Croatia Women

Stadion Maksimir hosts the team often enough, but not exclusively: Croatia's women have played qualifiers at Aldo Drosina in Pula and at the Gradski stadion in Varaždin, and training camps have gone as far as NK Solina's ground in Sinj. There is no single home, no separate training base — matches move with the calendar rather than with any fixed address.

The side formed in 1995, once the Croatian Football Federation had secured its FIFA and UEFA membership following independence. Thirty years on, it carries no nickname of its own; reports simply use the full name, leaving the "Vatreni" tag to the men. The kit follows the same logic, borrowing the red-and-white checkerboard for home games and blue and white away.

No trophy sits in the cabinet, and no World Cup or European Championship has ever been reached. The closest the team has come to altering that record arrived in 2026, with a runner-up finish in their 2027 World Cup qualifying group that pushed them into the play-off phase — the furthest a Croatian women's side has gone toward a major finals. The ranking tells a quieter story: 44th between July 2003 and June 2005, the highest the team has reached, against 63rd as of this June.

Ivana Rudelić carries the scoring record, 24 goals from 66 caps by April 2026, built up while playing her club football for FC Basel. Two decades earlier, Helenna Hercigonja-Moulton, a defender born in the United States, took 25 caps between 2011 and 2015 — a reminder that the squad has drawn on the diaspora as much as on players raised in Zagreb.

Whichever ground is booked for the next qualifier, the crowd will be smaller than at Maksimir on a men's international night, but the fixture list keeps returning the team to Zagreb all the same.