Part one of a love letter to the white shirt: how a few students with a permit, a professor with a dictionary and a city with an opinion made Hajduk Split, from the founding in 1911 to the cup of 1967.
Some clubs turn up in the Champions League every autumn without ever quite seeming to belong there. You know the ones. They arrive on money, fill a seat that used to go to clubs with decades of domestic and European pedigree behind them, and leave the romantics oddly unmoved. I had a soft spot for Manchester City once, back at Maine Road, before their casbah got rocked. Those days are long gone.
Ask a fan in their twenties and football might as well have begun in 2012 with That Drogba Header. Worse, they don’t seem to mind. We do. We mean a different football: one about beating the man in front of you as much as the scoreline, about chivalry and daft results and grounds that sent a shiver down the spine at the sound of their names, and kits with some class. Stoke City’s 1996 away shirt excepted.
Tottenham, Leeds United, St. Etienne, PSV, Atlético Madrid, Arsenal, Hamburg, Valencia, Ajax. A lovely list, and none of it random. Every one of those clubs has a distant, vivid memory of a white shirt caked in mud that would not accept the word defeat, worn by a club from a city on the Adriatic. The shirt belongs to Hajduk Split, and this is the first half of its story.
From Prague, with a permit
Split’s old walls have been watching people come and go for the best part of seventeen centuries, which gives the city a certain patience with newcomers. The newcomer here is a football club, and it was conceived a long way north, in Prague. In 1911 Split, Prague and a great deal else sat inside the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and football was spreading across the continent like gossip. A group of Dalmatian students in the Czech capital caught the bug, as students do, and decided their home town needed a team of its own.
The club’s own history of its first decade names the founders as Fabjan Kaliterna, Lucijan Stella, Ivan Šakić and Vjekoslav Ivanišević, joined by Vladimir Šore. You will hear more romantic versions of what happened in Prague, involving a famous beer hall, a boast to some Slavia fans and a promise to come back and beat them. I would love that story to be true. I have not found a source I trust for it, so I’ll leave the beer hall’s door shut and stick with what the club itself records, which is quite good enough.
Back in Split the founders went looking for a name. They took the question to Professor Josip Barač, who suggested Hajduk. The club’s history glosses the word as freedom fighter, or renegade. The hajduks of Balkan memory were outlaws who took to the hills against the Ottoman occupiers, bandits to some and Robin Hoods to others. Calling a football club after them in a city run from Vienna was not a neutral act. It was a statement with a ball at its feet.
Even the paperwork is a small piece of theatre. The club’s founding rules were approved by the Imperial Governor’s office in Zadar, and the date Hajduk keeps as its birthday is 13 February 1911. Somewhere in a provincial ministry a clerk stamped a form and set off a century of trouble for every authority that came after him. I like to think he went home that evening entirely unaware.
Nine-nil, allegedly with his knee
The first opponent was Calcio, the team of Split’s Italian community, and Hajduk won 9-0. The club’s history records that the first goal ever scored in a Hajduk shirt came from Šime Raunig, “allegedly with his knee”. That word allegedly is one of my favourite things in football historiography. More than a century on, nobody is prepared to swear to it, and nobody wants to let it go either. Every great club should have a founding myth that might have been a scuff.
The local fans got their own founding chant out of the afternoon. According to the club’s history of its supporters, Calcio were seen off the field with “Hip, hip, hura, devet prema nula”: hip hip hooray, nine to nil. The same piece says a notice in the daily paper ahead of the club’s first public outing had told the city it was a patriotic duty to support the club. Few clubs get a mission statement before they have kicked a ball. Hajduk got one in the newspaper.
The early years were spent winning at home. The club’s record shows Hajduk taking thirteen of the fourteen Split sub-federation championships up to 1936, which is less a rivalry than a habit. By 1913 the club was inviting the townsfolk on an “excursion” with the team to Sarajevo, and the crowds in Split were already running into the thousands.
Then the First World War arrived. That paused things across Europe, and it paused them in Split too.
Sailors, shacks and a song for the dance
When the war ended the Austro-Hungarian monarchy went with it, and Split found itself in the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The supporters’ history has a lovely detail from 1919: Hajduk played a string of matches against the crews of English warships calling at the port. One drew a record 5,000 spectators, 4,386 of them with paid tickets. Somebody counted, God bless them. The takings helped pay for a modest wooden clubhouse, known simply as the barracks. The same account says the stands soon held a contest of their own, with Hajduk fans and English sailors trying to out-shout each other. I suspect the sailors were outnumbered but not out-sung.
The football grew serious in the twenties. The club’s history of that decade notes that Hajduk took part in every first-league championship from the first one in 1923. In 1924, when the national team played Czechoslovakia, every player on the pitch except the goalkeeper came from Hajduk. The keeper, Otmar Gazzari, was left out because he held Italian citizenship. Ten out of eleven, and the eleventh blocked on a technicality: has any club ever owned a national team so thoroughly?
Then there is the operetta. In 1926 the composer Ivo Tijardović wrote Queen of a Ball, an operetta tied to the club. I have tried to picture Spurs or Everton getting the same treatment and keep arriving at Andrew Lloyd Webber, which is a sentence I never wanted to write. In Split the music suited the club perfectly. Hajduk was already more than a team. Workers, intellectuals and artists were all drawn to it, and it had become one of the ways the city talked about itself.
The trophies followed. Hajduk were national champions in 1927 and again in 1929, and the travelling support followed them in style. The club’s supporters’ history describes special trains laid on for big away games, and Zagreb getting its first proper look at the southern temperament: processions through the streets with flags, Split songs, and noise enough that the players felt at home in somebody else’s city. There were chants too. One of them promised, more or less, that whoever touched Hajduk would end up chewing a hedgehog. I can’t improve on that, so I won’t try.
The difficult thirties
The 1930s were leaner. In the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia the club, by its own account of the decade, finished second three times without adding another title. The goals kept coming all the same: the history records Vladimir Kragić scoring 21 in 1933. A decade of near misses would turn out to be a fair trailer for much of the century to come. More on that in part two, where the near misses get their own table.
The politics never went away either. A club named after rebels against empire, in a kingdom run from Belgrade, was always going to find itself arguing with whoever held the pen. By the end of the decade the argument was about to be overtaken by something far worse.
War, Bari, and a request from Belgrade refused
The club’s history of the forties is the part of the story most likely to make a grown man go quiet in a pub. Hajduk won the Croatian championship of 1941. Then, as Europe tore itself apart, the club joined the antifascist movement, and the footballers went to war wearing the name of their outlaw ancestors.
The history records a match in Bari, played against a British Army selection in front of 40,000. It records that Charles de Gaulle named Hajduk the Honorary Team of Free France, an honour connected to a 1945 visit to Lebanon. Nobody writing a novel about a football club would dare put that in. A side from Split plays the British Army in southern Italy and gets an honorary title from the leader of Free France. Hajduk did both before the war was over.
When the war ended there was an offer, or something more pressing than an offer: move the club to Belgrade and become the army’s team in the new Yugoslavia. Hajduk said no. The club stayed in Split. Football fans tend to romanticise refusals, and this one has earned it.
Through all of it there was Frane Matošić, whom the club’s history credits with 729 goals in its shirt across every kind of match. No modern striker gets near a figure like that, and I would not want to be the man sent to tell him his friendlies don’t count. Even counting only competitive matches he stays ahead of everyone. A 2026 piece in Jutarnji list, celebrating Marko Livaja’s hundredth goal, still calls Matošić’s 211 the untouchable record.
Torcida, the students’ idea
Now to 1950, the year this club acquired the thing it is perhaps most famous for. Brazil hosted the World Cup that summer, and the Hajduk players in the national squad came home full of the torcida, the Brazilian crowds who made every noise humanly possible for their team. The club’s history of the supporters tells how a group of students in Zagreb, mostly Dalmatians and Herzegovinians, took the idea and ran with it.
The club gives the founding date as 28 October 1950. That was the day before Hajduk played Red Star at home, with the title race still on a knife-edge. A first group of about 130 students arrived by train with the first Torcida badges on their lapels, carrying rattles, bells and sirens, and in the club’s words set about getting Split to its feet. Another three hundred or so followed on matchday. On 29 October, in a dramatic finish, goals from Bernard Vukas and Božo Broketa won it 2-1 for Hajduk. That season Hajduk took the title unbeaten, with ten wins and eight draws.
The authorities did not see a carnival. They saw a rising. The supporters’ history says the Belgrade press wrote about a lynch-mob atmosphere the very next day, and a party commission was set up to look into it. Club officials were reprimanded. Matošić was thrown out of the party over the incident. Several members of Torcida were detained and beaten, and its founder, Vjenceslav Žuvela, went to prison. The group was silenced for the next three decades, but the support it organised never really went away.
Hajduk proudly call Torcida the oldest organised supporters’ group in Europe. I’m not here to referee the claims of every other curva on the continent. I will just note that most supporters’ groups didn’t begin with a jail sentence.
Vukas, Beara and the fifties
The fifties brought more titles. The club’s history of the decade lists the championship of 1952 and another in 1954/55, with Vukas scoring twenty goals that season. Vukas and the goalkeeper Vladimir Beara were good enough to be picked for a Rest of Europe side against England. Players from Split were turning up in the company of the continent’s best, which is exactly where they had always assumed they belonged.
There were adventures too. The club records a South American tour in 1952/53 that ended in what the history calls the reserves affair. The details are better left to the club’s own telling than to my embroidery, but it is a reminder that Hajduk has never gone anywhere quietly. In 1957 Vukas left for Bologna, which is the sort of thing that happens to a club once its best players get noticed.
After the 1955 title the cupboard stayed bare for sixteen years. By the club’s own reckoning the next league title came in 1971. In a city where people talk about football the way other cities talk about the weather, that is a long time to go without sun.
Five points, paper and a first cup
The sixties tested everyone’s patience. According to the club’s history of that decade, the Planinić affair cost Hajduk five points in the 1965/66 season. In a decade when the club was already short of trophies, losing points off the pitch felt particularly cruel. Petar Nadoveza scored 21 goals that same season anyway. Football doesn’t care much for justice, but it does reward stubbornness.
The same history says the crowd at Maksimir in the sixties saw the first papelitos, the showers of paper that greet a team coming out. The supporters’ history adds that pyrotechnics arrived on the terraces around then too, and more flags went up on the old ground. If you have watched a big Hajduk match on television in the past few decades and wondered how the stand ever got like that, the answer is that it took sixty years of practice.
The reward came in 1967. Hajduk won its first Yugoslav Cup, beating Sarajevo 2-1 in the final, with goals from Ferić and Obradov. The club’s history records the young Jurica Jerković, later one of the stars of the seventies, being given the job of guarding the trophy. I find that wonderful. It is the youth team kid holding the cup on the bus, an unspoken promise that the next one will be his to win. The supporters’ piece calls the final unforgettable and remembers a full stadium in a uniquely southern atmosphere. It also says the cup woke up both the club and its fans, and that it opened the golden seventies.
There was a European night in there as well. In the Cup Winners’ Cup Hajduk drew Tottenham. They lost 2-0 in Split and 4-3 in London, as the club’s sixties history records. Remember the 4-3. It sets the tone for half a century of European heartbreak: a white shirt, a gallant effort, a goal short. The late club man Dorić put it best, in a line we’ll come back to in part two: they were always a goal short, and it was written in the stars the day they were founded.
The old plac
All of this happened at Stari plac, the old ground. It stayed home until 1979, when, in the club’s words in its seventies history, the flag was lowered after sixty-eight years and Hajduk moved across town to Poljud. That’s a story for part two, along with the concrete shell by the sea that now houses the whole thing.
Before we leave the old ground, look at what had already happened there. A club founded by students on an imperial permit had won its city, its country’s league, the loyalty of artists and composers, an honour from Free France, and a supporters’ group the authorities found frightening enough to put on trial. It had refused to move to the capital. And it had never once stopped being stubborn.
That is the thing about Hajduk. Flags, kingdoms and states have come and gone above Split for more than a century, and the white shirt is still there. There is a line, attributed to fans and repeated wherever the club is discussed: all empires may dissolve, but Hajduk shall remain. I have not found its author, so call it a folk saying, and a true one. The empires did dissolve. Hajduk did remain.
Coming next
In part two we move to Poljud and the seventies. Four titles, five cups in a row and a set of European exits so cruel they deserve their own museum. Then come the last Yugoslav cup final, a war, a Champions League quarter-final against the greatest Ajax side of all, a slide into near ruin, and the fans taking the club for themselves.
Part two is here: Hajduk Split: Devotion (part two).
Related reading on FBH: Football, Partizan and life through the lenses of art and Quick to Boro, slow to pay: All-in Bokšić.
