One of the favorite cries for Red Star fans is “UEFA-mafia,” but when their team qualified for the Champions League for the first time in 26 years, all 150,000 tickets for their three home games in the group stage sold out in an hour.
Like it or not, the 1991 champions are back in the competition and they cannot wait to take on Liverpool, SSC Napoli and Paris Saint-Germain.
“We’ve returned Red Star to where it belongs: the league of champions,” coach Vladan Milojevic said after his team rallied from two goals down to draw 2-2 in a second-leg qualifying playoff against Red Bull Salzburg.
The sides had earlier drawn 0-0 in Belgrade.
The notoriously excitable Red Star fans invaded the pitch at the end of the game in Austria to celebrate wildly, although UEFA sanctions for misbehavior mean the supporters cannot travel to the first two away matches in Liverpool and Paris.
The club known locally as Crvena Zvezda beat Bayern Munich 4-3 on aggregate in the 1991 Champions League semis before defeating Olympique Marseille on penalties in the final.
It was one of the most boring finals of all-time, but Red Star became only the second team from a communist country to win the European Cup, after Steaua Bucharest.
Red Star was then led by talented midfielders Robert Prosinecki, Dejan Savicevic and Vladimir Jugovic, defender Sinisa Mihajlovic and striker Darko Pancev. They all went on to sign big deals with sizable European clubs when Yugoslavia broke up following bloody Balkan wars.
Red Star has no standout players these days, except perhaps former German international Marko Marin, but it does possess promising players such as Ben Nabouhane.
Things have not been easy for Serbia’s most popular clubs. Four years ago, it was on the verge of closure because of a debt of 54 million euros (US$63.25 million at the current exchange rate).
“Because of unpaid salaries to the players, all of them had the right to leave,” manager Zvezdan Terzic told the Blic daily.
The only way out for the club was to scout for more talent that eventually led to sales totaling 16 million euros, he added.
“That was the crucial moment that reignited it all,” Terzic said. “Now, if we had a stadium with 300,000 seats, we would have sold them all.”
What worries club officials, and probably UEFA, is their fans who remain among the most feared in Europe because of their penchant for invading pitches and chanting racist slogans.
The “UEFA-mafia” cry began after the ruling body accepted Kosovo, the separatist former Serbian ethnic-Albanian dominated province, as a member.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
Rafael Nadal on Wednesday said the upcoming French Open would be the moment to “give everything and die” on the court after his comeback from injury in Barcelona was curtailed by Alex de Minaur. The 22-time Grand Slam title winner, back playing this week after three months on the sidelines, battled well, but eventually crumbled 7-5, 6-1 against the world No. 11 from Australia in the second round. Nadal, 37, who missed virtually all of last season, is hoping to compete at the French Open next month where he is the record 14-time champion. The Spaniard said the clash with De Minaur was
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but