Avoiding the Drop

This column comes to us courtesy of Twitter reader @DennisWimann; yesterday, Dennis tweeted the following comment to Two Yellows:

Imagine what would happen if Yugoslavia never broke up. Take a look at the countries included, then look at the Wiki pages.

Well, Dennis, we decided to take a look at exactly that today, and quite honestly you’re right: that team would kick ass. Let’s talk about the specifics after the jump.

First, some minor historical background. First: throughout this column,  “Yugoslavia” refers to the Socialst Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was assembled around 1945. That’s an important distinction, as  the region restructures their borders about as often as the Glazers take cash out of Manchester United (ZING!). Yugoslavia was a pretty big country in it’s day (it’s existence now would make this Sporcle quiz way easier); in it’s most stable existence – from about 1943 to 1992 – it bordered Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania.

From a soccer perspective, that was a hell of a time to be a Slav. They made the World Cup quarterfinals three times (1954, ’58, and ’90) and the European Championship finals twice (1960 & ’68); when the country finally disbanded in 1992, they were ranked as the sixth best team in the world by ELO (down from the fourth best team in the world only two years prior). This was a good team.

However, after 1992, Yugoslavia dissolved in a series of rather vicious wars. Ultimately, that break-up would result in seven different nations (Bosnia and Herzegovinia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia) and six different national teams (Kosovo just declared their independence in 2008 and have yet to form a national team, although one can probably safely assume that it’s coming).

Back around the World Cup draw, I wrote a post discussing the various factors that the book “Soccernomics” said went into determining how successful a national team SHOULD be. Those factors:

• Home field advanatage is worth 2/3 of a goal.
• Having twice as much international experience as your opponent is worth about 1/2 a goal.
• Having twice the population of your opponent is worth about 1/10 of a goal.
• Having twice the GDP per capita of your opponent is also worth about 1/10 of a goal.

When Yugoslavia broke up and formed seven different countries, it also divided it’s total population and it’s economy into seven different pieces. Plus, each one of those countries then went off and formed an entirely new organization. So even though the original Yugoslavian FA had experience, that experience doesn’t automatically trickle down to the Macedonian FA; they need to rebuild their infrastructure, hire new administrators, hire new coaches, etc., etc. So outside of homefield advantage, each of these new teams was starting without many other factors on their side.

Which brings us now to the national teams represented by the former Yugoslav republics. They’re actually doing pretty well;  three of them will be in the World Cup (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Slovenia), while Croatia is ranked #10 in the world by FIFA in spite of not qualifying. So of the six national teams bred out of the former Yugoslav republic, four of them are performing at a high level in European competition.

Still, that level is nowhere near the level that Yugoslavia would be at if they’d stayed together. Let’s look at what kind of team you could put out if you pooled those players together. For our purposes, we’re going to assume a 4-4-2 formation, and I’m going to use my own judgement for who gets into my All-Yugoslavia Starting XI; I’d love to hear who you’d use in the comments, of course.

Samir Handanovič (SVN)

Darijo Srna (CRO) – Nemanja Vidić (SRB) – Neven Subotić (SRB) – Bojan Jokić (SVN)

Stevan Jovetić (MTN) – Dejan Stanković (SRB) – Luka Modrić (CRO) – Niko Kranjčar (CRO)

Edin Džeko (BIH) – Goran Pandev (MKD)

Subs: Stipe Pletikosa (Goalkeeper, CRO); Josip Šimunić (Defender, CRO); Branislav Ivanović (Defender, SRB); Veliče Šumulikoski (Midfielder, MKD); Boško Janković (Winger, SRB); Eduardo (Striker, CRO); Ivan Klasnić (Striler, CRO)

That leaves a couple of players off, and is admittedly a rather attacking lineup. You could probably rotate the strikers a bit; I’m not really a big Eduardo fan, for example, and by leaving him on the bench all six former Yugoslavian republics are represented in the starting eleven. Croatia also gets a lot of love (there are seven of them, total, on the team), but they’re also the best team in the region.

One area that I’ve not covered (and may revisit later): what happened to the Yugoslav First Division teams? Teams like Partizan Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb used to be regular staples of the Champions League; since their local league became divided, however, they largely fallen by the wayside. It’d be interesting to see what that league would look like today if that hadn’t happened.