THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
Bosnia and Herzegovina have 91 registered female footballers under the age of 11.
Not 91 teams. Ninety-one players.
And yet, for these two weeks, the country is bringing together some of Europe’s best young footballers. Germany, Sweden, Spain, Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Iceland have travelled to Sarajevo and Zenica to contest the Women’s Under-19 European Championship alongside the host nation. Four stadiums, eight teams and a final to be played at Grbavica on 10 July.
The gap between the scale of the tournament and the size of the base from which Bosnian women’s football must grow contains almost the entire story. Bosnia and Herzegovina have managed to bring Europe’s youth elite home before building a structure capable of offering many of their own girls a stable route into the game. Now they want to use the tournament to begin creating one.
The immediate target appears modest and is revealing precisely because of it: to increase the number of registered under-11 players from 91 to 200 by the end of the 2026/27 season.
Bosnia’s other national team are playing a much longer game than the one the men will contest against the United States. It will not be settled in 90 minutes or fully reflected on a scoreboard. It is about making sure that a girl who watches Europe’s best young players this summer can then find somewhere to begin.
A tournament that must create teams
Bosnia and Herzegovina are hosting the final tournament of the Women’s Under-19 European Championship for the first time. It is also the national team’s first appearance at this level: they did not come through qualifying but received their place as hosts.
The results have shown how far they remain from the leading countries in the age group. Bosnia lost 0-5 to Germany in their opening match and were beaten by the same scoreline against Sweden. Before facing Poland in their final group game, they already know that they cannot reach the semi-finals.
Those defeats can be read as evidence of everything that is still missing. They also help explain why the value of the tournament cannot be reduced to the host team’s results.
Bosnia had already shown that it could stage a major competition when it hosted the Women’s Under-17 European Championship in 2022, the first UEFA final tournament ever held in the country. Four years later, the federation wants this new event to leave behind something more difficult to preserve than polished images, prepared stadiums or a generation that has faced elite opponents.
It wants the tournament to leave teams.
The Bosnian federation and UEFA plan to organise ten football festivals in different cities during the championship. The aim is to take the event beyond Sarajevo and Zenica, bring the trophy to different communities and offer activities to around 2,000 girls. Participants will be able to try football, discover UEFA’s Playmakers programme and join sessions organised by local clubs.
The next step is the creation of six new under-11 girls’ teams and a competition for the age group. Clubs that register those teams by the end of the 2026/27 season will be eligible for equipment vouchers and UEFA C coaching opportunities for members of their technical staff.
Ivana Vlaić, the Bosnian federation’s women’s football development officer, has explained that the intention is to bring as many under-11 teams as possible into organised competition and establish a base capable of lasting beyond the tournament.
The European Championship’s success will not be measured only by the response in the stands or the image presented by the final. It must also persuade some of those 2,000 girls to keep playing after the trophy has moved on.
For the first time, a strategy of its own
The championship arrives as Bosnia and Herzegovina enter a different stage in the development of women’s football.
In November 2024, the federation launched Our Time, Our Turn, which it describes as its first strategy specifically dedicated to football for women and girls. The plan covers the period from 2025 to 2029 and was developed with UEFA’s support.
It is not limited to the senior national team. Its seven areas cover participation, talent identification and development, national teams, clubs and competitions, professional education, facilities, internal organisation and communications.
Its objectives include increasing the number of players, helping clubs identify and support talent, improving the standard of the national teams, using club licensing to encourage women’s sections, training more female coaches and referees, and creating a national centre for women and girls.
On paper, those ambitions would be recognisable in almost any sports development strategy. The Under-19 European Championship provides an opportunity to see how Bosnia intends to translate them into action: festivals, new teams, a competition for younger players, equipment and trained coaches.
That translation matters. Women’s football has spent too long accumulating plans that promise growth without explaining who will open the next team, where the girls will play or how the activity will continue once a promotional campaign has ended.
Bosnia have at least set a first measurable target: 200 registered under-11 players.
That would still be a modest figure. But it moves the promise from a document to the registration records.
A structure built only recently
The project begins from a small and relatively young football ecosystem.
A unified national women’s league did not begin until the 2013/14 season. Before then, competitions were shaped by the country’s complex territorial organisation, with the national title decided through later stages involving teams from different structures.
Much of the game’s development has also rested on a single club. SFK 2000 Sarajevo have just won their 24th consecutive national championship, a run UEFA describes as a world record. They have also competed in European competition for 23 successive seasons.
That continuity has enabled the club to develop players, maintain a national reference point and offer several generations a competitive pathway. But such prolonged dominance also reveals how much remains to be built around them. When the same club wins for more than two decades, its success also says something about how difficult it has been for everybody else to close the gap.
The 2025-2029 strategy is intended to make the system less dependent on a handful of institutions and individuals. Six under-11 teams will not transform the domestic league by themselves, nor immediately reduce the distance between Bosnia and countries such as Germany, Sweden or Spain.
They would, however, mark the beginning of a pathway that has not existed for many girls: starting together, playing against other girls and remaining inside the game as they grow older.
Close, but still outside
The senior national team show that Bosnia are not starting from nothing.
In the recent European qualifying phase for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil, they finished on 11 points, level with Lithuania and Estonia. Lithuania won the group and reached the play-offs, while Bosnia remained in League C and once again missed out on a major tournament.
The country has players capable of competing and a generation that has come close to qualification. What it does not yet possess is a base broad enough to ensure that every step forward survives the players who made it possible.
That is the space the strategy is intended to fill. The task is not simply to find one generation capable of approaching a major tournament. It is to create the conditions that prevent the next one from having to begin again with a small pool, one dominant club and the players who managed to find a pathway almost by exception.
The two Under-19 defeats matter for the same reason. They do not invalidate Bosnia’s role as hosts or suggest that the country should not be staging the championship. They show the level it must reach and the amount of work beneath every youth team capable of competing in Europe: girls beginning earlier, enough clubs, trained coaches and suitable matches at every stage of their development.
The elite currently visiting Bosnia did not suddenly appear at under-19 level. It was built years earlier.
After 10 July
On 10 July, one team will lift the trophy at Grbavica. The players will return to their clubs, the stadiums will resume their usual activity and the European Championship will leave Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The most important result for the host nation will not be known that night.
Time will be needed to discover how many of the six proposed teams were created, how many girls attended their first training session, how many continued after the festivals and whether the 91 registered under-11 players really became 200.
The federation’s chosen slogan says that this is their time and their turn. The European Championship gives them a stage on which to say it. What happens afterwards will determine whether they can also turn it into a structure.
For Bosnia, the true legacy will not be having gathered some of Europe’s best young footballers for two weeks. It will be ensuring that, when a girl watches them and wants to follow, she no longer has to search too far to find a team.
