Football is Croatia's national sport, with a history dating back to the 19th Century. The national team has achieved significant international success, including a bronze medal at the 2018 FIFA World Cup and another at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The sport is managed by the Croatian Football Federation (HNS), which oversees a multi-tiered professional league system, the highest level of which is the Croatian Football League. The Croatian Football Federation (HNS) is the national governing body for football in the country and it is responsible for organizing all levels of competition, from the LHNL down to county leagues, and manages the national teams. The Professional leagues have a top-tier which is the Croatian Football League (HNL), established in 1992. Below the HNL are three other professional leagues: the First Footbal League is kbnown as the PRVL; the Second is the DRUG NL, and the Third is the TRECA NL. The National team history and achievements begins with the first football match on Croatian soil played by English industrialists in the city of Županja. Croatia's First Football and Sports' Club was founded in 1903 and the national team's first international match was in 1907.
Croatia has qualified for 12 out of 14 major tournaments. Recent international successes include a bronze medal at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, a bronze medal at the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and a silver medal in the 2023 UEFA Nations League. Before 1992, Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, and its clubs competed in the Yugoslav league system. Dinamo Zagreb is the only Croatian club to have won a major European trophy, the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1966–67 and now Croatian clubs regularly participate in UEFA and FIFA club competitions, quite successfully as well!
The National Team is a major sporting franchise in European and international football. They have qualified for every major tournament with the exception of EURO 2000 and the 2010 World Cup. Croatia has reached the quarter-finals of the UEFA Championships twice (1996,2008) and finished second in the UEFA Nations League 2023. At the FIFA World Cup, Croatia were the runners-up once (2018) and third on two occasions (1998, 2022), securing three World Cup medals.
The earliest record of football in Croatia dates from 1873, when English engineers and technicians for Stabilimento Teachnico Fiumano played in Rijeka against the engineers building the local railway line, with local Fiumans also taking part in the game.
The first recorded football match in the Kingdom was played in 1880 in Zupanja, between English workers of The Oak Extract Company and local youths. In 1890 the first school-based football clubs are founded by high school students in Rijeka. The sport was further popularized in Croatia by Franjo Bucar in the 1890s.
The Croatian translation of the sport's name, nogomet, was coined by the linguist Slavko Rutzner Radmilović in 1893 or 1894. The name was adopted into Slovenian as well. In 1896, the first edition of the Rules of the Football Game in Croatian was printed in Zagreb.
The earliest officially registered association football clubs were founded in Pula before the turn of the century, when in August 1899 the locals founded Club Iris and later in the same year Veloce Club, both multi-sport association with very popular football sections. The first clubs to be founded in the then Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia per se, were HASK and PNISK, in 1903. In Rijeka, the Hungarian-leaning Fiumei Atletikai Club was founded in 1905 and the multicultural CS Olimpia in 1904, but Olimpia's football section may have held its first seating only in 1906 (the date is still debated among historians). In the same year, the Giovine Fiume club was founded by the Italian irredentist youth of the city and HSK Concordia was established in Zagreb. između HAŠK-a i PNIŠK-a.
The first public football match in Croatia was played on Marulic Square in Zagreb on October 28, 1906 between HAŠK and PNIŠK and ended with a score of 1:1. This match was played according to the then only valid English rules. The HAŠK team then consisted of the following players: Hinko Würth, Josip Besednik, Hugo Kuderna, Josip Novak, Ivo Lipovšćak, Anđelo Grgić, Marko Kostrenčić, Dragutin Albrecht, Marko Kren, Vladimir Erbežnik, Zvonimir Bogdanović; while the following played for PNIŠK: Dragutin Baki, Jan Todl, Veljko Ugrinić, Schreiber, Kiseljak, Pilepić and Uhrl.
Among the other early clubs are Victoria and Olimpija Karlovac, created in 1908. 1908 also saw the first recorded win by a Croatian city-based club against an English side, when CS Olimpia beat the official football team of the Cunard Line ship RMS Brescia 1-0. In 1909 GSK Marsonia started playing in Slavonski Brod and Rijeka's then strongest side Fiumei AC was invited to play officially in the Hungarian Championship, but turned down the offer. In the same year, Segesta offically appeared for the first time in Sisak.
In 1910 the club Forza e Coraggio was founded in Dubrovnik and the Società Ginnastica e Scherma in Zadar officially opened its football section. The two would battle in the first Dalmatian Championship in 1911, won by Forza e Coraggio, which was then forced by the authorities to change its name to U.S. Ragusa. Hadjuk, Grandanski and SK Opatija were all founded in the same year, 1911. The first football club to be founded purely by Croats was Backa in Subotica in 1901, in what was then the Kingdom of Hunbgary and is today Serbia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zrinjski Mostar was founded by Croats in 1905 and was the first club to be founded in that country. The Croatian Football Federation (HNS) itself was created in 1912, which was also the year of the first Croatia and Slavonia championship.
The football section of HŠS 1912-13. organized the first Croatian football championship, in which clubs exclusively from Zagreb, Građanski, HAŠK, Concordia, AŠK Croatia and Tipografski športski klub Zagreb participated. This first championship was not completed due to unsportsmanlike behavior, and the new one was interrupted in 1914 due to the war. In 1912 the Dalmatian championship was won by Società Bersaglieri and in its third season by Calcio Spalato, who then played and lost against the strongest club from the Trieste region, Edera.
After World War One, Croats played a major part in the founding of the first football federation of the KIngdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes later named the FA of Yugoslavia. Its headquarters were initially in Zagreb before moving to Belgrade in 1929. In 1927, Hajduk Split took part in the inaugural Mitropa Cup, a tournament dedicated to the best Central European clubs.
Croatia itself played its first international football match as a representative team of the Banovina in a match held on April 2, 1940 against Switzerland. During World War II, the Croatian Football Federation joined FIFA as a representative of the Independent State of Croatia, but this was contentious and short-lived, as was the fascist puppet-state of which it was part. After the war, football was resumed within the institutional framework of the "second" Yugoslavia. The communist regime in the new state quickly moved to apply a damnatio memoriae to all club names and brands involved in the Croatian or Italian championships or which bore obviously Croatian or Italian national names. The government in Belgrade justified the rearrangement of all local football clubs with its plan to copy the Stalinist model of athletic organisation, merging all local clubs into omni-comprehensive sport unions—often forcing local institutions and party representatives to enact a total rebranding of the local clubs' identities—and thus bring them into line with communist goals and ideals.
Following these policies, Građanski was rebranded into NK Dinamo Zagreb, U.S. Fiumana (CS Olimpia's name under the Italian fascist regime) became S.C.F. Quarnero in Yugoslavia, ŽŠK Victoria became NK Lokomotiva in Zagreb, and dozens of other less famous clubs followed suit. Most clubs had henceforth to explicitly display loyalty to the new regime, and it was common for them to feature the communist red star as part of a new emblem, often paired with proletarian sounding and appealing identities. Among the victims of these changes, some clubs were completely disbanded, including top sides Concordia, PNIŠK and HAŠK, as well as major ethnic Croat clubs in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, SASK and HSK Zrinjski Mostar. One of the very few large Croatian clubs to avoid restructuring was Hajduck Split, who had refused to participate in the fascist Croatian competition and had strong links with the partisan army of Tito
As Tito broke withm Stalin, in the 1950s most sport unions reverted to purely football clubs. Over the following decades, Croatian clubs performed well in the Yugoslav First League and the Yugoslav Cup. Hajduk and Dinamo formed one half of the Big Four of Yugoslav football (the other two being FK Patizan and Red Star Belgrade). Rijeka won 2 Yugoslav cups. In 1967, Zlatco Cajkovski of German club Bayern Munich became the only Croatian manager to win the European Cup Winners Cup.
After Croatia gained independence in the 1990s, the football federation was reconstituted and joined the international associations. The Croatian players went on to achieve more success, who finished in THIRD place at the 1998 FIFA World Cup. Since then, Croatia has continued to produce top players. At the more recent Euro 2008, they famously beat 2006 FIFA World Cup bronze medalists Germany 2–1 in a shock win but exited the tournament courtesy of a penalty shoot-out defeat to Turkey in the quarter finals. The national team's best performance came at the 2018, where they finished as runners-up, losing 2–4 to France in the Final. 38% of the Croatians watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup final. Croatia followed the achievement by again finishing third in the 2022 World Cup, after a 2–1 win over Morocco.
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