Once sharing a special football club, Kosovo’s city of Mitrovica is now divided on ethnic, geographic and sporting lines, creating a unique culture
Tag: serbia
In 1991, the great Red Star Belgrade of Savićević, Prosinečki and Pančev won the European Cup, defeating a Marseille team featuring stars such as Jean-Pierre Papin, Abedi Pele and Chris Waddle. In terms of…
The modern football fan can be ruthless, stark and unforgiving. He or she lives in a world of instant gratification, where facts on any subject can be obtained with the merest flick of…
The wind howls down a bleak Belgrade avenue, rain thumping against the windscreen of the white Mercedes that carries Aleksandar Stanković gently towards the blurred traffic lights on Bačvanska Street. It is October…
THIS SEASON the Champions League has thrilled fans, with the traditional big boys strutting their stuff bolstered by a litany of world-class stars. Teams from Eastern Europe have again fallen by the…
The Stadio Marc’Antonio Bentegodi in Verona bore witness to one of the finest individual performances of Italia 90. Under the sweltering Venetian summer sun, Yugoslavia’s Dragan Stojković announced himself on the world…
SOME TEAMS HAVE LEFT THEIR MARKS ON TOURNAMENTS, only to watch on as another team won. Hungary in 1954 and the Netherlands in 1974 had risen to the World Cup final but…
Illustration by Federico Manasse On the wrong side of retirement, in the pained days of forced leisure, memories can often be the most prized possession for the ex-footballer, as well as for…
Another round of international fixtures yielded another unsavoury incident in the stands in the Balkans recently as the Group H fixture between second-placed Greece and third-placed Bosnia and Herzegovina was marred by…
AS THE IRON CURTAIN descended over Eastern Europe following the Second World War, when Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union held onto – or at the very least controlled – the land that it had…
This feature is part of A Tale of One City It’s March 1992, and the Marakana falls eerily silent. Sixty-thousand fans have packed into the stadium in Savski Venac, a central area of Belgrade,…
This feature is part of A World of Ultras Delije: a term that strikes fear across Europe and evokes all the images linked to football ultras. This is the name of Red Star…