Let's stop the storm of bad narratives: If Zidane is French, not Algerian, then Lukić is a Bosnian in the BiH jersey, not a Serb!

It was a long time ago, July 12, 1998, when France climbed to the top of the world, as if it were the natural order of things, not one of those days when the ball decides to obey only one side. In Paris, Zinedine Zidane, cold as mathematics and precise as a verdict, signed the final twice.

A round earlier, against Ćiro's Croatia, Lilian Thuram, a man for whom a goal was unattainable both before and after, decided to be the exception that hurts, twice cooling the Fiery Ones and closing the door on the surprise that already had the shape of a miracle.

And then, interestingly, no one felt the need to write epic genealogies of every pass. No one counted origins, blood cells, and continents in the legs. There was no narrative like: “A Norman assisted an Algerian, who passed the ball to a descendant of Guadeloupe, and France scored a goal.” No, because it was football, not an administration of identity.

It was the same with Croatia and Thuram. No one did geographical forensics on his goals. No one asked “where he is really from,” but rather looked at what he did on the field. Period.

The French national team today has a whole gallery of players of origin outside France, but the jersey swallows all of that. There are no footnotes under every pass. There is only one word: France. And one mission: the national team.

And then, as if normal sports logic stops somewhere and a local special version of reality begins, we come to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In this context, it is particularly dangerous and almost caricatural to allow narratives often created by hegemonies from Zagreb and Belgrade to gain space on the pro-Bosnian media scene, regardless of how packaged they are in “analysis” or how clickable they look. Because what starts as a harmless interpretation very quickly becomes a framework through which one persistently tries to explain what is actually simple, a team playing under one flag. If that framework is not rejected in time, it becomes a substitute for reality, and reality begins to resemble someone else's story about us.

Here, even three decades after Zidane and Thuram, an additional explanation is still sought for every goal, every assist, every touch of the ball. As if the field is a laboratory and the players are samples that need to be labeled before they are allowed to be recognized as part of the same team.

The same football that in Paris, Barcelona, or Madrid belongs to everyone and no one in particular, here is broken down into its constituent parts, so every pass must be ethnically signed, every ball genealogically explained, every goal dissected as if it were not the result of a game but of political analysis.

And the most absurd thing is that this does not come from the locker room. Not from the field, but from comments, narratives. As if someone decided that it is impossible to accept the simple fact that eleven people in the same jersey represent one country, not three tables, not two entities, not endless footnotes of identity.

So then Jovo Lukić's goal is not seen as a goal of the national team, but as an opportunity for linguistic and ethnic dissection. As if the ball did not end up in the net, but in a debate. As if “who is what” is more important than “what happened.”

And in that same world, Lamine Yamal plays for Spain, speaks Spanish, and it never occurs to anyone to turn every move of his into a family tree spanning three continents. If he played for Bosnia and Herzegovina, they would write that his dribble to the right comes from his Moroccan father, and to the left from his mother from Equatorial Guinea. In Spain, no one even thinks of that, because football would, otherwise, cease to be a game and become genealogy with stadiums.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, things all too often go in reverse order: first, belonging is sought, and only then is achievement recognized. As if identity is the result, not the framework. As if one must prove the right to a goal before the goal is recognized.

And somewhere there lies the problem, not in the players, but in the need to turn even the simplest thing into a complex construction of divisions. As if it is constantly necessary to prove that the shared jersey is actually not shared.

It is time to stop feeding that narrative on itself.

Because the ball, unlike politics and comments, never makes a distinction. It either goes in or it doesn't. And everything else, all those labels, additions, explanations, and affiliations, remain off the field, in the polluted space between occupying desires and poor patriotic defense in the media space.

And that is why sports commentators, analysts, and even former players should finally take responsibility for the language they use, so that a representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina is exactly that: a Bosnian and Herzegovinian in the national team jersey. And when he takes off that sacred jersey, he can be whatever he personally decides to be. Without anyone, in someone else's name and according to someone else's interest, reducing him to a footnote in someone's narrative.