FC Bayern – Hasan Salihamidzic on fleeing Yugoslavia: “Howled every day”

Bayern Munich’s sports director Hasan Salihamidzic suffered greatly from his flight from what was then Yugoslavia to Germany. The separation from his family put a lot of strain on him, he said in an interview with the DFL magazine.

“During the first three months I cried every day. Dad, mom and my sister were the most important things for me,” said the long-time professional. His father wanted to bring him “absolutely to safety”, which is why his family sent him to Hamburg in 1992, where his career as a footballer began.

When Salihamidzic moved to distant Germany in the summer of 1992 at the age of 15, the war front ran “very close to our town of Jablanica in Bosnia”. As the 44-year-old had already revealed in the Amazon documentary “FC Bayern – Behind the Legend”, during the war he even slept with a Kalashnikov under his pillow.

“Before I left, I had written the most important sentences and expressions in a small book. One of them was: ‘I want a lemonade’, Salihamidzic also looked at his first experiences in Germany. The FCB sports director is convinced that football in the Integration in a foreign country can help enormously. “In football, what you can do counts. Not who you are And football also makes it relatively easy to make friends. “