For some, the World Cup is a unifying force like no other

“For us, winning the World Cup was as much a victory for our parents as it was for us,” said Youri Djorkaeff, a member of the French team that lifted the World Cup on home soil in 1998, in a FIFA documentary that was aired before Brazil 2014.

“For us it was like a big revolution. We made France recognize its own communities, its differences, and the mix of cultures,” said Christian Karembeu, also a member of the squad, to CNN.

The rush of emotion and cultural belonging a player feels when they stand shoulder to shoulder with their team-mates as they sing their national anthems, united as a single entity is a feeling that words cannot do adequate justice to.

World Cups bring to nations a unifying effect that few other events can match. And it is the same with Brazil 2014.

The tackling of multicultural integration is an issue that is becoming increasingly common among many European nations as they deal with immigrants, often leading to a clash of cultures between those who come to the continent in search of a better life and those whose family trees have always been firmly rooted in Europe.

In the build-up to France 98, politicians shied away from the team, deriding football and calling it a working man’s sport.

At the end of the tournament, a million people danced down the Avenue de Champs-Elysées. They were a force of humanity united in celebration of the achievement of the blacks, blondes et beurs - the blacks, the whites and the players of North African extraction that made up Les Bleus’ World Cup winning team.

What followed was a phenomenon called L’Effet Zidane, the Zidane Effect – which was characterised by a greater acceptance and broad-mindedness towards France’s immigrant population by its predominantly white population. It was a phenomenon that politicians were cottoning onto quickly as well.

“Jacques Chirac, a haughty classical bourgeois of the right, wore the colours of his national team,” writes Andrew Hussey of The Observer. “On the left, the former Minister for Culture,

Jack Lang, known mostly for highbrow tastes and disdain for proletarian culture, said that he had dreamed of such a moment throughout his career.”

It is this acceptance that could well spread in places like Switzerland and Bosnia, whose teams – for very different reasons – have done them proud at Brazil 2014.

“When my father came to France, he didn’t even have a pair of shoes to wear,” recalls a nostalgic Zinedine Zidane in that FIFA documentary. “For him to see his son lift the World Cup a few years later was truly special.”

Like Ismail Zidane, many people moved to Western Europe in search of a better future for their families. Switzerland is now home to a several thousands of people who left the former Yugoslavia as it was on the verge of collapse so that their families wouldn’t be drawn into the conflict that was sure to follow.

Striker Admir Mehmedi and midfielders Granit Xhaka, Blerim Dzemaili, Valon Behrami and Xherdan Shaqiri are all of Albanian origin. They were either born in the former Yugoslavia or soon after their parents left Eastern Europe.

Forward Haris Seferovic is of Bosnian extraction, while his fellow strikers Mario Gavranovic’s and Josip Drmic’s families are from Croatia. In addition, both Ricardo Rodriguez and Philippe Senderos have Spanish parentage.

And Johan Djourou? “His father, Joachim, is a laboratory pharmacist who was working in Geneva when he met Daniele, a nurse,” writes Glenn Moore in The Independent. “They met, they married.

“But then they parted and Joachim went back to the Ivory Coast, met Angeline, and had a son, Johan. Joachim then returned to Switzerland, and to Daniele, who adopted Johan, formally and emotionally, as her own. Which is how this son of Africa came to represent Switzerland in the World Cup.”

Because of the culture and way of life that the families of these players bring to Switzerland, they may not be easily accepted by the generations of Swiss who’ve spent all of their lives in their homeland, leading to tensions across ethnic and cultural lines.

But when these players are on the pitch, wearing the same red shirt that their teammates are, singing the Swiss Psalm, together in the bonds of kinship and country, irrespective of whether their parents were born in Thun or Tirana, they represented a united Switzerland that was greater than the sum of its parts.

It was this message that the Schweizer Nati were broadcasting to the millions of Swiss back home. If they could live and work in togetherness, so could those at home. Football, therefore, served as an example and symbol of racial, cultural and ethnic integration.

But while some families were fortunate enough to leave Yugoslavia, many others weren’t.

The families of the 23 men who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina at the World Cup are just a fraction of the thousandsof ethnic Bosnians who still carry the physical and psychological scars of the horrors of the Bosnian Civil War that terrorised their nation for four terrible years.

More than 100,000 Bosnians died, and even today, their families are struggling to deal with their loss. Vedad Ibisevic is one of them.

“Twenty-two years ago, Serb neighbours invaded his mother’s village, Pijuke, and called out familiar names on a bullhorn, promising that no one would be hurt,” narrates ESPN’s Wright Thompson, paraphrasing this chilling tale. “They murdered everyone who emerged. The ethnic-cleansing militia tortured and killed as many Muslims as they could find, burning down every house. They split his grandfather’s head open.

Ibisevic fled his hometown on a grossly overcrowded bus, fortunate not be on a list of people who would be taken to the concentration camp of Srebenica, now synonymous with the grisly murders and large-scale ethnic cleansing that characterised the Bosnian War.

Ibisevic and his family lived in makeshift huts in the woods and in tents inside overcrowded refugee camps filled with the desperate and despondent, never staying in one place for more than he few days at a time.

He was seven years old.

As the war ended, Vedad and his family moved to St. Louis in the United States. But he always vowed to return to Bosnia and rebuild what was so brutally taken from his family. In the States, despite possessing only a smattering of English, he graduated high school early and played soccer at St. Louis University, says Thompson.

After failed attempts to qualify for tournaments from 1998 to 2010, Bosnia faced a two-legged playoff against Portugal to decide which team would go to Euro 2012. Although they lost to the Iberians, their performances gave Bosnia’s sons such as Edin Dzeko, Emir Spahic, Asmir Begovic and Ibisevic that added initiative to qualify for Brazil 2014.

In qualifying for the World Cup, Bosnia and Herzegovina were not just representing their country. They were representing their hopes, their dreams and their emotions, which are heavy with the memories of the Bosnian War.

Ibisevic scored his country’s first ever goal at the World Cup in his nation’s 2-1 defeat to Argentina. Although most will regard the goal as a mere footnote at the tournament, to the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it will be a symbol of how far they’ve come as a united nation since their country was torn apart by conflict.

“People from other countries,” recalls Ibisevic in that piece on ESPN, “they don’t understand. To them, it’s just another soccer game and the goal I scored is just a goal. But it’s not just a goal. I think the people who know me and know my family members, they have the same feeling.

“It’s not just a goal. It’s much more than that. It’s the whole story.”