Part two of our Hajduk story: a stadium like a spaceship, a decade of glory, a catalogue of beautiful European defeats, the last cup of a dying country, and the fans who took the club back.
In part one we left Hajduk in 1970. By then it had a first Yugoslav Cup in the cabinet, a supporters’ group the state had tried to stamp out, and a youth team full of names the city would soon know by heart. This half begins with those names and ends, as any honest account of Hajduk must, with a title still unwon and a crowd that has refused to leave.
Sixteen years, then everything
The club’s own history of the seventies opens with a sentence I would happily have carved over the main gate: four national titles and five cups, the cups won in “an unheard-of five successive years”. It began in 1971 with a league title, Hajduk’s first for sixteen years. Slavko Luštica was the coach. The young Jerković, Jovanić, Lemešić, Džoni and Buljan played alongside the more experienced Vukčević, Hlevnjak, Nadoveza and Pavlica. The club says their flowing game became “an iconic symbol of Dalmatia”. Nadoveza was top scorer again, this time with twenty.
The supporters’ history adds the noise. After a win over Partizan, the club’s account of its fans says, Hajduk songs from several thousand travelling supporters rang through the streets of Belgrade. When the players came home from Belgrade and Novi Sad, Split “burned”. On the last day of the season the cramped old ground, every seat taken by people in white shirts, saluted the new champions.
That season also gave us one of the strangest results in the club’s history. Against OFK Belgrade, with the game at 2-2, the referee, Pavle Ristić, was hit on the head by something thrown from the crowd. The club’s history says he had “brazenly stinted” Hajduk all afternoon. The match was abandoned and OFK were initially awarded a 3-0 win. Protests spread across Dalmatia, and the history adds, with a straight face, that cars with Serbian licence plates were thrown into the sea by cheering crowds. On appeal the result was set at 2-2, although the game itself was never finished. A draw nobody completed, decided by a committee. Very Yugoslav, and very Hajduk.
Ivić and the kids
The cups started the same year: Dinamo beaten 2-1 in the 1971 final, a game the club remembers as the debut of a young coach named Tomislav Ivić. Branko Zebec took the next season and reached the semi-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup. Hajduk lost 1-0 at Leeds and then drew 0-0 at home after “missing many clear-cut scoring chances”. Remember that phrase. You will hear it again.
Ivić came back in 1973, promoted from the club’s award-winning youth academy, and did what brave coaches do: he picked the kids he knew. It brought two Doubles in a row. Once again, the club says, fans could recite the entire first team by heart. In 1976 a third Double was on, and that season, in the club’s phrase, “lives on in infamy”. Hajduk and Partizan were level on points going into the last round. Partizan were away in Ljubljana, kicking off at the same time as Hajduk, supposedly in the name of fairness. Hajduk could only draw. The club’s history says the referee in Ljubljana let the game run on long after Hajduk’s result was known, and blew for full time only once Partizan had scored the goal that won them the title. Nobody will ever produce a stopwatch to settle it. Nobody in Split has ever needed one.
In 1978 Ivić was back again and won another title. It looked unlikely at the halfway mark, when the crowd’s darling, the striker Slaviša Žungul, left for the United States. According to the club, it was a fitting farewell to Stari plac. The flag there was lowered after sixty-eight years.
The shell by the sea
The new home was Poljud, and if you have never seen it, look it up now. The club’s stadium page explains that it was built in 1979 for the eighth Mediterranean Games. The architect, Dr Boris Magaš, gave it a “delicate shell-like construction” almost on the water, with a concrete dome spanning the east and west stands. At night its 630 floodlights make it look, as the club puts it, as though “some spaceship has just arrived to Earth”. It seats 33,987. Most new stadiums look like a car park with ambitions. Poljud looks like a crab that has wandered in from the sea and decided to stay.
The first match there was against the Turkish champions, Trabzonspor, in front of 50,000, and Boro Primorac won it with a penalty. That set off the best European Cup run in the club’s history to that point. Vejle of Denmark were beaten 3-0 in the second round, which put Hajduk in the quarter-finals for the first time, against Hamburg. In Germany the only goal came, the club says, “after a clear foul by Horst Hrubesch” on Ivan Pudar, the eighteen-year-old debutant in goal. Boriša Đorđević ran Manfred Kaltz ragged that night. At Poljud Hajduk won 3-2 and went out, with a penalty missed along the way. One goal short.
Always a goal short
That brings us to the table. The club’s histories of the seventies and eighties read like a catalogue of beautiful exits, and here are a few of them:
1971/72, Champions Cup: 0-0 away to Valencia, then 1-1 at home, and out on away goals.
1972/73, Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final: lost 1-0 at Leeds, 0-0 at home.
1974/75, Champions Cup: beat St. Etienne 4-1 in Split, lost 5-1 after extra time in France on 6 November 1974.
1975/76, Champions Cup: beat PSV 2-0 at home, lost 3-0 after extra time in Eindhoven.
1976/77 and 1977/78, Cup Winners’ Cup: out to Atlético Madrid, then to Austria Vienna on penalties in the quarter-finals.
1979/80, Champions Cup quarter-final: lost 1-0 in Hamburg, won 3-2 at Poljud, out.
1983/84, UEFA Cup semi-final: beat Tottenham 2-1 at home, lost 1-0 in London, out on away goals.
1984/85, UEFA Cup quarter-final: past Metz, Torino and Dnipro, then out to Waregem on penalties.
I’ll stop there. You get the point. The late club man Dorić, quoted in our original piece, put it better than anyone: we’re always a goal short, and it was written in the stars the day we were founded. If that sounds like a lament, it isn’t. It’s the closest Split comes to a creed.
Baka and the eighties
The eighties, according to the club, had an excellent team but no league title, just three cups and a run of second and third places. In 1981 Hajduk finished two points behind Red Star, and in 1983 the same margin behind Partizan. The consolation was Blaž Slišković, signed from Mostar and nicknamed Baka, whom the club calls “mercurial, supremely talented”. In the 1983/84 cup, which Hajduk won against Red Star over two legs, he lobbed the goalkeeper Ivković straight from a corner. In the UEFA Cup quarter-final against Sparta Prague he scored a 118th-minute free kick that, in the club’s lovely phrase, “outfoxed” the Czech goalkeeper. Then came Tottenham and the away goals rule again.
There are stories about famous footballers naming Baka as their boyhood hero. I’ve heard them, and I would love them to be true. I couldn’t find one I could stand behind, so you’ll have to settle for the corner-kick lob, which needs no celebrity endorsement.
Zlatko Vujović was the league’s top scorer in 1984/85 with 25. In 1987 Josip Skoblar’s side won the cup the hard way, beating Red Star on penalties in the semi-final and Rijeka in the final. The goalkeeper Zoran Varvodić came off the bench late in extra time to save in the shootout and was known as Rambo from then on. Every club should have a goalkeeper called Rambo. Very few deserve one.
Nesvrstani, and Torcida again
The terraces were changing too. The club’s supporters’ history describes a group that, in the middle of the seventies, gathered at the east end of Stari plac and set new standards for organised support. They followed the team away, used more pyrotechnics, made banners, and carried big flags with the Croatian coat of arms. Wanting to stand apart from the rest of the crowd, they called themselves Nesvrstani, the Non-Aligned. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, where non-alignment was official foreign policy, that is a very Split joke.
When the club moved to Poljud, the hardcore found a home under the north-east roof. By 1980, the history says, the name Torcida was being spoken again among the lads, as if testing the authorities’ pulse. In the summer of 1981 a new generation, the “spli’sko cviće”, Split’s flowers, formally revived it. Through the eighties its banners were regularly banned and confiscated, and many of its members fell foul of the system. When the war came in 1991, the club says, members of Torcida joined the defence of the country, and many were killed or wounded. In May 1993 a memorial plaque went up in the north-east corner of Poljud. Look for it if you go. It explains a lot of the noise.
The last cup of Yugoslavia
In 1990 Hajduk lost the cup final to Red Star. The club still calls Darko Pančev’s goal “highly suspicious”. The next year the two clubs met again, at the same ground in Belgrade, in what the club’s nineties history calls the last final played before Yugoslavia fell apart. The date was 8 May 1991. In the club’s words, the tense political standoff of the day was mirrored in a strange atmosphere in the stands. Alen Bokšić scored an excellent goal, Hajduk won, and the last cup of a dying country went to Split.
Red Star went on to be crowned champions of Europe that month, beating Marseille on penalties in Bari on 29 May, according to UEFA’s record of the 1990/91 season. So Hajduk beat the future European champions three weeks before their finest hour. If you want more on the man who scored that goal, our piece on Alen Bokšić has the full, slightly scandalous picture.
A month after the final, Hajduk played their last Yugoslav league game, a 3-2 win away to Proleter of Zrenjanin. Ardian Kozniku scored the last goal. Then came the war. UEFA would not let Hajduk host Tottenham in Split that autumn, so the home leg was played in Linz, where Mario Novaković scored in a 1-0 win before Spurs won 2-0 at White Hart Lane. This time the club wasn’t a goal short. It was a country short.
Champions of Croatia, and that Ajax
The first Croatian championship started in February 1992, and on 13 June Hajduk beat Šibenik 4-1 to become the first champions of the new country, with Kozniku top scorer on twelve. The first Croatian Cup followed a year later. In 1993/94 the war again stopped Hajduk playing a European home game in Split, so Ivan Katalinić’s side met Ajax in Ljubljana. Ivica Mornar scored the only goal. Then it lost 6-0 in Amsterdam, its heaviest European defeat. The club is generous about it: that Ajax, with Van der Sar, the de Boers, Davids, Seedorf, Rijkaard, Kluivert, Kanu and Litmanen, was “perhaps one of Europe’s greatest-ever teams”, and the night in Ljubljana was their only European defeat that season or the next.
The next season was Hajduk’s best. The club records a domestic Double (some tellings call it a treble, but the club says Double, and so will I) and a Champions League run that saw off Legia Warsaw, Anderlecht and Steaua on the way to the quarter-finals. The opponents there were Ajax again. It finished 0-0 at Poljud and 3-0 in Amsterdam, and that Ajax went on to win the whole thing. Losing to them is no disgrace. It was still a goal short, or three.
The long dark, and the fans
After that the story gets harder to tell. The club’s history from 2001 records titles in 2001, 2004 and 2005, and then nothing. Since then Dinamo Zagreb have dominated Croatian football, interrupted only twice, by Rijeka, as Jutarnji list notes further down. In 2008 the club became a joint-stock company. That sounds dull, but it mattered, because it meant the club could be owned, and so the question became who should own it.
The fans’ answer was themselves. Through the members’ association Naš Hajduk (Our Hajduk), the supporters now elect the club’s supervisory board. The club reported that the fifth such election closed on 30 June 2025, with 4,613 of the 6,196 registered members voting to confirm a single list of candidates for the next four years. It is not quite the Benfica or Barcelona model. It is something rarer in this part of Europe: a club where the people in the stands have a real say in who runs it.
And there are a great many of them. Index.hr reported that by seven in the evening on 1 January 2026, 20,000 people had already taken out membership for the new year, beating the previous year’s record of around 18,000 for the same day. On that day Hajduk sat second in the league, a point behind Dinamo. Eighteen thousand people paying up before lunch on New Year’s Day. Some clubs struggle to fill a stadium. Hajduk fills a membership drive while the city is still hungover.
Southampton had Le Tissier
Then there is Marko Livaja, who arrived in Split at 27 and, against everyone’s expectations, stayed. In March 2026 he scored his hundredth goal for the club, against Lokomotiva at Poljud. Jutarnji list counted 87 of them in the league, 12 in the cup and one in Europe. Only eight Hajduk players had reached a hundred before him, led by Matošić on 211. He has been the league’s top scorer three times, including 28 goals in 2021/22, and the paper calls his status south of the Sveti Rok tunnel nothing short of divine.
The same piece is honest about the rest. With Livaja the club has won two cups, in 2021/22 and 2022/23, which it calls “consolation” trophies, and his European record is thin. Hajduk, it says, “has dreamed one single dream for more than two decades”, a Croatian league title, and even Livaja has not been able to break Dinamo’s hold. That is the most Hajduk sentence written this century. A hero beloved beyond reason, a crowd that grows every year, and the title still a goal short.
A light that never goes out
So here is Hajduk in 2026, as it has always been: proud, stubborn, a little unlucky, and loved far beyond the size of its trophy cabinet. A club founded on an imperial permit, refusing kingdoms and capitals, beating the champions of Europe in the last cup of a vanishing country, and now owned in spirit, and on the supervisory board, by the people who sing for it.
I have tried, writing these two pieces, to keep the tall tales at arm’s length. Hajduk attracts legends the way Poljud attracts seagulls, and some of the best ones I grew up with turned out to have no paper trail. What surprised me is how little that matters. The stamped permit, the knee goal, the Bari match, the prison sentence for starting a fan club, the referee who wouldn’t blow his whistle, the corner-kick lob: all of it is on the record, and all of it is stranger than anything invented in a bar.
Its ground looks like a spaceship. Its fans’ group calls itself the oldest in Europe. Its record in Europe is a list of honourable defeats against the very best. None of that is a complaint. Somewhere on the Adriatic there is a white shirt, mud on the knees, still refusing to learn the word defeat.
Related reading on FBH: Football, Partizan and life through the lenses of art and Quick to Boro, slow to pay: All-in Bokšić.
