It’s a bright afternoon, and the head coach of the Indian men’s football team is visiting his hometown, his parents, brothers and their families. No such trip is complete without a visit to NK Neretva, his first football club.
Stimac, 55, says he can’t live without football. He calls it “a kind of professional illness”.
It’s why he took coaching badges soon after retiring as a player, along with former Croatia teammates Slaven Bilic and Aljosa Asanovic. “We knew this would be our lives.”
By 2001, aged 35, Stimac was managing the academy team at Hajduk Split. Bilic, 33, was in charge of the club’s first team.
They were all part of the golden first generation of Croatian players. Representing a new country after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991-92, they finished an exhilarating third in the 1998 World Cup. That was, Stimac says, “the brightest of our great teams, the one that paved the way for our players to go to top clubs”.
In 1987, four years before his country became a country, Stimac was also on the Yugoslavian team that won the Under-20 World Cup. “We had six Croats in the starting line-up, playing with Bosnians, Montenegrins and Serbians. It wasn’t difficult blending in,” says the former central defender. “We were growing up together. Also, any kind of nationalism was immediately killed.”
Croatia was independent by the time Stimac made what was then a big-ticket move of £1.5 million to Derby County, in 1995. He was named captain after helping the club qualify for the Premier League, and remains an icon at the club. Since 2005, he has managed Hajduk Split, the Croatia national team, and clubs in the Asian powerhouses of Iran and Qatar.
So why India? “That was the first approach I received when I decided to go back to management (after a two-year sabbatical that began in 2017),” he says.
Initially sceptical, the coach says he learnt of a new tournament, the Indian Super League (ISL), where the broadcast was good and games were beamed around the world. He read that the football federation had a commercial partner (Football Sports Development Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries). “Things were happening,” he says.
The other half of what attracted him was the enormity of the task. “The size of the challenge… you can’t find that anywhere in the world,” he says, smiling his broad smile. “For a coach at the top level, you know you are going to work with players with great basic skills. But in India, the difference between reality and dreams…” he trails off on the Zoom call, lifting his left arm above his head. “Nowhere else in the world is there such a huge gap. And that is what attracted me.”
This challenge is “far more difficult”, he says, than anything he’s done on the field. And he has played against Juergen Klinsmann, Zinedine Zidane, Dennis Bergkamp and Matthias Sammer, to say nothing of two games against Diego Maradona.
“Football in India is still at a low level and has very little support,” Stimac says. “That is sometimes frustrating. But as people from a country born of long civil war, we don’t know how to give up.”
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Under Stimac, India, 99th in the FIFA rankings, have ticked quite a few new boxes.
As in 2019, they will be at the 2024 Asian Cup, the high table of the continent’s football.
India also pulled off an 0-0 draw against Asian champions Qatar in 2019 and have been unbeaten in 11 games this year, a run that included winning a three-nation meet in March, the Intercontinental Cup in June and the SAFF Championship this month.
On the way to those titles, India have shown a kind of aggression they were not previously known for. “The mindset, approach to the game and style of play has changed. No more timid football,” says Stimac.
As 25-year-old Indian midfielder Anirudh Thapa said during the SAFF Championship: “We are done with sitting back. If you are hitting us, we will also hit you.”
This attitude starts with the head coach, and that’s a lesson Stimac learnt in 1987. He and Zvonimir Boban, his closest friend on the U-20 World Cup squad, were caught breaking curfew, back then.
They had met Miss Chile, Yasna Vukasovic, and she and a friend had asked if they’d like to go out for a drink. Head coach Mirko Jozic told them they couldn’t go. They went anyway.
When they were caught, Jozic announced that he was going to send the two men home; this was before the semi-final. The team rallied, saying they would all go home from Chile if the two were sent away.
“I think it was a smart move by the coach to unify the team. I am not sure he ever wanted to send us home,” Stimac says. He went on to score in the semi-final, Boban in the final. “What you see of me today is what I have learnt from some great coaches.” He mentions his manager at West Ham, Harry Redknapp, and former Croatia coach the late Miroslav Blazevic, among these.
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When Croatia was born, Stimac had wanted to join its army. But the country’s leaders felt its footballers served better by staying on the field. Behind his easy manner, he remains a man committed to his role in battle.
He speaks about the state of football as he sees it. He takes dissent to the field. It is about standing up for one’s rights, he says several times.
During the SAFF Championship, Stimac was shown the red card twice in three games. After the first, he sat out a one-match ban. He was expelled again, in the group league game against Kuwait. That fetched a two-game suspension and meant he was banished to the stands for the semi-final and final.
“The red cards produced a great reaction from the team. Earlier, we were accepting every decision from the referee. Now, we are not,” he says.
His immediate “fight” today is to get All India Football Federation (AIFF) to agree to a “bare minimum” of four weeks for the training camp ahead of the Asian Cup in January. Ideally, it should be six, he says. AIFF is arguing that ISL — likely to stretch from October to March — cannot be paused for that long.
Anything less than four weeks and we need to ask “whether you want us to sit in front of our goalkeeper for 90 minutes and get over the half-line maybe two or three times. Or, you want us to be brave Blue Tigers and fight,” Stimac says. “Saudi Arabia, Oman, Uzbekistan (all ranked higher than India) will have long camps, so what is stopping India?”
What he and the team have achieved so far, he adds, is only phase one of the puzzle.
“Now, we can work on playing attractive football. You want to get to the top 80 in FIFA rankings and top 10 in Asia, I will take you there in four years.” India are 18th in Asia now. “But you need to trust me, otherwise we can part as friends.”
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