Mario Marina

Sixteen yellow cards in a single HNL season is the kind of tally that follows a player around, and Mario Marina picked his up at NK Varaždin. It fits the job he has done for most of his career: a right-footed defensive midfielder, sometimes listed further forward or dropped into defence, who does the work that shows up in the referee's notebook as often as anywhere else.

He came through the youth setups at Dinara Knin and Lokomotiva Zagreb, and it was at Dinara Knin that he began as a senior in 2008. The years that followed took him around the lower reaches of Croatian football — Zagora Unešić, a return to Dinara, then Imotski and Krka Lozovac — before Šibenik signed him on a free transfer in August 2012.

He won the Bosnia and Herzegovina Football Cup that season, but a red card ruled him out of the final. He was back at Gorica later the same year and won the Croatian Second Football League with them in 2017–18.

December 2019 took him abroad again, to Sabah in the Azerbaijan Premier League, where he made 29 appearances. He returned to Croatia in July 2021: two years at Slaven Belupo, then a free transfer to Varaždin in September 2023.

Marina was born in Bugojno, in what was then Yugoslavia, and holds Croatian nationality. He has never been capped at senior international level.