The Yugoslav Secret Service and Croatian Football Supporter Groups

Abstract

In the 1980s, in the period before the collapse of Yugoslavia, football stadiums became one of the most important public spaces in which forbidden and suppressed discourses were exposed. Correspondingly, it has been widely accepted that the state repressive apparatus perceived football supporter groups as an exceptionally dangerous political opponent to the socialist system. However, according to the analysis of archival materials from the Yugoslav secret service Croatian supporters per se were not perceived as such. Supporter groups were approached primarily as subculture actors with a special system of social norms and values. This is evident from a 1989 operative investigation code-named ‘Stadion’, the purpose of which was to surveil four of the largest Croatian supporter groups. The surveillance of supporters began mainly as a consequence of the foundation of the first opposition political parties. This increased the possibility that supporter groups would be instrumentalized, which was a real potential danger from the perspective of the secret service.