“Does your father have a shrine to Boban?”
It’s not a question that you hear every day. But as my distant cousin explained at a gathering of my Croatian-American family in Pittsburgh in 1998, the first year that Croatia unexpectedly stormed the soccer world, her garage had been repurposed by her father as a devotional museum to the Croatian soccer player Zvonimir Boban. It was filled with photographs, jerseys and even candles. Naturally, she wanted to know if my father had done the same.
Boban, who is now the deputy secretary general of FIFA, won the Champions League title in 1994 with A.