Welcome, everybody to soccer 101.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and this week we are heading to the Balkans to a country where football is not just a sport.

It's a mirror of history itself.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's domestic game is one of the most fascinating and complicated stories in European football.

The Premier League of Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded in 2000, born out of the wreckage of the 1990s

war as a deliberate act of post-conflict nation building.

It hasn't always been peaceful.

There have been reminders of the Civil War in certain domestic derbies, but it's a country

in a league that has produced talents like Edinjeko and Miriam Piannich, who helped carry

a young nation to its first ever World

Cup in 2014 and back again in 26, Graham Ruffin. Shall we get into the Bosnia of it all?

Let's do it. I'm excited to talk about a country that is near and dear to my heart and a country

that I definitely wasn't chased out of in August 2013. That didn't happen. I don't know where you heard that, Taylor Rockwell. It's been a while since you've told that story, and I'm sure there are people who have not. The floor is yours. Okay, I'll try and keep this concise. So, this is when, this, this was when the US were playing a lot of games in Europe, right? You remember this of the

Klinsman era, Klinsman wanted to test himself against European teams, and this is like pre-Nations

league time, so you could do it, you could go to Europe and play a bunch of games, and so around

that time, I was kind of unofficially the New York Times Europe guy for when the US national

team played in Europe.

So I went to Cyprus to watch the US play in Ukraine.

I went to Vienna.

I went to...

Where else did I go?

Germany.

...