aided by several useful pre-existing conditions.
'Croatia is a serious football environment, but not the most serious football environment,' says Jozak. 'This means that the first division is strong enough for young players to be developed, but weak enough that the kids actually get a chance.'
When Jozak was the academy director at Dinamo, youth development was the club's lifeblood — both in producing first-team players, and eventually funding the club through their sales. As the most historic and successful club in Croatia, Jozak would try and tempt the country's top young talent to the capital.
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'In terms of having players who could impact the national team, one huge criterion is internal competition,' explains Jozak. 'Never mind 11 — if you have 20 players in a squad fighting against each other on a daily basis, they have to improve to survive.
'So we wanted to bring the best talent to Dinamo to create the most competitive internal competition against each other. And when it was not sufficient to play against the other Croatian teams, we would put them in to play against the higher age groups — the under-16s against the under-18s, the under-18s would play the under-20s, and so on. We artificially created these conditions.
'Sometimes, when I was at Dinamo, people complained that we would sign a starting player from another team, and they would be on our bench. But he would be fighting in training sessions, the starting players would be feeling pressure, they'd both be producing their best. So we'd bring in the best under-16s to strengthen the top talents like Luka or (Josko) Gvardiol.'
In particular, the competitiveness gave birth to a glut of talent in one position in particular — midfield. In the 2018 World Cup squad alone, Croatia boasted Modric, Rakitic, Kovacic and Marcelo Brozovic, four elite players at Champions League level.
This was no coincidence — rather, Croatia's strength across the team stemmed from a holistic obsession with the position.
'Vrsaljko was a right-back, and we knew he was going to be a right-back,' says Jozak, of the former Atletico Madrid defender who won 52 international caps. 'But for most of his time in the academy, when I was director, we got him to play defensive midfielder.
'Why? When you're at No 6, you have to play from all four sides — defending, attacking, left, right, switching, switching, switching. It helped him massively. (Vedran) Corluka, the same.
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'Not many people know this, but Gvardiol played as a No 10 until he was 16 years old. He was tall, left-footed, and that's why the guy has amazing technique. And then he grew to 190cm, was aggressive, fast — and that's why he's such a good defender.
'But we always tried to push them towards the middle. It would improve your reactions, positioning, tactics, mentality… you'd physically be running the most. And then, even if you aren't good enough to play central midfield professionally, you will probably be good enough for your primary position.'
This level of competition meant that those players who did survive as central midfielders — that central quartet from the 2018 World Cup — had been tested against the nation's best since their early teens.
'When you take the talented wingers, right-backs, centre-backs, and place them artificially into midfield, the specialists have to be so much better,' says Jozak. 'You know your own position will be in question if you don't strengthen.
'Once, at Dinamo Zagreb, we had open tryouts. Kids came from across the whole of the Balkans. We had 25 of the most talented boys, they all came onto the pitch, and when the coach asked where they played, 24 of them said they were midfielders.'
Powered by their team of midfielders, the Croatian team began to fly. The tiny nation were runners-up in the 2018 World Cup, bronze-medallists four years later, and have established themselves as a regular force in the knockout stages.
Compared to the other nations of the former Yugoslavia — Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Kosovo — Croatia have had remarkable success.
The other six have just three knockout appearances at major tournaments between them — Serbia at the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000, and Slovenia at Euro 2024 — and have never won a knockout match. Croatia alone have 14 (with seven wins). Why are they so much more successful, given their similarities in size, culture, and history?
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'It's a tricky question,' replies Jozak. 'And I can ask the same question back — why have Serbia done so much better in basketball than us? We've struggled since Drazen Petrovic's time in the 1990s. But I think the answer is the same — from 2000 onwards, we've had a clear structure of football governance and strategy in the country.'
After moving leaving Dinamo to become technical director of the Croatian FA in 2013, Jozak impressed the importance of five criteria in becoming an elite side:
To this end, he literally wrote the country's coaching manual — identifying over 100 technical traits for coaches to spot and develop.
These lessons are still being used — and are producing a new generation of Croatian players.
Alongside Gvardiol, Dinamo Zagreb midfield products Martin Baturina and Petar Sucic are two of the most promising. Jozak is now working for the Saudi Arabian FA as technical director of the Future Falcons, a national project to produce a squad of outstanding domestic players for the 2034 World Cup.
Historically, one of the development stories that Jozak prides most is that of striker Mandzukic — the perfect example of a fragile talent.
'I was coaching the under-17s at Dinamo Zagreb, and they were already serious guys — most of them were in the national team,' he explains. 'But we had a tournament in Germany scheduled, and so I decided to trial some local guys from the area. And people told me: 'Listen, there's this under-17, a little shorter, but an amazing talent.'
'And so he comes with us — and he looked like a 13-year-old. He came up to my waist. I'm not exaggerating. I asked him to confirm he was born in 1986. He was literally 40 centimetres smaller than everyone else, but he was buzzing around like a guy on a motorbike, like a mosquito. He was just short.
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'So when he came back to Zagreb, I told him that I couldn't take him now — he would not have played at that level, but to stay at his other side in Zagreb. And he did, he grew big, and we have the Mario Mandzukic we know today. (He scored 41 goals in 81 Dinamo appearances after being signed three years later.)
'You have to predict the talent, anticipate what the conclusion could be — and, after maybe Davor Suker, he became the greatest Croatian striker of all time.'
Of course, Croatia lost the occasional talent. In 2015, Jozak led the delegation that attempted to convince Christian Pulisic, of Croatian descent, to opt for the Balkan nation over the United States.
'One of our age-group sides played a friendly against the United States,' he remembers. 'We lost 5-0, which was a surprise, because we were a strong team — but they were all big guys except for one. He was the No 10, and we spotted his name was Pulisic. I got goosebumps, because it was a Croatian name on his back.
'So I immediately spoke to his father, who explained that the boy's grandfather had moved to the United States. And the grandfather wanted Pulisic to play for Croatia, and the father was half-and-half. And so we spoke to Christian, proposed he played for Croatia, and offered him citizenship. At the time, the UEFA rules were that you could not play in Europe before 18 if you did not have an EU passport.
'One day, on my table, I had a request from the Pulisic family to issue Christian's passport. We said, 'OK, let's do it', because we can say that we need this talent for Croatian football. And as a federation request, we were able to make it go faster. So I speak to the father, and ask if it was because he wanted to play for Croatia — and he said, 'No, Borussia Dortmund are after him'.
'So we gave him the passport even though we knew he wasn't going to play for us. We really fought, speaking to the father, to the grandfather, and I remember the grandfather saying: 'The kid just wants to play for the U.S.'. And you have to respect the decision. Rakitic was playing in Switzerland all his life, and he suddenly said: 'I want to play for Croatia'. So we gained one and lost one.'
Jozak's squads were still strong enough. One of his proudest achievements was how, at the beginning of his tenure at the Croatian FA, they were the world's only team to qualify for the under-17 World Cup, under-20 World Cup, and senior World Cup.
At major tournaments, the team's calling card became their ability to emerge from tight games. During the 2018 World Cup, they made their way to the final after two penalty shootout wins and one in extra time — though people forget their 3-0 win over Argentina in the group stages.
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In those games, psychology can be the key difference — something which had been central in Jozak's mind when hiring manager Zlatko Dalic in 2017.
'He fully understood the chemistry, the passion, the patriotic side of Croatia,' says Jozak. 'He has huge social intelligence, huge emotional intelligence, and a super understanding of our football. He's connected with daily Croatian life — and all that means he was the perfect psychologist for Croatia's circumstances. And then, of course, he had that squad in their prime…'
This was Croatian football's high point — arguably the most surprising World Cup finalists in history. Late in games, their midfield, forged through competition, took them over.
'They were more than team-mates,' explains Jozak. 'Modric and Kovacic are godfathers to each other's kids. Brozovic and Rakitic are similar — all huge friends.
'And so at Croatia, we may have developed super talents playing in top teams — but they would fight for each other so much more than regular players. They would step in and fight for each other, because of what they've been through together, because they're family. They'd go beyond. The feeling was always this: 'If I have a bad day, I know you will step in and save me'.'
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Simon Stacpoole/Offside, VI Images via Getty Images)