'Emotionally it's the biggest story of my life'

Zvonimir Boban opens up on returning to Dinamo Zagreb, falling out with Uefa and the actions of Gianni Infantino

- Nick Ames

An afternoon mist is descending over Stadion Maksimir, enhancing the severity of its dramatic, precipitous angles.

In a building across the way, Zvonimir Boban is explaining what brought him back. We are eating squid ink risotto in one corner of a room now configured as Dinamo Zagreb’s canteen; diagonally opposite is the spot where, fighting through the club’s youth system, a young arrival from Dalmatia used to sleep. “Emotionally it’s the biggest story of my life, this one,” Boban says, memories of this former dormitory leaping into his mind’s eye. “Where, if not here?”

He has, in some shape or form, been almost everywhere else. Boban has burned brightly but briefly in each of his various lives as a football administrator. The sport would look different were it not for his influence in senior roles at Fifa and Uefa across the past decade.

Almost two years have passed since his high-profile resignation from the latter and there was always the sense Boban, opinionated and deeply principled, had further rungs to climb.

Instead his world has, in contrasting ways, both shrunk and grown. The policymaking clout he held in Zurich and Nyon is no more; neither of those posts, though, came with the persistent public gaze and criticism that are part of the package as Dinamo president. The day’s newspapers pay testament to that with some scathing commentaries after a 3-1 Europa League defeat by Real Betis here the previous evening. “They say Jesus was a good man,” he says. “Better than any of us, that’s clear, no? They crucified him, so who are we not to be crucified in our everyday life?”