at the end of the season. Sloboda Tuzla In January 2014, after refusing to take over the Croatian Second Football League club NK Solin, Blažević signed with the Bosnian Sloboda Tuzla playing in the second level Bosnian League. He took over the club while it was second on the league table and agreed to lead the club until the end of the season with the goal to reach the top level Bosnian league, He succeeded, with Sloboda winning 13 and drawing 1 of his 15 matches in charge to win the First League of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a record total of 71 points from their 30 league games in the season. Zadar On 2 September 2014, after Sloboda Tuzla, he was named the manager of Croatian First Football League club NK Zadar, but he parted ways with the club and finished his coaching career on 2 January 2015. Personal life and death Blažević married Zdenka Đorđević in 1962. The couple had three children and five grandchildren. Apart from Croatian, he also held Swiss citizenship. Blažević died of prostate cancer in Zagreb on 8 February 2023, one day before his 88th birthday. He was buried at Zagreb's Mirogoj Cemetery on 15 February. Political engagement Blažević was an admirer of Franjo Tuđman with whom he maintained a friendship as well. Blažević was also a member of the former Croatian president Tuđman's conservative political party HDZ, but he publicly disagreed with his successor, the pro-European centrist politican Ivo Sanader. Because of this, Blažević left the party in 2000 shortly after Tuđman's death, and then decided to run for President of Croatia as an independent candidate. Polls predicting the 2005 presidential election results usually gave him 1–2% of the vote. In the end he received 17,847 votes (0.80%) and was eliminated in the first round of the election. Following the presidential elections debacle he quit politics, until he appeared once again four years later at the 2009 Zagreb local elections where he successfully ran as HDZ candidate for the city council. He claimed that prime minister Ivo Sanader had talked him into re-joining the party and running for office. He was at the time the oldest serving member of the Zagreb City Council and a member of the city board for naming streets and squares. During World War II in Yugoslavia, Blažević's two brothers, Anto and Joso, were members of