Bosnia and Herzegovina has recently gotten two kings. This is not a contradictio in adjecto but reality following the fact that Wolfsburg Football Club was crowned the German champion. Two of their three best players are Bosnians Zvjezdan Misimović and Edin Džeko, who have officially become ‘Kaisers’ of German football. This is just a pinnacle of the few nice stories that are currently coming out of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Football, the sport so much loved in this country, has suddenly become the most prominent one.

The success of Misimović and Džeko comes after the national team won a few respectable European selections in the qualifying stage of the competition for the World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Bosnia and Herzegovina is in a good position to qualify alongside its neighbours, Serbia and Croatia. The secret of the success seems to be solidarity between the players. In the case of Wolfsburg, Misimović explained that whenever he himself,  Džeko or the team's Brazilian striker Grafite gets the ball, they start yelling ‘tebra, tebra’ which means in specific Sarajevo slang ‘brother, brother’ or rather ‘bro, bro’. Of course, nobody else understands them.

It was only a year ago that football was in deep crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The national coach had resigned, state attorneys were investigating several officials in the national football federation and many players refused to play for the national team. The change came with the surprise appointment of a new national coach.

Miroslav Blažević, who led Croatia to third place at the 1998 World Cup, surprised everyone by becoming the main man of football in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thereafter, the results changed and Bosnian football players achieved several victories, the most famous being a double over Belgium. All of a sudden, the country appeared as a brotherly unit. Džeko and Misimović continued their co-operation from Germany, but they were not the only stars of the team. Vedad Ibišević, born in a small town in eastern Bosnia, moved to the USA with his parents after the war but came back to Europe and became the most feared striker in Germany last year. His team, a small German provincial club called Hoffenheim was leading the championship before Ibišević got injured.

However, people in Bosnia and Herzegovina swiftly changed sides, at least when it came to watching German football. Last year’s heroes, Ibišević and his teammate Salihović, were replaced by Misimović and Džeko. At the national level, the team of Bosnia and Herzegovina progressed without Ibišević. New stars were born and something previously hard to imagine took place after Belgium was defeated twice within just five days. A kind of euphoria appeared in this nation that had already lost some of its self-belief. Bosnian writer Emir Imamović touched the public mood with his description: ‘These were five of the most beautiful days, during which  […] the news did not start with pictures of mass graves or reports of widespread redundancies, but all the talk was about [football players] Misimović, Džeko...'

While in the past, the national team was not universally supported throughout the country, now things seem to have changed. ‘When a citizen from Banja Luka states that he did not support Bosnia and Herzegovina until now, but will do so from now on’, Imamovic concludes, ‘it is proof that maybe, just maybe, everything is not as dark in this country as it sometimes may seem...’  Imamović seems to be right: Bosnia and Herzegovina looks forward to the next football season with high expectations and full of hope. In September and October the national team will face Armenia, Turkey and Spain in the next qualification round for the World Cup in South Africa 2010 – good opportunities for the Bosnian and Herzegovinian team to immortalise itself.