As a Croatian, Belive me our country is not responsible for our national team. We don't have national stadium, we don't have real soccer schools. Stadiums that we have are under any standard. For example german 4th league has better stadiums then we have in our major league.

Now where this success comes from? I would say there are few factors. Ofcourse first one is talent for sport. We are successful in many sports not just football (skiing, tennis, waterpolo, gymnastic, athletics, handball, basketball and so on).

Second one is all this players from our nation team are playing abroad in major world teams (barcelona, real madrid, atletico madrid, juventus, inter and so on). How did they get there? Well some of them are born outside country like Rakitic in Switzerland and he never lived in Croatia. Many of players were discovered and sold abroad by manager Zdravko Mamic, he is now convicted criminal for fraud in those transfers. He sold Modrić, Lovren, Vrsaljko, Mandžukić. And some say Zdravko Mamić is the reason this team did not achieve great result like this before. Because he was deciding who will play and who will be the coach, and all decisions were in his private interest.

And third factor is that in 1998 we were only 7 years young country, war was still running. And they played with lot of national pride, and wish to prove our self to world. Same thing i can say about this team also. Croatia is in very hard situation we got in by the hands of our politicians. During the entire tournament, players were sending messages how they want something to change, that they play for poor people in our country, that they want our people to have something to feel good and proud about. They even condemned the Croatian soccer federation. They didn't want anyone from our soccer federation to be on homecoming celebration. You could see all this in their games, they never stopped running even in the final, France has a lead of 4-1 but they are still running. And as our coach Dalić said: You can do anything if you belive and have born talent in your feet. And i think that sentence sums up their key to success.

This guys are not a product of Yugoslavia. Only thing they got from Yug is the war. Some of them are refugees from occupied areas.

Other countries on Balkan are in the same or worse political position then Croatia. Serbia also used to have good football team, they also were on almost every world and european cup. Bosnia was on one World cup, and they bouth are also good in other sports.