After a wonderful, uplifting day providing football workshops for the orphans at Our Kids Foundation in Mostar, it was time to use spread our messages of anti-discrimination and anti-racism to the promising children of Mostar’s two professional football clubs, Velez and Zrinjski. Velez being from the now almost-exclusively Bosnian Muslim side of the city, and Zrinjski being from the opposite half, largely annexed by Roman Catholic Bosnian Croats, the two senior teams both play in the Bosnian Premier League and are bitter rivals on a scale unprecedented anywhere in Western Europe. The adult Velez fans we met before this day refuse to even mention the name of Zrinjski when discussing them, and vice versa.
Determined to combat this deeply-entrenched intolerance, we at Football Beyond Borders have set out to ensure that the next generation of fans and players at these clubs can bridge their divides, and that the thousands of peaceful citizens of Mostar can walk the streets at night on derby day. Our idea was to organise a multi-ethnic tournament between the academies of the clubs, with the help of those at the Youth Council of Mostar, to be held over two days, bringing the two sides of this divided city on the same pitch for friendly competition and fair play.
This began on a bright Saturday morning on a pitch just beside the Mostar City Hall. As well as the two major city rivals, teams from Lokomotiva Mostar, HNK Branitelj and MAS were in action to complete the line-up. After the preliminaries, it was the unlucky Lokomotiva who claimed 5th place going into Sunday’s final two games. Predictably, the final would be between Velez and Zrinjski, with Branitelj and MAS competing for third. This tournament was not about footballing ability, however. The best thing to see was the children from all teams shaking hands before and after games, laughing together as they experienced friendly integration for one of the first times in their lives.
With the ‘Love Football, Hate Racism’ banner proudly displayed in the middle of the stands, this was an exceptionally proud day for FBB, and the local interest generated by the tournament only served to further highlight this. We made Bosnian state television at 7pm that night, and local journalists were very keen to interview all of the organisers. Here and many other places within the Bosnian news our work was celebrated.
Afterwards, we were invited to host a special anti-discrimination in football lecture for all of the children who had participated. Our tour captain Lucas Farthing proudly spoke of his personal goals to do everything in his power to bring peace to Bosnia in the football world. Sadly, the Zrinjski players could not make it to this lecture, but this did nothing to dampen the impact of the talk to the other teams’ intent young listeners.
Read on tomorrow to find out who won the tournament, and how we laid the foundations for this to not be a flash-in-the-pan, but to be a part of a large re-integration project for the city of Mostar.
Read the whole of our Football Beyond Borders coverage here.
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