World Cup '74 Portrait #99 (Dusan Bajevic: Yugoslavia)

graphite & putty eraser, with watercolour pencil/30x21cm

The latest randomly-chosen ‘star’ of the project is Dušan Bajević, a sticker representing whom appeared in each of the FKS & Panini albums published to preview & commemorate the 1974 World Cup, & who was selected in the official Yugoslavia squad for the tournament, where he went on to appear in 3 matches – the First Round group record-equalling thrashing of Zaire, to which he contributed a hat-trick of goals (one of the two achieved at the ’74 Finals); the subsequent 1 – 1 draw with Scotland, being substituted for Stanislav Karasi, who scored the Yugoslavs’ goal; & the Second Round group match loss to Poland.

Dušan Bajević was another of the unknown names to me of World Cup ’74 prior to engaging/indulging in this particular drawing project, but research reveals that the club for whom he played at the time was one of our then-Yugoslavian favourites, Velez Mostar, being thus a team-mate of Vahid Halilhodzic, which information necessitated another delve into the original Yugoslavian football memorabilia ‘Fudbaleri i Timovi’ 1974/75 season album to discover that ‘Duško’ Bajević is indeed featured in portrait sticker form.

Fudbalski Heaven

(Re)presenting today a recent addition to the European football print library/archive in the form of the magnificent & essential Yugoslavian ‘Fudbaleri i Timovi’ 1974/75 season sticker album, an original artefact from the season I became properly interested in football & seduced by the glamour & romance of continental teams’ names, imbued with a hauntological aura & redolent with ‘Ostalgie’, acquired via ebay from a seller resident in Belgrade, for just that little bit extra authenticity: this, dear reader, is the very realest of deals.

As can be seen from the images, the album & its contents form an essential visual document(ation) of the protagonists of Yugoslavian domestic football in the mid-1970s: the player pictures are, of course, a period delight, there is also a brief illustrated (with black & white stickers, a nice detail) history of Yugoslavian league football since 1946, the complete roster of first & second division teams are featured in pictorial sticker form, enabling an aesthetic appreciation of their colours, but perhaps the real gold is the inclusion of the grid-format graphs plotting each of the featured teams’ top division progress from post-war to the previous '73-74 season (the vertical y-axis), & the unique line drawings that are thus created as a consequence of joining the small circles that fix the individual seasons’ finishing position from 1 to 18 (along the horizontal x-axis).
Grids & drawing is, of course, living the TOoT modernist dream, at least in terms of historical & enduring concerns, & especially so when applied to a football statistics context.

From the examples below, please feel free to appreciate the jagged elegance of the point-to-point line drawings, from our favourites Velež Mostar, through the particularly striking inconsistent ups & downs of lovely-sounding Vojvodina, to OFK Beograd, whose linear progress can be seen to be interrupted by a season’s absence.

On the subject of football statistics as drawing, art, the stuff & subject matter of creative practice, we return to the example of Marc Renshaw’s continuing ‘Sporting League’ project (who also happens to run another blog on the subject of ‘The Grid’, albeit the search for a particular one), & recent personal considerations of the possibility & viability of doing something along similar lines, having, since 1990, sporadically worked on what now stands at a total of almost 34 full seasons’-worth of an alternative football league (better & much more real, vivid, exciting than the real thing, of course), featuring a combination of English & Welsh league, non-league & invented teams, thus already having a significant store of raw material from which to work & expand – there might be mileage, watch this space…

Badge of the Day #2 (Velež Mostar)

Presenting the second in the series of recently-acquired European football lapel badges, on this occasion featuring another of the clubs encountered during that initiatory-revelatory season of 1974-75, Velež Mostar, then of Yugoslavia (for which we, here at TOoT, inevitably suffer pangs of 'Ostalgie') but latterly & now more locally of Bosnia-Hercegovina.


Velež obviously registered on the radar courtesy of their UEFA Cup Third Round clash with Derby County, from which they emerged triumphant on an aggregate of 5 - 4, overturning a 1 - 3 first, away, leg deficit in the process, which one assumes would have been a stirring comeback, albeit in apparently controversial circumstances, having reached that stage of the competition after eliminating two other favourite-to-be European teams in the form of Spartak Moscow & Rapid Vienna before succumbing in the Quarter Finals to eventual losing finalists Twente Enschede.
Subsequent seasons have failed to replicate a similar level of European club football success, & Velež have thus far not been able to achieve a level of eminence in Bosnian domestic soccer that they, for a period during the 1970s - 80s, managed in Yugoslavia, but still the very name exerts a powerful attraction.



In terms of the details of badge itself, the logo is a rather groovy one & the legend 'Fudbalski Klub' is another obvious attraction, adding that touch of East European exoticism, with 'fudbalski' being rather more poetic than mere 'football'.