"Richard Mills' The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia is everything that a serious work of football history should be. Prodigiously researched, fair-minded in its assessments, and wide-ranging in its themes, Mills' work expertly navigates the contested spaces of Yugoslavia's most popular sport. His gripping narrative takes the reader from the foundation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after World War I to the bloody collapse of the federal socialist republic more than seventy years later. In the process, Mills shows the extraordinary, and extraordinarily varied, roles that football played in reflecting and shaping modern Yugoslavian history. Through Mills' lucid and nuanced account, we learn of football's role as a propaganda weapon for Tito's Partisans during World War II and as a tool of international diplomacy for the isolated socialist regime after its 1948 split with the Soviet Union. We discover the sport's ultimately ambiguous position under socialism, where it served as a key marker of Yugoslav "brotherhood and unity" and as an incubator for ethnic identities and nationalist rivalries. And we learn of football's central and tragic role in the wars of the 1990s, as players and supporters signed up to fight on all sides and stadiums were turned into concentration camps and sites for execution. By moving beyond the big clubs in Belgrade and Zagreb, and exploring the very different football cultures of Bosnia & Hercegovina and Slovenia, Mills creates a multi-layered history that accords as much attention to the grassroots as it does to elite competition.
His admirable study reminds us that, even when football is placed in the service of politics, it is not easily kept there. The game in Yugoslavia, Mills concludes, was a "powerful and unpredictable commodity", a multi-ethnic home to complex forms of identity and belonging. This frequently undermined attempts to make football conform to official narratives, whether communist or nationalist. The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia is an outstanding piece of scholarship: a major contribution to the history of sport and to the history of Yugoslavia.".