Yugoslavia v Team USA in 2021: Who Would Win?

The former Yugoslavia was a sporting force to be reckoned with until its demise in 1992. The socialist republic scored Olympic gold in wrestling, gymnastics, handball, water polo, and football.

In 1991, the country’s leading football team, Red Star Belgrade, won the coveted European Cup (today’s Champions League). Its striker Darko Pancev earned the European Golden Shoe award for most goals scored.

The country’s exploits on the football pitch extended to the basketball court. In 1980, Yugoslavia won Olympic gold on the court, albeit a good twelve years before the IOC permitted professional and NBA basketballers to compete.

But in the late 80s, its golden generation comprising of future NBA stars such as Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc, Dino Radja, and Drazen Petrovic came of age. It won the 1990 FIBA World Championship, beating the Soviet Union in the final, and repeated its heroics by winning Eurobasket in 1991.

The team was set to take their heroics to the Olympics, where they would’ve faced the might of the 1992 USA Dream Team. But of course, that never came to be as centuries-old conflicts and nationalism brought about the suspension from competition and eventual dissolution of Yugoslavia into its constituent republics.

This not only brought about the demise of Yugoslavia, but also the demise of the once-great friendship between Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic, before a car accident tragically took the life of the New Jersey Nets star. This was chronicled in the ESPN documentary, Once Brothers.

Unlike Serbia, Croatia avoided sanctions and competed in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona as an independent nation. Without the support of its former countrymen, it still put up a solid fight, making it to the final and succumbing to a dominant Dream Team, 117–85. The nation’s silver medal would offer its inhabitants a brief moment of joy that would all too soon be forgotten.