On a dramatic night at the Stadion Bilino Polje in Zenica on 31 March, Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH) qualified for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in North America, just the second tournament appearance in the country’s relatively short history, after having appeared at the 2014 competition in Brazil.

While for many, the story of the shoot-out victory was Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma’s meltdown after his penalty crib-sheet was taken by a local ballboy, the story of the journey is strongly linked to the bloody war that marked Bosnia’s birth as an independent nation between 1992-1995.

Key to the success of the Zmajevi (‘the Dragons’) has been a large number of young members of the Bosnian diaspora, who completed their football education in more established leagues around Europe and as far away as the USA, who chose to play for Bosnia and Herzegovina rather than the countries of their births.

Of the squad that went to Brazil a dozen years ago, more than three-quarters of the squad were born in BiH (although seven of those later migrated across Europe with their families due to the war). By contrast, two-thirds of the 26 players in coach Sergej Barbarez’s squad to go to the United States and Canada, two-thirds were born and raised outside the country.

From 1945 Bosnia & Herzegovina was one of the six republics that made up the socialist Republic of Yugoslavia under the iron grip of Marshal Josip Broz Tito. It was a multi-ethnic state combining Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Bosniaks as well as ethnic Albanians and Hungarians as well as different religious groupings of Muslims, and Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

With the exception of Slovenia, none of the republics was ethnically homogenous, but simmering tensions were kept in check by an overarching policy of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ that united this federation of disparate republics into a singular Yugoslav state.

However, when Tito died in 1980, the bond that held the country together was broken and nationalist ethnic and religious fissures began to break open by the end of the decade beginning in the autonomous province of Kosovo.

As Yugoslavia started to break apart in the early 1990s, with Slovenia and Croatia seceding, the Muslim majority led by Alija Izetbegović also pushed to leave the republic fearing a Serb dominated Yugoslavia and declared independence for Bosnia & Herzegovina in 1992.

However, the significant Serb and Croat minorities countered this by declaring their own ethnic microstates of the Republika Srpska and Bosna Herceg as the war erupted with each trying to carve territory from the nascent nation, perpetrating ethnic cleansing and atrocities on the Muslim Bosniak population.

Over the next three years the fighting continued until the tide turned when Croat forces went from fighting the majority Bosniaks to joining forces to fight the Serbs. The war came to a negotiated end with the Dayton Accords of 21 November 1995 which saw Bosnia become a federal state in which the Serbs had considerable autonomy in the Republika Srpska.

During the three years of the war hundreds of thousands fled the country as it lost a quarter of its population, with refugees going to countries across Europe and beyond: principally Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, giving rise to a million-strong Bosnian diaspora worldwide.