When Croatian supporters flooded Toronto and Philadelphia this summer, the loudest songs belonged to Marko Perković Thompson, better known as Thompson. Croatian fans draped city halls in the red-and-white checkerboards on the Croatian coat of arms and belted out “Lijepa Li Si,” an unofficial team anthem that salutes the wartime Croat statelet in Bosnia whose leadership was convicted of war crimes.

The worrying part is not that Thompson is controversial. It is that the fascist salute “Za dom spremni,” used as the Ustashe regime’s answer to “Sieg Heil,” is treated as normal stadium music. In one past example cited by Politico, Croatia nearly won the World Cup in 2018, and the second-placed team was welcomed back with Thompson aboard the victory bus, while star midfielder Luka Modrić personally asked for him to perform.

To understand why this matters beyond soccer, you have to see Thompson as a system, not a single singer. Politico describes him as Croatia’s most popular singer and also its “most enduring embarrassment.” Croatian historian Hrvoje Klasić, focused on the legacy of World War II, is quoted arguing that people both at home and abroad view Thompson as synonymous with love for one’s country. That framing helps explain why this is not fringe behavior. Thompson’s music has an established role in national identity performance, especially during sport, where collective rituals are at their most intense and enforcement often becomes politically sensitive.

The song catalogue is the mechanism. “Lijepa Li Si” functions like an unofficial anthem at matches, Another track opens with “Za dom spremni,” the salute that Ustashe used during WWII. Thompson’s wider catalog is “more explicit still,” and Politico notes that in the past his concerts have been banned or canceled in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia, Austria, and Germany.

So why is Croatia different? Politico points to Croatia’s long delay in reckoning with the Ustashe past. The article says Croatia has spent three decades declining to reckon with that history, treating symbols of the fascist puppet state as heritage rather than crime. In practical terms, that changes what gets labeled, what gets regulated, and what gets tolerated. If a salute is treated as cultural inheritance, regulators, event organizers, and sponsors can quietly reclassify the event from extremist propaganda to entertainment. And entertainment has a way of gaining institutional cover.

This is not happening in a vacuum across Europe either. Politico situates it in post-communist historical revisionism after the Cold War. Nations that felt their identity had been suppressed under communism recast neo-Nazi and far-right figures as patriots. Klasić’s conclusion, as quoted, is that these nations believe they were robbed of national identities or are dissatisfied with their country’s present achievements, so they “reach back into the past” for themes from a more “distinguished” past. The piece names Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Croatia as having made a version of this bargain, folding once-condemned nationalists into modern national myths.

That bargain has second-order implications that executives should care about, even if they do not think they are involved in culture-war controversies. Sport and mass entertainment are large distribution channels for symbols. Politico reports that last summer Thompson drew more than 500,000 people to a single Zagreb concert, described as the largest in the country’s history, where fans chanted the same Ustashe slogan while authorities looked away. When authorities do not enforce, the signal is that mainstream audiences and official institutions will accommodate, which in turn reduces the perceived risk for promoters, broadcasters, advertisers, and venues.

There is also a governance angle. When public-facing institutions normalize extremist salutes, compliance teams get forced into awkward tradeoffs between brand safety, political realities, and uneven local enforcement. Policies can exist on paper, but if event authorities, sports federations, and high-profile figures treat the performance as celebration, compliance becomes a negotiation, not a rule. That is exactly the scenario boards and leadership teams want to avoid, because it can pull them into reputational and regulatory exposure with no clear path to “just follow the rules.”

For peers in similar roles, the strategic stakes are straightforward. This is what happens when mainstream culture absorbs the symbols of crimes: bans in some countries do not prevent normalization at home, and “heritage” narratives can outcompete enforcement. Politico’s examples across borders show a gap between jurisdictional responses and what is politically acceptable within a country. The result is that stadiums can become distribution networks, salutes can become marketing language, and history can be treated like a costume rather than a record of harm.