Sensational Win For NK Gorica In The Time Of Economic Hardship

Ozren Podnar reports...

The club season has ended with a surprising win for the modest provincials of Gorica, while the Cup went to the country's leading club Maribor.

The "violets" won their fifth FA Cup with a 7-4 aggregate win over Dravograd, winning 4-0 at home and losing harmlessly by 3-4 in the return match. Still, four days later Maribor failed to clinch the crucial win away at neighbouring Mura from Murska Sobota, which enabled NK Gorica to go top with a simple 2-0 home win over Koper.

Maribor in fact went 1-0 up in the last day of the competition, but conceded a clumsy equalizer early in the second half, which meant they had to score again.

The seven times champions did not take the pressure well and in the midst of desperate attacks lost another goal, while Gorica cruised to the victory on their soil.

Maribor was finally pipped to the second place by Olimpija, and Gorica celebrated their second Slovenian title, the first after 1996 for the town on the Italian border.

In the meantime, Slovenian club football has been struck by the most severe economic crisis yet. Olimpija Ljubljana, Koper and Mura have failed to obtain a licence for next season's UEFA's club cups, and four teams - Olimpija, Koper, Ljubljana and Smartno - are contemplating whether it pays to play on the top level at all.

The gravest problems are troubling the capital city of Ljubljana, possibly the only European capital where no one cares for first division soccer. The Slovenian media have described the lack of interest of Ljubljana companies and city officials as a "unique phenomenon in the whole world", while the capital's two premiere clubs Olimpija and NK Ljubljana struggle to patch up their budgets for yet another season of financial agony.

Olimpija, the most famous Slovenian club, and the only one from that small Alpine republic that mattered at all in the old Yugoslav football league before the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, plays in what is easily the ugliest football stadium in Europe.

"When one takes a look at Stadion Bezigrad, the most horrible 'scarecrow' in all of Europe, one realizes how little soccer matters in the capital," was a recent comment in the Slovenian edition of Sportske novosti daily. The club's financial problems and the condition of the decrepit Bezigrad have finally taken its toll as Olimpija will fail to see European competitions for the first time in eleven years.

Still, the team proudly nicknamed "The Dragons", ironically just like the mighty European champions Porto, has a loyal, albeit small following. When on June 3rd the club directors met to discuss the prospects of abandoning Division 1, fifty fans took over the offices and asked the management to do whatever they could to keep the club in the top flight.

Director Miro Gavez told them he hoped the club finds a solution to avoid the drop for financial reasons, but showed little enthusiasm as far as Olimpija's sporting future was concerned.

"Maybe we'll be able to collect some 650,000 euros per season. This means we'll have to turn towards young players and lower our expectations as far as results are concerned."

Olimpija won the first four League titles in independent Slovenia from 1992, but by the mid-nineties their supremacy was irretrievably lost to more ambitious Maribor from the industrial north, who won seven titles in the row between 1996 and 2003.

Not that Maribor is an example of footballing wealth and glory, but the club at least operates in a region with some sort of passion for the sport - possibly as a token of resistence against Ljubljana. The capital, on the other hand, typifies the Slovenian haughty stance towards football as "a sport for the inferior".

Formerly the northern-most Yugoslav republic, by 1991 it had developed a disdain for football as a way of distancing itself from the rest of the multiethnic and multicultural country it never felt it belong to.

While Serbia, Croatia or Bosnia fiercely and passionately loved football and their local ethnic-based teams, the Slovenes came to prefer skiing, ice hockey and swimming. Not even the recent run of success for the Slovenian national football team has made any difference when it comes to the domestic scene.

While the national team, which took part at Euro 2000 and the World Cup in 2002 and barely missed Euro 2004, provides the Slovenian people with a sense of national pride in the confrontation with the rest of Europe, the national football competitions have not made any emotional impact on fans or sponsors alike.

In fact, the club scene has sunk to an all-time low, since the crisis does not only concern the capital. First division Smartno have volunteered to return to Division 2 because of its smaller financial requirements, while the press have speculated that the Division 2 champions Rudar Velenje may prefer to stay down, even though it now seems they will have the courage to make the leap.

New national team coach: Oblak in Praskinar's shoes

The legendary former Yugoslav international Branko Oblak has been appointed Slovenian national team coach in placeof Bojan Prasnikar, dismissed six months after failing to qualify for Euro 2004. The former Olimpija Ljubljana, Hajduk Split, Schalke 04 and Bayern Munich player will coach the Slovenian team in the forthcoming qualifiers for the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

Ozren Podnar

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