The Plazma Youth Sport Games are marking their 30th anniversary this month in Split, Croatia, with finals in 10 sports spread across a week and nearly half a million young people from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia and North Macedonia taking part in qualifying. A children’s sporting festival on the Adriatic, yes. But also a neat little display of who gets to shape youth life, who funds it, and who gets to stand on the dais while everyone else runs the drills.
Who Owns the Game
On a dais overlooking the Adriatic, 20 children played chess against grandmaster Nigel Short, moving one piece at a time while celebrity coaches hovered nearby. Among them were former French Open champion Ana Ivanovic, former Burnley manager Sean Dyche and the rightwing tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The organisers call Plazma both a sporting event and a social project. They say children are encouraged to learn teamwork, collaboration and putting phones away. Fine words. The guest list tells a different story about who gets access, who gets prestige, and which names the event wants in frame.
The games have become a magnet for ambassadors from sport and public life, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Alastair Campbell. That’s the modern sponsorship circuit in miniature: public virtue, private money, and a parade of famous faces to make the whole thing look untouchable. The event now has 11 billionaires associated with it, and one of those investors is understood to be Thiel, the founder of PayPal and Palantir and a mentor to JD Vance, the US vice-president. Asked why he had chosen to take a stake in the games, Thiel did not respond and passed down the riviera with his security detail. Silence, then security. A familiar sequence.
The Funding Trail
Sponsorship deals are growing, with Coca-Cola, Topps and the Croatian telecom firm Telemach among the partners. Uefa also provides funding to the YSG, and its president, Aleksander Ceferin, used his visit to Split to praise the setup. He said: “I think that top sport, and the money that you get with top competition, should be used for the development of sport and this is the development of sport.” He declined to answer questions about his continuing battle with Fifa. The line about development lands differently when the money trail runs through football’s governing bodies, telecom firms, soft-drink giants and billionaires with security details.
Dyche, meanwhile, called the games “a brilliant, brilliant initiative” and said the girls’ mini-football final was a highlight. “It was terrific, they were playing good football; getting properly stuck into each other, properly playing,” he said. “You could feel that they felt free and were being supported in that environment.” He also said he was sceptical that something similar could have started in the UK. “It seems to me that every time you try and get an initiative off in England, there’s a million rules and regulations that make it difficult,” he said. “I know how hard it can be to get funding too and times are tough for people.”
That’s the language of managed possibility. Rules, regulations, funding, difficulty. The state and its market partners set the terms, then congratulate themselves when children manage to move inside them.
From Yugoslav Ruins to Corporate Stage
The games were founded by Zdravko Maric in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war. His motivation was not peace but countering drug problems among Croatia’s young people at the time. Slaven Maric, Zdravko’s brother, has worked on the games since their inception. He said: “It’s a lifetime project and we live with it every day. But when Zladko started it we didn’t have an idea that it would develop into this. It’s not about sport or the results, its about social life, it’s about being together. There were many issues with drug abuse [then], now it’s about bringing the kids to spend sometime together in real life.” He said attempts by esports brands to become involved in the event had been rebuffed.
That refusal matters. So does the fact that the event has still become a magnet for sponsors, billionaires and football royalty. The project began as a response to social damage after war and breakup. Thirty years on, it sits inside a polished circuit of corporate branding and elite endorsement, with the children still doing the actual work of making it look alive.
Split itself is presented as a sporting city with a contemporary population of only 160,000 people, but one that has produced Goran Ivanisevic, Bernard Vukas, Luka Modric, Branko Cikatic, Toni Kukoc and Stipe Bozic. It also has its own Olympic walk of fame, celebrating its 73 medal winners, and its own sport, picigin, played in the shallows of the Adriatic. Slaven Bilic, the former Premier League player and manager and now a YSG ambassador, said: “I’m not objective because I’ve known Zdravko for more than 30 years but it’s great that at a time when there’s a lot of negativity in the world that this can exist,” he said. “Especially in this part of the world that is supposed to be unstable.”
The games ended on Friday night with their own version of Soccer Aid, a football match between a YSG team and 11 all-stars that included Claude Makélélé, Pavel Nedved and Ibrahimovic. The all-stars were coached by Dyche. The spectacle rolled on, as these things do, with the same familiar cast: sponsors, celebrities, institutions, and a lot of talk about development while the money and the power stay where they are.