Ahead Of Žilina: New Season, Same Hajduk

Hajduk Split starts its 2026/2027 season today in the 1st qualifying round of the UEFA Europa League against MŠK Žilina, a team Hajduk fans remember for the wrong reasons; Žilina shockingly eliminated Hajduk from the qualifiers back in 2009. But the real talking point of preseason wasn’t the club’s plethora of new signings and outgoing players. It was Marko Livaja and his refusal to obey coach Gonzalo Garcia and sporting director Robert Graf; a problem that could and should have been solved months ago, and one that only exists because of the way Hajduk keeps doing business.

Three men have shaped this saga, and it’s worth keeping them straight. Garcia was hired first, brought in by then-sporting-director Francois Vitali. Twenty-one days later, Vitali was replaced by Goran Vučević; his approach appeared to differ significantly from Garcia’s, with the sporting director often perceived as being closer to Livaja and the players. Vučević is gone too now, replaced at the end of last season by Robert Graf, who is very much aligned with Garcia’s vision. Three different sporting directors, three different relationships with Livaja, and a coach who’s been constant throughout. That mismatch is the root of everything that has since followed at Poljud.

The Bled Running Incident

Here’s the story, for those who missed it. During Hajduk’s preseason training camp in Bled, Slovenia, Marko Livaja went out for drinks with seven teammates after a team-building exercise and watching Croatia-Ghana on June 27th. Garcia and Graf learned about the outing immediately and confronted the players. Initially, a pay cut was proposed as punishment, but it was reduced to running laps at the next morning’s training session instead.

Livaja never ran those laps. He was sent home to Split shortly after, and in a statement, Hajduk revealed this wasn’t his first incident of the preseason. He had also refused to sign the new season’s code of conduct and skipped the kit photoshoot before the running incident ever happened. None of this should have surprised anyone: tensions between “Maradona from Kaštela” and the Spanish coach had been building for months.

Oil and Water: Garcia and Livaja

The relationship had been fraying since at least November. Hajduk were playing Rijeka at Rujevica, down 4-0 around the 60th minute, when Garcia asked his captain to warm up. Livaja refused, citing stomach issues, though he was also just back from injury, which wasn’t really the point for him.

Garcia went on a small run of good form without his captain, with Michele Šego taking the striker role and flourishing — 13 goals on the season, largely because Šego offered exactly what Garcia’s system demands and Livaja’s game lacks: constant movement and defensive work rate. It raised an obvious question around the fanbase and media: was Hajduk actually better off without Livaja?

Šego and the team cooled off after the winter break, and Garcia started giving Livaja more minutes again in the second half of the season. But the underlying tension never went away. After a match against Lokomotiva in March, Livaja told reporters: “The coach has his style of football he likes, I think differently.” Both men insisted publicly that their relationship was fine. It clearly wasn’t.

This is where Vučević’s split loyalty made things worse. He offered Livaja a contract extension three times, a detail Livaja himself revealed at that same Lokomotiva press conference, almost certainly promising his captain the deal would be finalised by season’s end. It never was. And after Vučević left the club, president Ivan Bilić did nothing to resolve it. When Graf arrived at the end of last season, settling Livaja’s contract status should have been priority one for everybody involved.

By that point, it was obvious the player and the coach didn’t get along, and results weren’t good enough to paper over it. A boiling point was coming one way or another; that’s just what happens when a problem is left to brew for months. The fanbase has split as a result: as much as Livaja has given the club, that credit isn’t infinite. There has to be a hierarchy, something Hajduk struggled with for years under President Lukša Jakobušić, when senior players often outranked the manager in practice.

A Feud Hajduk Refuses to End

After the squad returned to Split, Livaja came back to training only to be told to finally run the laps he’d skipped in Bled. He refused, walked off, and did gym work alone instead. Next day’s meeting produced a decision to keep him in the squad — which, to me and to plenty of Hajduk fans, is just kicking the problem down the road until it explodes again. Graf and Garcia are building a team of players fully committed to the club, on a tighter budget. Livaja, by his actions this summer, has made himself the exception to that plan.

The only logical solution was to sell Livaja, however much the fanbase doesn’t want to hear it. A player can’t operate above his manager and act like a diva repeatedly without consequence, especially not when Garcia’s system explicitly favours mobile, high-work-rate strikers over him. Hajduk is already rebuilding: Zvonimir Šarlija is gone, and Filip Krovinović and Hugo Guillamon have both been placed on the transfer list. With Livaja holding the biggest contract at the club by a wide margin, moving him on was always the cleanest answer if he wasn’t committed to the club and the coach.

Instead, he’s back in the fold. Livaja returned to full team training in the days before tonight’s Žilina tie and eventually did the laps he was supposed to. The reconciliation may keep the peace for now, but nothing about the underlying mismatch between player and coach has actually changed. Hajduk didn’t solve the problem this summer. They just postponed it, again, and now they’re starting a new campaign with it unresolved.