The Opiate: Why I Don’t Give A Flying Fuck About the World Cup
Bosnia and Herzegovina qualified for the World Cup, their first since Brazil in 2014. Penalties, heart attacks, veteran Edin Džeko (a month younger than me) leading a squad of kids I've never heard of. Italy probably walked in cocky and paid for it.
Bosnia played like a team with nothing to lose, backed by a diaspora the size of a small continent and haters of the Italian team, all screaming at their phones and TVs. Good for them, genuinely.
And then, the utter madness.
Flags. Jerseys. Panini stickers that somehow became vanity items, collector's pieces for people who couldn't name three players on the squad two months before overpriced Panini stickers hit the market.
I presume it'll stay that way for as long as Bosnia stays in the tournament.
I am one of those guys with the unpopular opinion: I sincerely hate what football does to people. When I sit someone down and walk them through the absurdities of modern football, and I've done this more times than I care to count, most agree with me, assuming they have a single gram of brain inside their thick skulls. But with this qualification, opposing football started to feel almost treasonous. Weird. Unpatriotic. Not needed. Like I'm the problem.
Why Am I Like This?
I didn't watch football with anyone as a kid, so I never developed the itch. Trained for a few months in defense and goalie; never liked it, it always felt boring. Music and art were where I could actually express and feel something. That was enough for me.
As I grew up, I began to notice what football brought. Violence. Poisonous nationalism. I genuinely cannot understand what cracking open the skull of someone who supports the other team has to do with sports. How do you stand in a crowd waving a flag that denies genocide and celebrates war criminals? How does that feel normal? Sportsmanship?
It happened. It keeps happening. I'll not even get into the topic of football fanatics.
My disdain works on two levels now. One: I am a full-on hater of ethnonationalism, of the idea that my country is inherently greater than someone else's. Two: I find it genuinely difficult, not funny, not pointless – DIFFICULT - to watch an underpaid, poorly employed nation lose their minds screaming at eleven millionaires or millionaires-to-be. I can only file that under total and absurd stupidity.
Or, Well
In 1945, George Orwell wrote an essay called "Sporting Spirit" for the Tribune. In it, he stated what I can’t disagree with: international sport mimics warfare. This gladiatorial exercise, powered by nationalistic pride, pits two teams against each other where the goal isn't just to win. It's to humiliate, to establish national superiority.
Feel free to paint me as a cynical, fatherless, bitter middle-aged fatso if you want. Won't make it less true. Football at the highest levels, everyone enjoys the most because it’s shiny and has all the merch, is a profit-driven, corporate-run shitshow that has very little to do with sport, and even less to do with any life lesson worth passing on.
The Music, The Problem
What Orwell didn't touch on, because it probably didn’t exist in 1945, is the create-a-song-for-the-mass bullshit. I consider this a real problem over the last few weeks: unsanctioned noise pollution in public spaces that won't settle down.
You know what I’m writing about. Local acts rushing to compose the unofficial national hymn, hoping the wave carries them somewhere. A song picked up by the masses to the point of becoming a spotlight, earning an artist a few extra concert tickets and some more merch sales.
The current unofficial-but-very-official song soundtracking Bosnian football mania is "USA" by Dubioza Kolektiv. A band that started as a serviceable Rage Against the Machine knockoff quickly figured out the formula: drop the rage, inject Balkan stereotypes, add folk rhythms that personally trigger anxiety in me, and celebrate what I'd describe as the worst of not just Bosnia and Herzegovina but the whole region. I am firmly with my two feet on the ground when I say this, and I will not change my mind because there are no arguments for anyone to use to change my mind: folk music is a soundtrack of destruction, war, primitivism, lack of empathy, sexism, misogyny, and you may very well continue the thread yourself.
"USA" opens with something like a folk slogan: "I am from Bosnia, take me to America." It's essentially a song about immigration, the American dream, and sudden realization it is a nightmare. In it, a narrator, tired of Bosnia, goes to live in the USA, realizes what it actually is, and wants to come home, for whatever reason people might want to return after emigrating.
The thing is: USA was not written for the World Cup. It was chosen by the masses because of that first line and simplistic, infectious rhythm that is tribal in its nature. Which means the masses are, once again, singing along to something they don't understand. Dubioza will probably make decent money off this. The merchandise will move. It perfectly illustrates the short-sightedness of the average football fan, alongside a serious lack of actual music taste.
I've heard around five or six songs specifically written for this World Cup. Some of them are written by dear friends of mine whose dedication I do appreciate. What I can't appreciate is the result these songs (written by anyone) deliver. These songs are, without exception, painting Bosnians as a tribe of primitive cave dwellers, troglodytes suddenly discovering football, either through the lyrics or through cheap rhythms exhausting every unimaginative musical motif available.
Or they go the other direction: artificial pride-boosting at maximum volume. That's not us either. We're one genuinely fucked nation made up of three same-and-hot-blooded ethnonationalist groups hating each other based on cheap propaganda from the very politicians running the very system we keep choosing not to escape.
That system loves football. Loves it. An opiate for the masses. A reliable breeding ground for people who don't shy away from violence against their fellow man.
I'll try not to be a hypocrite here. In 2014, when Bosnia played their first World Cup in Brazil, one of the bands I worked with decided to do a football song. I was mildly frustrated with that idea, but went along, trying to quit acting like a “black sheep”.
The compromise we landed on was an homage to Motörhead, with lyrics telling the story of the Bosnian national team flying to Brazil. It very quickly turns ugly right away in the lyrics section; the band crashes the flight, forcing the footballers and the coach to drink until they puke. It ended with a sing-along I never really appreciated and felt was unnecessary.
Of course, it was a major flop because we didn’t do video, there was too much lyrical content, and the music was the wrong fit for the occasion. It was sarcastic, and probably rude toward the efforts of actual sportsmen. But that was the punk rock in me, and I can live with it.
Now it's 2026, the first World Cup since Brazil, and a few people have asked me to write something again. One friend has been actively pursuing me, even pledging financial backing and sponsorship. I'm a better songwriter now than I was in 2014. The lineup I play in is more compact, capable of moving fast and tight.
I said no.
Because it feels cheap and dirty, and doing it would make me feel like a fucking whore. I don't like football. I don't care about it, for all the reasons already listed. And I really want to avoid, however unlikely, the scenario of people paying attention to the band because of a song about football.
That would be a disgrace to ten-plus years of almost entirely unpaid labor that still somehow resulted in some songs I'm genuinely proud of, the songs I actually care about. That's worth more than whatever a football crowd would give me for a month.
Football Is Not The Solution You Need
Some of the forward-thinking people I'm lucky enough to be surrounded by see this World Cup run as "something else". A fuck-off to the above-mentioned ill nationalism plaguing Bosnian-Herzegovinian reality. A healthy patriotism of sorts, always mentioning a player or two who play for the national team, feeling proud without having been born here. The kids of tomorrow, not poisoned by the Bosnian reality. I understand that. I respect it more than I respect the jersey-buying frenzy.
But I was born under a punk rock star, and I find no real reason to be proud of a flag, a hymn, a nation. These are constructs, fictions of the human brain. None of them map onto anything I recognize as true human nature.
The football mania unfortunately didn't melt my black heart. Ten kids playing something that can be considered football, with two stones as goalposts, on the playground behind the school is fine (I only found this excellent photo of Vietnamese children playing with wooden goalposts, but you get the gist). Kids training should be encouraged to do that. But football is too far gone for me to think about it being anything other than an opiate for the masses.
Bosnia and Herzegovina desperately needs a country-wide dose of something positive. If you think this World Cup is it, good for you; genuinely, have fun. I hope it delivers. I won't be sent to the hospital screaming at my TV while chugging cheap beer.
I sincerely believe that we can do better as individuals and as members of the local communities. I don’t believe that political systems will ever be beaten by an act of millionaires running on a field or millions screaming at the screen, everything from gratitude towards gods of football to obscene vulgarities aimed at referees, FIFA, and other team players, showing us as racists fucks that we unfortunately quite often are.
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