IT must be a bit galling for us to recall how, in order to reach the final of the World Cup, Croatia had human resources to call on that are actually smaller than Scotland’s. Their four million of a population compares with our five million. Yet we did not even qualify for the competition.

Just as national leagues are becoming the preserve of large, rich clubs, so was this four-yearly global league, if we can call it that, turning into the preserve of a few football superpowers – at least till 2018.

This time Germany, Argentina and Brazil went home early after being beaten or held to a draw by the likes of South Korea, Belgium and Iceland. England merely talked big, rather than achieving anything to match, and Croatia ruthlessly exposed English mediocrity in the second half of their game. Only the French finally caught up with the Croats, and were wonderful winners in the best World Cup we’ve had for ages. But in my heart I followed Croatia from the start.

Still, we need to wait and see if there is really any correlation between size and success in football, and whether it is changing. In other ways Croatia might have seemed an unlikely candidate to become best in the world. It is by European standards quite a poor country, to be sure richer than its Balkan neighbours, except Slovenia, though with gross domestic product per head only one-third of France’s (or the UK’s). That is why its players often go off to play in the leagues of other European countries, as the Croatian captain Luka Modric did at Spurs and now at Real Madrid. It has the advantage that they can bring their experience back to enrich the national team.

Croatia is quite poor for two reasons. One is that it suffered 50 years of socialism under the Yugoslav regime of Marshal Tito, himself a Croat.

He had the reputation of being liberal compared to the leadership in Soviet Russia, but this did not really apply in the economic sphere. His regime allowed in the end a degree of decentralisation, with a few things decided in the Croat capital of Zagreb rather than in the federal (and Serb) capital of Belgrade. But, as for policy, the actual practice was the same all over Yugoslavia and the same as elsewhere in the eastern bloc, with rigid controls from the Communist elite. The result was the same as well: poverty for the people and, by the 1980s, increasing macro-economic instability. In the end socialism has always produced failing states, and Yugoslavia proved to be just another.

The second reason for Croatia’s relative poverty is that, after its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, it at once had to fight a war against the exertions in Belgrade to keep the crumbling country together by force of arms. Inside Croatia a Serb minority was incited to attack and intimidate its Croat neighbours. Savage fighting followed with atrocities on both sides.

Modric lost a grandfather in one of the massacres. He fled with his parents to the town of Zadar on the Adriatic Sea, where he grew up billeted in a hotel (the tourist trade of the region had naturally collapsed). He honed his schoolboy skills with kickabouts in the car-park, while Serb shells whistled overhead.

Since then Croatia has followed the general pattern of liberated east European countries, though not as successfully as some. One big reason is that it had another huge negative heritage from socialism: corruption.

It is the same sort of problem as we witnessed in Glasgow under Labour – a ruling socialist caste free of any threat from rival parties (or none that it could see) decided it would be good practice for the redistribution of wealth if it started with itself. In Croatia, these ingrained habits survived the downfall of the old regime.

As elsewhere, football offered a playground for oligarchs. The most notorious of them in Croatia was one Zdravko Mamic, an executive of Dinamo Zagreb and also the patron of the young Modric. When Modric signed for Spurs, he had to hand most of the transfer fee over to Mamic. Today the godfather is on the run, charged with embezzlement and tax evasion, and some of the stain has rubbed off on the midfielder, who is not as popular among his countrymen as we might imagine.

In fact he has been accused of perjury in defence of Mamic. Small, ugly and elfin, Modric seldom looks all that happy, but his playmaking compensates for it.

Croatia in fact became so corrupt that, when it applied for membership of the EU in 2003, it was sternly told from Brussels that it had to clean its act up before it had any chance of getting in.

It took 10 years to comply, but since 2013 has done its best to be an exemplary member country. It bore a large part of the burden of the refugee crisis, accepting 700,000 transit migrants (17% of its own population) who had been turned away from Hungary. It plans to join the euro by 2020.

If we compare Croatia with Scotland in another way it seems ludicrous to claim, as Unionists do, that Scotland will be excluded from the EU when Croatia has got in. Croatia was a seceding state with enormous economic and political difficulties that had to be fixed helter-skelter before its application could go forward. Apart from being seceders too, we have nothing of the kind. But there are other respects in which the Croats may be able to offer us useful lessons.

The Croat rate of growth has been running at about 3% a year, a great deal better than the miserable rate of 0.8% we marked up in 2017 (compared to 1.8% in the UK).

Croatia still benefits from the removal of socialist controls on its economy that started in 1991 and has yet to run its full course, so that investment is rising and more people are being drawn into the workforce. It’s interesting how a profitable shipbuilding industry continues to survive on the Adriatic, and accounts indeed for 10% of exports. Tourism is a big earner, with 14 million visitors a year. And this is a free-trading country, with no tariffs higher than 1%. It is altogether an object lesson for those in Scotland – probably a majority of us – who think government should intervene more rather than less.

One of my theories is that, when things start to go right for a nation, they all start to go right together. Perhaps in Croatia, in everything from Michelin stars (just won its first two) to the World Cup, that is happening. The Croats do work hard for what they get: look at how, in the Luzhniki Stadium, they fought back from being 4-1 down when they already seemed doomed to lose, and in fact scored another goal before the final whistle. Scots, in football and in other things, nowadays seldom show the same unbeatable spirit.

In 1998 Croatia came third in the World Cup, this year second. It would be a logical progression if, not too far into the future, they finally won their way through as champions. I would certainly be shouting for them – except, of course, if their opponent in the final were Scotland. But there’s a long haul before that can happen.