The last time Brazil hosted the World Cup, in 1950, Croatia was still a part of Yugoslavia. A handful of soccer fans from the coastal town of Split were in Rio to watch the final, and they marvelled at the torcida, Portuguese for “supporters,” rooting for their team with organized chanting. When the Yugoslavians returned home, they created their own torcida, and even kept the Portuguese name, for the local club called Hajduk (pronounced “HI-duke”) Split. Torcida purports to be the oldest soccer fan club in Europe, with a tradition of celebrating the team in fiery fashion. Its members chant their mantra at every game: “My life is gambling, whores, and fights. Alcohol, drugs, and that is all. I love you, Hajduk Split.”

Torcida developed its reputation in the nineteen-eighties, in the buildup to the Yugoslav Wars, around the time that European soccer banned English clubs after a deadly bout of fan violence in Brussels. It became known for its rivalries with Dinamo Zagreb, Serbia, and Bosnia, which often turned violent on game days. Supporters drank wildly and huffed glue—they might not have been brawny, but they were crazy enough to fight.

Typical of the old guard was a skinny brute I met who fondly remembered travelling to see Hajduk play in Sarajevo, where he followed a Serbian fan who had been heckling particularly loudly to the bathroom, choked him nearly to death, and then returned to the stands for the rest of the match. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d broken his nose or torn his ear. He has scars from all the stitches he’s needed.

A significant portion of the injuries were sustained during one visit to Zagreb, in the late eighties. When the Torcida buses arrived in the capital that day, Dinamo Zagreb’s supporters—Torcida’s biggest rivals, called the Bad Blue Boys—welcomed them by hurling rocks at the windows. At a stoplight, Torcida emptied out to fight the mob in the street. Bodies collided like a battle scene from “The Lord of the Rings,” a checkered battlefield of white and blue jerseys. The man and his friend were outnumbered, so they fled down a street to a café. When they walked in, they were met with stares from three dozen Blue Boys.

“They broke us,” he said.

At the hospital, it got worse. It was like a clinic in a war zone, with members of Torcida and the Blue Boys all waiting for doctors to stitch them up. Frightened and covered in their own blood, they heard on a radio broadcast of the match they were missing that Hajduk had a chance to score. They started cheering, and the Blue Boys pounced on them again. The brawl was so brutal that the police had to be called in to separate the wounded from the club they were supporting.

None of the old brute’s Torcida stories included much about soccer.

Tomislav (Tomo) Laco has sided with Hajduk for twenty-four years, ever since his father took him to his first game when he was six. He remembers seeing Torcida causing chaos in their section, in the northern part of the stadium, and fell in love. Ten years later, he ran away from home with a friend to see Hajduk play Dinamo in Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. One morning two days before the match, they snuck onto a train to Zagreb, and slept in the bathroom.

They didn’t even get inside the gate. Tomo’s mother had reported him missing, and suggested to the police that he might have run off to watch the game. The police bought them bus tickets back south to Split. When Tomo got home, his father grounded him for two months—which lasted just two weeks. His son had been stupid, but he was stupid for Hajduk.

A few years later, Tomo spray-painted an iconic Torcida image on the wall outside his house: a man in sunglasses with a bandana covering his face. It was a nod to a Torcida leader from the eighties, who continues to inspire Torcida’s ranks. These days, the fanatics in Torcida have war stories that are less about beatings and more about their penchant for sneaking flares inside the stadium. Life for soccer fans in Split is a life that routinely tests authority. When the team’s biggest rival, Dinamo, comes to Split, thousands of Torcida members gather outside their hotel and sing all night before the match to prevent the players from getting rest. They drive their cars in circles around the rooms, honking and hollering until the police block the way.

The walls inside Torcida’s headquarters are painted with scenes of young men in scarves holding flares above their heads, and framed pictures show famous matches covered in smoke. For decades, members have smuggled flares into the stadium to ignite during matches, the pinkish plumes billowing across the field and sometimes delaying play for an hour. At midnight on Hajduk’s centennial, February 13, 2011, thousands of supporters launched fireworks into the dark sky. It was as if Split were on fire—a moment so bright and so proud that nearly every Torcida member I met took out his phone to show me video of it.

Not everyone in Split is so enamored of Torcida. Soccer fans around the world clash with authority, but in Croatia the tensions are heightened by a special soccer-fan law, enacted in 2003, which gives Croatian police enormous authority over anyone around or going to and from the stadium on game days. The penalty for getting caught with a flare is a two-year ban from games. The result is more like house arrest—every week, the police check up on them in their homes, in bars, wherever.

“The whole country hates us,” said Petar Vidovic, the twenty-five-year-old secretary of Torcida. “I feel like a criminal in this country has more rights than me, as a supporter.” Last year, the police beat an eighteen-year-old Torcida member to death at a police station, a rare example of extreme brutality but not surprising to Torcida’s members. Now they chant his name at every match, followed by “Croatian police, bribes and corruption.”

At the matches, the police are joined by about a hundred private security guards, who pat down spectators and stand guard around the arena. Zeljan Rakela, the head of the Protector Rakela security firm, resembles an Eastern European Hell’s Angel, his thick vest covered in stickers from places around the world that he has driven through on his motorcycle. He conceded that Hajduk’s stadium doesn’t have enough cameras to catch everyone bringing in flares. “Every time, pyrotechnic comes inside the stadium,” he said.

Flares can be found on the street for ten dollars, but for big games Torcida needs a lot. One night before a big match, two hundred Torcida members met in the center of the city. They split into groups of ten and headed for the docks, where they boarded boats and ferries to steal as many flares as they could find. That night, they walked away with five hundred firesticks. Only half of these made it inside the stadium; the cops found the rest. Sometimes, Torcida members break into the stadium a few days before a match to hide flares in the stands, but they have found that the most successful smuggling method is to put them down their pants, and, sometimes, up their rears. (It can be humiliating: a seventeen-year-old Torcida member told me a cop stripped him naked in a bathroom to find his flare.)