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Over the last thirty years, theclaim that sport matters has been widely accepted in social science scholarship. It is considered as a constitutive element of everyday life and popular culture, within a particular historical and social setting. This setting can be a nationalist one: there is agreement in nationalism and identity scholarship that sport constitutes a major ritual of popular culture contributing to the theoretical concept of the nation as an imagined community. Hence, it is an important topic in the State of Nationalism series.

This article compares two international attempts to promote reform of power-sharing institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina: failed European Union-led efforts to promote reform of the country's constitution, which was established by the 1995 Dayton Agreement; and the recent successful reform of Bosnia-Herzegovina's institutions of football governance, promoted by the game's international and European governing bodies, FIFA and UEFA. The article outlines the history of these two reform processes and seeks to explain why FIFA and UEFA have been more successful in promoting reform in this post-conflict setting than the EU. It argues that, in contrast to the EU, which has been vague about the precise reforms expected of Bosnia-Herzegovina's politicians, leaving the details to be negotiated by domestic political elites, FIFA and UEFA were more precise in their demands and were also willing to capitalise on popular frustration with the governance of the sport and to bypass nationalist elites who stood in the way of reform.

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