Bosnia and Herzegovina are at the World Cup. That sentence alone would have seemed implausible not long ago. Across the two qualification cycles preceding this one, the team managed just four wins from 19 matches. When Sergej Barbarez took charge in 2024 — with no previous coaching experience, having spent his retirement playing professional poker — it was not an appointment that inspired obvious confidence. What followed was chaotic, emotional and occasionally bewildering. It was also, in the end, enough.
Playoff victories over Wales and then Italy carried Bosnia to the tournament for only the second time in the country's history, and transformed Barbarez from a cult figure into something considerably larger. A former captain who had first made his interest in the job known in 2009, he waited fifteen years for the call and arrived without a coaching record to point to — only a reputation for speaking plainly about the dysfunction in Bosnian football and a conviction that rebuilding the squad's mentality mattered more than immediate results. He went winless in his first eight matches. He was criticised heavily. He persisted.
The squad Barbarez has assembled is largely made up of players raised abroad. In his first year alone, 16 players earned their debuts, drawn from communities in Sweden, Germany, Austria and the United States. The Bosnian diaspora, long a source of untapped talent, has become the structural core of this team. The formation shifts regularly — usually between a 4-2-3-1 and a 4-4-2 — but the identity is consistent: aggressive out of possession, direct in transition, and increasingly difficult to play against once matches become heated, which with this group they invariably do.
Three players define the squad at either end of their careers. Edin Dzeko, 40 years old and still captain, is the country's all-time leading scorer and a figure his younger teammates regard with something close to reverence. He no longer operates with the physical dominance he showed at Wolfsburg and Manchester City, but his reading of pressure moments remains exceptional, and the playoff campaign once again illustrated how much Bosnia depend on him. Kerim Alajbegovic, 18, represents the other end of that arc. The midfielder joined Bayer Leverkusen from Red Bull Salzburg and took penalties in both playoff shootouts with a composure that belied his age. Tarik Muharemovic, the left-footed centre-back who has moved through Juventus and Sassuolo, completes a defensive unit that, for the first time in some years, appears capable of carrying the ball as well as simply stopping opponents.
In Group B, Bosnia face Canada, Switzerland and Qatar. They are unlikely to control many of those fixtures, and Barbarez himself would probably not claim otherwise. But qualification alone — sealed while more than 100,000 people celebrated in the streets of Sarajevo — has already meant something significant to a country whose diaspora supporters will travel from across Europe and North America to follow them. The question at the tournament itself is not whether Bosnia will play the most composed football in the group, but whether the energy and unpredictability Barbarez has cultivated will be enough to make them genuinely difficult to account for. On the evidence of the playoffs, the answer is probably yes.