Football is, at the present time, the favourite sport of most Slovenes, but it was very far from that position not a long time ago. This sudden transformation is due mainly to the talent, effort and love of the Slovenian National Team players, who have been giving all they can in the field and caused the Slovenian people to fall in love with them.
The nice footballer on the left and whose image is also the link from the "Sports" page to this one is called Trigi and it's, since January 23rd 2002, the mascot of Slovenian football. Created by NZS in cooperation with the design agency Arih, Trigi, as well as its name, was inspired by one of the greatest Slovenian symbols: mount Triglav.
But although it was not very popular, football has a long history in Slovenia. The Football Association of Slovenia, Nogometna Zveza Slovenije (NZS), was founded in 1920, when Slovenia belonged to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Until the independence, the best Slovenian footballers played for the Yugoslavian team, like the former National Team coach
Srecko Katanec, the also famous Marko Elsner (who won, along with Katanec, the olympic bronze medal in 1984 for the Yugoslavian National Team) and Brane Oblak, the current National Team coach, for example. In June 1991 NZS left the Yugoslavian Football Association and in January 2002 Slovenia submitted its official application for the membership in FIFA and UEFA, which was accepted in a month. Rudi Zavrl, NZS president at that time, is still the president today.
[Clubs]
[National Team]
Clubs
The best Slovenian teams played in the Yugoslavian league until 1991, but they didn't achieve a great success. 1990/1991 was the last Yugoslavian championship with teams from all ex-Yugoslavian republics. In the following year Slovenia and Croatia already had their own leagues; in 1992 it was Bosnia and Macedonia's turn to create their own leagues too, and the Yugoslavian league remained with the Serbian and Montenegrin teams only.
The main Slovenian league is sponsored by a mobile phones company called SI-Mobil and is therefore called "Liga SI-Mobil". It is played by 12 teams and has 33 rounds (first the teams play home and away against all the others and after these 22 rounds they are divided into two groups: the best 6 and the worst 6). The SI-Mobil league doesn't have a great reputation yet. The Slovenian champion has to play three pre-rounds to enter the Champions League while the Cup winner and the second-placed in the league must play both UEFA Cup pre-rounds.
National Team
The Slovenian National Team, which has extremely talented players, performed an amazing evolution since 1991, surprising not only its supporters but all football lovers from all around the world. In 1999 they were the surprise of Group 2 of the Euro 2000 qualifying rounds, ending up in the second position, when everybody was expecting Greece to be second. And when everybody thought it was pure luck and Slovenia would fall against Ukraine in the play-off, another fantastic thing happens. Something that made Katanec, the Slovenian coach, say that "there is a God and He cheers for Slovenia!"! In our minds an image will remain from the 72nd minute of the match in Ljubljana. The magician: Acimovic (colorized in green in the Home page). The discription: impossible to describe. Click here to watch (again) that unique moment of football, because if we tried to describe it we would certainly be frustrated, since the beauty of a goal such as this one knows no words. Slovenia won 2-1 and four days later, by drawing in the Ukranian white blanket (1-1, Pavlin scored) the Slovenian National Team reserved its place in the florid fields of Belgium and Holland.
From that day on, Slovenia was never the same again. These two matches were important not only at the sports level, but also at a social level, since they caused (as well as the other matches in the qualification rounds, but these two in particular) a great change in the Slovenes' everyday life: they started loving football. They started buying National Team shirts, filling the stadiums, "worshipping" the players... The first time this difference was felt was in the dawn after the second match. When the National Team arrived, there where 3000 people waiting for their heroes in the airport.
In 2001 they repeated it all. When everybody was thinking that Russia and Yugoslavia would be first and second in Group 1, Slovenia, in the 10th year of independence, forces Yugoslavia to take the third place. And in the play-off, although everybody was thinking Romania would win, the results were again 2-1 in Ljubljana - also with great goals (by Acimovic and Osterc) - and 1-1 in Romania, with Mladen Rudonja scoring his first goal for the National Team. And Slovenia qualified for its first World Cup!!!!!
After the Korea Japan World Cup Srecko Katanec resigned from National Team coach, and Bojan Prasnikar took his place. After the disappointment of not qualifying for Euro 2004 (Slovenia lost in the play-off against Croatia), he was replaced by the Slovenian legend Brane Oblak, who renewed the team but didn't manage to qualify for Germany 2006.
