It was arguably the game of the tournament so far. Georgia’s 3-1 loss to Turkey on Tuesday afternoon in their opening tie of Euro 2024 belied a stellar performance that kept the result in doubt all the way to the last minute of extra time. And, for all the disappointment at the final whistle, Levan Kobiashvili could not have been happier to have been at the Westfalenstadion in rainy North Rhine-Westphalia.
The first player in Georgia’s history to have 100 caps, a former captain of the men’s team, and today the president of the Georgian Football Federation, Kobiashvili’s assessment of the last three decades of his country’s footballing history was succinct: it had, until now, “all been a failure”.
This had been Georgia’s first appearance at a major footballing tournament in its history as an independent republic, and the skilful and passionate performance was surely a platform for further progress.
“Our fans have been waiting for success for 30 years,” said Kobiashvili, 46, with pride. “Why? Well it starts with our history.”
Football is said to have been introduced to Georgia at the turn of the 19th century by British industrialists and workers landing in Poti, a region along the eastern Black Sea coast. But it was the cultural and economic legacy of being subsumed into the Soviet Union that has defined so much about this small footballing nation.
A high point for Georgian football within the Soviet Union was a victory for its leading club, Dinamo Tbilisi, in the 1981 Cup Winners’ Cup, a triumph claimed for the USSR by then general secretary of the Communist party, Leonid Brezhnev.
The Guardian writer Craig McCracken evocatively recalled his experience of watching that team from Georgia’s capital play against Liverpool 40 years ago: “Who are these footballing supermen and in what sinister Soviet sports laboratory have they been manufactured? Why don’t they smile more when they’re really, really good at football? And can communism be a bad thing if it produces athletes like this?”
Today, Georgia’s team play with smiles on their faces. But in the public consciousness, and for many abroad, the country’s footballers had long had a reputation for being skilful but also erratic, capable of great beauty yet also moody and difficult to make work as a team.
In Erik Scott’s book Soccer Artistry and the Secret Police: Georgian Football in the Multi-ethnic Soviet Empire, this mythology is traced back to the early 1920s when Georgian players were called the “great Uruguayans” in reference to their South American style of play. But it was the Soviets who amplified it.
The USSR, of which Georgia was a part after the Bolshevik invasion of 1921, used football to cast itself as a harmonious multi-ethnic entity. Georgia’s place was partly defined by the explosive male folk dancing for which the country was known.
An official fan guide published in 1960 saw leading stars of Dinamo Tbilisi sketched as singing and making acrobatic leaps towards a football.
A photograph taken after a 1965 friendly between the USSR and Brazil, of its four Georgian stars of the time posing with a shirtless Pelé, was widely disseminated by the Soviet press.
Yet when Dinamo Tbilisi gained its first Soviet Top League title in 1964, it was linked to the discipline instilled by the Russian coach Gavriil Kachalin, while Scott writes in his book of a 1949 guide that contrasted the impulsive, albeit exciting, Georgian players with the stoic Russian keeper and coach. Georgian flair tempered by Russian steel.
It is a complicated legacy. There was certainly investment in football by the Soviets. One of Stalin’s bloodiest henchmen, Lavrenty Beria, promoted Dinamo Tbilisi’s development, even stepping in to correct the records when the results didn’t go the team’s way.
The All-Union Dinamo Sport Society was linked to the state security and secret police entity, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). The club’s stadium was named in honour of Beria, who, like Stalin, was a Georgian.
As a result, there was an expectation for footballing success after independence but also the seeds had been planted of the subsequent failure, said George Kipiani, 35, technical director at Locomotive Tbilisi, and also the son of one of Georgia’s most celebrated playmakers, David Kipiani.
“In the Soviet times, it was a centralised system,” he said. “When we started to do things on our own, manage competitions, coach, grow people, build new stadiums, we had nothing. We were not prepared for it.”
Levan Gvinianidze, 39, who has a popular football video channel, and who was previously head of PR at Dinamo Tbilisi, said Georgia’s first qualifying campaign for the 1994 World Cup in the US was the pinnacle of the last three decades, with Georgia beating a Bulgarian team that included Hristo Stoichkov.
“And that was because of inertia,” Gvinianidze said. “The Soviet system had been working in many ways – there were at least proper pitches. There was a system, good or bad, but there was a system. But by the 1990s there were no pitches for kids to train on. There were there was no food, no lighting, no showers to have a shower after the game.”
Georgia emerged from a civil war between 1991 and 1993 as a poor and unhappy country.
In 2003, the non-violent Rose revolution saw the back of the Soviet hangover administration of Eduard Shevardnadze but the footballing results over the following decades remained quite consistently woeful, with the team falling outside the world top 150 in the Fifa rankings by 2015.
Domestic league attendances hit rock bottom with even the veracity of the results put into question by a series of match-fixing scandals.
With a population of 3.7 million people, perhaps Georgians were expecting too much. But those expectations were there, said Kobiashvili.
“It was a big weight on our shoulders that became heavier as time went on,” Kobiashvili said. “These campaigns added up as this period of lack of success continued. It just got worse.”
There were always stars in Georgia’s team. Few who saw the dribbling skills of Georgi Kinkladze, who played for Manchester City between 1995 and 1998, would doubt it. But there was a cultural problem as well as a lack of infrastructure, said Kobiashvili.
“The main thing missing, and I have always been very open about this, not only now but when I was playing and leading the national team, is that we always lacked self criticism and we never played well as team,” he said.
“We always had good individual players who played for top European clubs but when we got together it didn’t click. We didn’t manage to find that team spirit and togetherness.”
The key to Georgia’s recent success has been investment and a huge change in psychology that saw a shedding of some of the old stereotypes and insecurities, suggested Kobiashvili, who took over the Georgian Football Federation in 2015.
Thirty-seven football pitches have been renovated since 2016, and 18 are in construction. In 2015, there were 14,676 registered players but that number is closer to 40,000 today. Just 200,000 attended a top flight domestic game nine years ago, but it was up to 2.6 million by 2022.
The national team has also undergone branding. The country’s motto is “Strength is in Unity” and in the inner collar of the players’ latest jerseys is written “Strength is in me”.
Gvinianidze, who was involved in the rebranding project, said it was a conscious attempt to break from the Soviet mentality in which “individuality was not a big deal”.
“This rebranding served the purpose of regaining all the power to individuals and then these individuals when they come together they make this unity that can reach a higher ground,” he said.
Georgia has in recent months been engulfed by political turmoil, as the younger generation have rejected what appears to be a realignment by its government with Moscow’s world perspective.
The hundreds of thousands that have massed on the streets of Tbilisi have received the backing of stars of the football team, including the captain, Jaba Kankava. “We have a new generation, new energy, with new vision, with new values,” said Kipiani. The national team and their fans have been looking forward to Germany for a long time. It won’t always be easy but they refuse to look back.
