The Ultras Group That Became Inseparable From a Nation’s Identity

Most football ultras groups exist to support a club. Dinamo Zagreb’s Bad Blue Boys exist to support an idea of Croatia itself, and the club has often been almost incidental to that mission.

Founded in 1986 with around sixteen original members, the Bad Blue Boys, BBB for short, took their name from a Sean Penn film. What followed over the next four decades turned them into one of European football’s most politically significant supporter groups, for reasons that go well beyond football results.

The riot that became a founding myth

In May 1990, Dinamo Zagreb hosted Red Star Belgrade at Maksimir Stadium, drawing over 4,000 traveling Serbian fans who chanted that Zagreb belonged to Serbia.

What followed was a full-scale riot: seats ripped from the stands and hurled at away supporters, violence spreading onto the pitch itself, and a young Dinamo midfielder named Zvonimir Boban launching a flying knee at a police officer widely seen as siding with the Serbian fans.

That moment happened barely a year before Croatia’s war of independence began, and BBB members have long treated the Maksimir riot as a symbolic first skirmish of that war, not merely a football disturbance.

During the actual fighting that followed, many BBB members served in Croatia’s police forces or army. A memorial beneath Maksimir’s west stand honors members who never came home.

Turning that same intensity against their own club

What makes BBB unusual isn’t just their role in Croatian nationhood. It’s that they’ve applied the exact same uncompromising energy against Dinamo’s own leadership when they felt the club was being run corruptly.

Starting in August 2010, BBB launched a full boycott of Dinamo matches, home and away, in protest against club vice-president Zdravko Mamić, who they accused of financial corruption. The boycott lasted thirteen months. Thousands of BBB members gathered outside government buildings in 2015 to protest institutions they felt were protecting Mamić, who was later convicted of embezzling millions of euros from the club.

Even after boycotts officially ended, BBB continued protesting from inside the stadium for years, at one point prompting the club to ban roughly 800 of them from Maksimir entirely.

A group that resists easy labels

International outlets have occasionally filed BBB under generic “hooligan” coverage, and there’s genuine violence in their history worth acknowledging honestly, including a 2010 attack on a traveling PAOK fan coach.

But that framing misses what actually makes the group significant. Few ultras movements anywhere in Europe carry this level of entanglement with their nation’s founding story, war history, and ongoing fight against institutional corruption, all wrapped into one identity that happens to organize itself around football.

BBB isn’t just watching Dinamo Zagreb. In their own telling, they’re guarding something bigger, and the club is simply where that guardianship plays out most visibly.

What does it say about football’s power that a fan group can carry this much national and political weight, well beyond anything that happens during ninety minutes on the pitch?