Počeci igranja nogometa u Ðakovu
The beginnings of soccer in Ðakovo

Summary/Abstract: We do not know much about the beginnings of soccer in Ðakovo. Based on modest and not always representative historical sources, as well as memories of the first soccer activists, I feel that we are today nevertheless able to offer a sufficiently coherent genesis of football in Ðakovo from its beginnings till the outbreak of World War I. Soccer first began to be played in an organized fashion within the Section of the sport society “Hrvatski sokol” that was established in 1908, and afterwards also in the Holiday-Time Soccer Club that had not been registered as a soccer club and that was active only during the summer, at the time of school breaks. Only with the establishment of the Croatian Sport Club “Orao”, which had been preceded by elaborate preparations, but also certain dissonant tones in the domain of sport as well as politics, Ðakovo got its first “proper” soccer club. “Orao” played its first public match in Ðakovo against the club “Slavonija” from Slavonski Brod on August 6th, 1911. Until it was hurriedly dissolved at the end of 1912 or the beginning of 1913, it played only several more matches. After “Orao” ceased to be active, soccer clubs “Slavija” and “Viktorija” were established in Ðakovo in 1913, and the Holiday-Time Sport Club occasionally played, too, as it had been doing thus far. The activities of all sport clubs stopped with the outbreak of World War I, including the soccer clubs from Ðakovo. The results achieved by soccer players from Ðakovo in the observed time period were not impressive, but they nevertheless had a certain mobilizing effect on a great number of young people. After 1918 this youth was going to form the base of newly formed clubs, while the citizens who had gotten accustomed to soccer in prewar time were going to assume the role of the founders and members of management boards of newly formed clubs. Without this initial affirmation of soccer in the period between 1908 and 1914, it would be hard to understand the soccer boom that occurred in Ðakovo between two world wars.

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