Croatia has no official national sport: no law or government decree has ever named one. By popular consent the title belongs to football, which is governed by the Croatian Football Federation (founded 1912), fills the country’s biggest stadiums and has given a nation of nearly 3.9 million people three World Cup medals (silver in 2018, bronze in 1998 and 2022). Handball and water polo are the strongest challengers, each with Olympic gold medals to show, and Split adds a beach game of its own, picigin. Below, each contender gets its turn: origins, governing body, trophies and home grounds.
Why Croatian Law Is Silent and Football Fills the Gap
Some countries settle the question on paper. Mexico’s president named charrería the national sport by decree in 1933, and Canada passed an act of parliament in 1994 for ice hockey and lacrosse. Croatia has never done anything similar. The state’s highest sporting honour, the Franjo Bučar State Award for Sport, is open to every discipline rather than reserved for one; the men’s water polo team, for example, received it in 1996, the year it won Olympic silver in Atlanta.
Without a legal answer, the measure becomes participation and attention. The Croatian Football League (HNL), the top division, is the country’s most popular league by attendance, television audience and revenue. Football is also the sport played most widely, at amateur and professional level and across every age group from Istria to Slavonia. On every practical test, football is the de facto national game, with handball and water polo as the serious rivals for affection.
Organised Croatian sport itself runs back to one man. Franjo Bučar (1866–1946), often called the father of modern Croatian sport, founded the Croatian Sports Association in Zagreb on 8 October 1909, when Croatia-Slavonia was still part of Austria-Hungary. He was the initiator behind the introduction of football, gymnastics, ice skating, alpine skiing, ice hockey and fencing in Croatia, played a leading part in the Croatian Sokol gymnastics movement, and in 1914 became the first president of the sports federation he had founded.
Football: From the 1912 Federation to Three World Cup Medals
The Croatian Football Federation (Hrvatski nogometni savez, HNS) dates its foundation to 13 June 1912, when the football section of Bučar’s association was set up with Milovan Zoričić as its first president. For most of the twentieth century Croatian players represented Yugoslavia, and the modern national side played its first match as an independent team on 17 October 1990, beating the United States 2–1 in Zagreb in the now familiar red-and-white checkered shirt. FIFA admitted the federation on 3 July 1992 and UEFA followed on 17 June 1993.
The rise afterwards was steep. Croatia entered the FIFA ranking in 125th place in March 1994 and climbed to third by January 1999, the fastest ascent in the ranking’s history. At the 1998 World Cup in France, its first as an independent country, the team beat Germany 3–0 in the quarter-final and finished third; Davor Šuker took the Golden Shoe with six goals in seven games.
The second peak came twenty years later. At the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Zlatko Dalić’s side won three knockout games after extra time, two of them on penalties, and beat England 2–1 in the semi-final before losing the final 4–2 to France. Luka Modrić won the Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player, and an estimated half a million people welcomed the squad home in Zagreb. Croatia became the second-smallest country by population, after Uruguay, to reach a World Cup final. In Qatar in 2022 it beat Japan and Brazil on penalties and took bronze by defeating Morocco 2–1, and in June 2023 it reached the final of the UEFA Nations League, losing to Spain on penalties.
Maksimir, Poljud and the Eternal Derby
Club football in Croatia is dominated by two cities at either end of the country. In Zagreb, Dinamo play at Maksimir Stadium, opened by the club HAŠK on 5 May 1912 with a wooden stand for 6,000 spectators. Rebuilt in 1948, 1998 and 2011, it now seats 25,912 and has been the main home of the national team since 1990. Dinamo are the most successful club in the country, with 26 league titles and 18 Croatian Cups, and remain the only Croatian side to have won a European trophy, the 1966–67 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, beating Leeds United in the final.
On the Adriatic coast, Hajduk Split were founded on 13 February 1911 by Split students who had been studying in Prague. Since 1979 they have played at Stadion Poljud, whose seashell roof by architect Boris Magaš spans 206 by 47 metres. Poljud once held 55,000 and now seats 33,987. Hajduk have won six Croatian league titles, and their supporters’ group, Torcida, founded in 1950, is the oldest organised fan group in Europe.
Matches between the two are known as the Eternal Derby (Vječni derbi). The rivalry began in the 1920s, when Zagreb’s Građanski met Hajduk in the Yugoslav championship, and more than 200 official derbies have been played since 1946. Between them, Dinamo and Hajduk have won 32 of the 35 Croatian championships contested since the HNL began in February 1992.
Handball: Atlanta 1996, Athens 2004 and a Home Final in 2025
If any sport can claim to rival football, it is handball, where Croatia has won more at the highest level than in any other team game. The first public handball match on Croatian soil was played at a high school in Varaždin on 29 May 1930, and the Croatian Handball Federation (Hrvatski rukometni savez) joined the European and international federations in 1992.
Four years later Croatia pulled off a famous Olympic upset. Croatia went to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta after finishing fifth at that year’s European Championship, with coach Velimir Kljaić appointed only 38 days before the Games. They beat the reigning champions Russia in the group, then France in the semi-final, and won the final 27–26 against Sweden in front of 25,000 spectators at the Georgia Dome. Under Lino Červar the team then won the 2003 World Championship and a second Olympic gold at Athens in 2004, a world and Olympic double.
Croatia has since reached three European Championship finals (2008, 2010 and 2020) and hosted the men’s world championship in 2009, losing the final to France. In January 2025 it co-hosted the championship with Denmark and Norway, and the team coached by Dagur Sigurðsson reached the final, losing 32–26 to Denmark. Arena Zagreb, the largest indoor sports hall in the country, is the usual stage for the big club and national matches. At club level, RK Zagreb won the EHF Champions League in 1992 and 1993, and RK Bjelovar had won the European Cup back in 1972.
Water Polo in Zagreb, Split and Dubrovnik
Water polo suits a country that stretches the length of the eastern Adriatic, and it is the third great Croatian team sport. The men’s national team, run by the Croatian Water Polo Federation, was the first Croatian national side in any Olympic team sport to win gold at the Olympics, the world championship and the European championship. It became Olympic champion at London 2012, European champion in 2010 and world champion three times, in 2007, 2017 and 2024. It also took Olympic silver in 1996, 2016 and Paris 2024, where it lost the final to Serbia.
The club game is spread along the coast and in the capital. HAVK Mladost of Zagreb, the water polo section of the University of Zagreb’s sports society, has been European champion seven times (1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1990, 1991 and 1996) and was named best club of the twentieth century by the European swimming federation, LEN. VK Jug of Dubrovnik and VK Jadran of Split, which won back-to-back titles in 1992 and 1993, have also been European champions, and POŠK of Split won in 1999. Two members of the national team have entered the International Swimming Hall of Fame: Perica Bukić as a player and Ratko Rudić as a coach.
Picigin on Bačvice Beach and the Individual Champions
One contender has no federation at all. Picigin was first played in 1908 on Bačvice, the sandy town beach of Split, by students back from Prague who found the water too shallow for water polo. Usually five players stand in a rough pentagram in knee-deep water and slap a small ball, often a tennis ball stripped of its felt, from palm to palm. Catching is not allowed and the aim is simply to keep the ball out of the sea. Two players, the sidruni (anchors), hold their positions while three trkači (runners) dive after loose balls. There is no score and no winner, which is why picigin is loved in Split but never mentioned as a national sport.
Croatia’s individual champions have made just as strong a claim on the public. Janica Kostelić won four Olympic gold medals in alpine skiing at Salt Lake City 2002 and Turin 2006, the only woman to win four Olympic golds in alpine skiing. Goran Ivanišević won Wimbledon in 2001, still the only player to take the singles title as a wildcard, Croatia won the Davis Cup in 2005 and 2018, and high jumper Blanka Vlašić was world champion in 2007 and 2009. Basketball has its own history, too: KK Split won three straight EuroLeague titles from 1989 to 1991, and Dražen Petrović is enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
None of these achievements has led to a law, and none needs to. Football remains the game most Croatians play, watch and argue about, from Maksimir to Poljud, while handball and water polo hold the Olympic gold. For more on the country those teams represent, see our guide to Zagreb, the Croatian capital and our overview of the countries that border Croatia. Hungary, which beat Croatia to several water polo titles, tells a different sporting story: read about the national sport of Hungary.