The Fall of the House of Luksa
An era at Hajduk crashes to an end. Having re-established the club as a force, does the era end with Hajduk in a better place?
In late 2020, Hajduk were coming out of the first major COVID lockdown on the back of one of their worst seasons ever - 2019/20 had seen them knocked out of Europe by Gzira of Malta and finish 5th in the league, able to reach European football in 2020 only due to it being the one season Croatia had had enough coefficient to allow a fifth side in Europe. The Autumn of the following season would be similarly dire with Hajduk but the future would be set in November 2020 as Luksa Jakobusic would be elected president of the club.
After three and a half years in post, Jakobusic has resigned from his post as the senior leadership of the club has collectively fallen on their swords and left Hajduk at a very different crossroads to the one they were at when Jakobusic took over. How did we get here, what happened to break it all to pieces and where do Hajduk go from here?
The Past
Jakobusic’s first role in post was to stabilise the club, to which end his first major decision was to bring in Paolo Tramezzani as Head Coach followed soon after by, on the winter deadline day in 2021, bringing Marko Livaja to the club as well as appointing Gorica’s Mindaugas Nikolicius as Sporting Director. His decisions immediately paid off as Hajduk lost only two of their last fifteen league games that season to scrape into Europe by a single point.
Tramezzani left at the end of the season to be replaced by the first project of the Jakobusic era - Jens Gustafsson. Gustafsson joined after a prolonged spell at Norrkoping. He would last 14 league games, being doomed after a 3-2 loss to Slaven Belupo and while, under replacement Valdas Dambrauskas, they would only lose two more games between then and the end of the season, they did not get all that close to Dinamo in first. They would bring in more major names during the season, such as Filip Krovinovic, Dario Melnjak and Nikola Kalinic and, with Livaja as player of the season for the league and the club winning their first of two successive cups, there was the real feeling that the club were on the cusp of something.
That something would fall apart quickly in the late summer of 2022. Dambrauskas would barely last into September as Hajduk stumbled out of the gates. Mislav Karoglan would be caretaker boss until Ivan Leko could join in the winter and, under Leko, things never seemed to really click before he left the club in October 2023. Unlike in the prior two seasons, Hajduk’s early season form hadn’t been enough to knock them out of the title race and, reappointing Mislav Karoglan, Hajduk would aim to go all out for the title. They would bring in Ivan Perisic on loan, hoping that in spite of injury, his personality around the club would help. They would bring in Josip Brekalo on loan, having taken him from under the noses of Dinamo - improving themselves while also damaging a direct contender.
Alongside all of this, Hajduk’s business state would improve. Their membership numbers, which prior to Jakobusic taking over, were around 45k, multiplied - they would pass their former record of 55k in warly 2022, break through 75k later that year and now sit with over 107,000 members of the club (by comparison, only 5 German clubs exceed that, all in far bigger cities than Split). Their youth academy and development of first team players would produce impressive transfer profits, a net transfer profit of around 20 millions Euros and, of course, much of Europe would pay attention to their Youth League run in 22/23.
But none of it would matter. The Spring of 2024 would put in stark light the issues with Hajduk and the issues with Karoglan.
The Present
So why did it all fall apart now? The most simplistic answer is that four losses around the March international break ended Hajduk’s season in terms of it having any sort of hope or meaning. On top of that, the manner in which they did it essentially ensured that the sins of the season would all come up all at once.
Mislav Karoglan had one other managerial role aside from being given the reins at Hajduk twice. That lasted a mere three games at Istra. What was it that Istra saw so quickly that Hajduk were prepared to ignore?
From the evidence of the games themselves, Karoglan’s primary issue isn’t an uncommon one, even among more experienced managers. He has a plan A. If Plan A doesn’t pan out, his Plan B is simply to do Plan A, but better. If that doesn’t pan out, then it tends to feel panicked. From my watching, we saw two very different Hajduks under Karoglan - the one where they could get a goal early, settle and eventually come to play well for a full game and the one where they couldn’t and they would struggle. As a result, their form was always fragile at best as they alternated between flattering to deceive and dominating. In a sport as utterly unforgiving as football, when that form broke, what would be left was devastating.
Against Lokomotiva, an early red card for Hajduk would see them quickly fold against an enigmatic team and late pressure would not be enough to recover things. Against Dinamo in the league, they would have much of the play but a mistake to allow Bruno Petkovic space condemned them to a 1-0 loss. Against Dinamo in the Cup, they would see another 1-0 loss, conceding early, pressing hard late but ultimately coming up short. Finally, against Rijeka, they simply gave up - in a must win game, Karoglan set up for a 0-0 draw and ended with the 1-0 defeat that such negativity should always deserve.
One can point at bad luck, such as Niko Sigur crashing the bar at the death in the Cup game vs Dinamo, or point at injuries denying Hajduk the availability of defensive players at the start of the spring and attacking ones in the middle of it, but with what is a squad littered with big names for Croatia, it’s hard to dodge the feeling that this side should have done more.
After the Rijeka game, things happened quickly. Jakobusic left the club the following day - in spite of all the clear improvements he’d made to the club, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he managed to get every decision regarding the position of head coach wrong in some way: Jens Gustafsson was shown up at this level quickly, Valdas Dambrauskas was done away with far too hastily, Ivan Leko never clicked and Mislav Karoglan was simply not able to deal with a title race where every game counts.
Karoglan would follow the same day and it’s hard not to have seen his final game against Rijeka as much other than a disasterclass in how Hajduk approached that particular game. Mindaugas Nikolicius has also announced he will depart at the end of the season leaving Hajduk down a Head Coach, Sporting Director and President.
The barometer for success at the club, as set by Jakobusic, was to win the HNL. They have failed. While Hajduk are undoubtedly in a better place than three and a half years ago, where does this leave the club?
The Strategy
When looking at the Head Coach situation, Hajduk have been mightily reactive and this is perhaps the biggest issue of their past 3.5 years. Gustafsson was hired because Hajduk needed a project, but they didn’t really grasp what the project was so they brought in Dambrauskas because Nikolicius had worked with him well before rather than because they necessarily believed whole-heartedly that he was the right man for the job. Had they done so, they would surely not have dispensed with him so readily. Mislav Karoglan impressed in a caretaker role, but the club felt they needed a name that would associate them with success, so they pushed for Ivan Leko as the biggest name coach they could get that would also be a marriage of convenience (as Leko knew a title win in 23/24 would place him as lead candidate to replace Zlatko Dalic as national team coach) without either party seeming to work out whether a marriage of convenience was or was not a good fit. With a name having failed, particularly as the players didn’t seem to react well to Leko, they went back to Karoglan, ignoring the massive red flag of his spell at Istra.
For a club that seems to be yearning for an overarching plan, the sort of plan that takes any manager 18 months to fully implement, they have been inconsistent in trying to stick to a plan and impatient whenever such a plan has fallen off. While Jakobusic and Nikolicius undoubtedly deserve credit for their negotiating skills in being able to get the players they have into the club and (presumably) happy, hindsight has allowed it to appear scattergun and as if Hajduk’s recruitment has been around getting temporary sugar highs into the club rather than things that actually properly make sense. The club didn’t need Brekalo or Perisic to reach their goals, but they could have done with a more solid back-up for Livaja, a solid holding midfielder and something in full-back areas to prevent the rotation of players they’ve had to do this Spring.
In addition to that, we can look at the departing youth products over Jakobusic’s spell that arguably didn’t have to (I’m not including the likes of Vuskovic and Biuk) - Darko Nejasmic, now back to being one of the league’s better midfielders; Tonio Teklic, who went on to be the best midfielder in the league in the same season at Varazdin; Michele Sego, a regular now at Varazdin; Ivan Brnic, who flew through Maribor and is now in the squad at Olympiacos; Lumbardh Dellova, now a regular Kosovo international after starring for Ballkani in Europe; and Marko Brkljaca, a clear future star. Some of these may have needed another environment but, save for Nejasmic, all left the club for free. All showed more than enough since departing the club to suggest they’d have been able to contribute at Hajduk sooner or later.
We can rightly praise Jakobusic and Hajduk’s team for getting fans involved, getting Poljud busier, increasing income streams and boosting membership to new highs. But to keep all of those things going, you have to ally that with progress on the pitch and Hajduk, for all they can point at legends on a team sheet and youth products on the balance sheet, have not given the fans the team that they deserve.
The future
Hajduk have a couple of months to come up with a plan and it had better be a good one. To attempt to push themselves to the title this season, they boosted the side with loans - Brekalo, as already mentioned, Laszlo Kleinheisler and also Ivan Perisic, who has an option for next season that was predicated on Hajduk not self-destructing.
Which they kind of have.
Also take out Mikanovic, Nikola Kalinic, Odjidja-Ofoe and potentially Filip Cuic as ending contracts. Then ask yourself, if Hajduk are rebuilding and have lost the smooth talker that got names into the club, do others also turn around and express a wish to leave? Marko Livaja has certainly had a disrupted season through injury and the feelings of the national team’s fans outside of Split - could he turn around and decide hanging about isn’t worth it? Does that decision making equation enter anyone else’s heads?
In a way, Hajduk’s situation reminds me of a baseballing one, specifically Max Scherzer in the 23 season at the Mets asking the question “Will you contend next season” and leaving if the answer is no, which it was. It would be the question on my mind were I a Hajduk player and hitting 28 or older next season. The question that has to be posed is how big a rebuild does the squad need, not does it need a rebuild.
Rijeka, who struck Karoglan’s death knell, serve as a counterpoint - they got coaching appointments right, the make game decisions correctly and brought in what they needed when they needed it. Last season may have seen them a joke, but they corrected course with Jakirovic and then Sopic and complemented the journey the club were already on rather than jumping between paths as Hajduk have. While obviously few would seriously suggest they’d rather have Marco Pasalic over Josip Brekalo in a side on paper, the former has certainly been more effective and impactful than the latter this Spring and only one was on the scoresheet this past weekend.
Hajduk’s answer won’t necessarily be to just do what Rijeka do, but they need to discover the continuity in approach that Rijeka have shown throughout their appointments. Even Serse Cosmi, as weird and disastrous as he was, was consistent with what Rijeka did. Failures don’t change the direction the path leads towards, they merely shape the journey.
Hajduk have to decide their direction and stick on the path. That will mean personnel changes and a squad rebuild. It may mean a lot of pain and, in the short term, it’s hard not to think that whichever path they take from their current crossroads, they all lead into the dark forest.
But as Rijeka show, through the forest is light and, ultimately, the fall of Jakobusic, Nikolicius and Karoglan shows little more than the folly of changing path in the middle of that forest.