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Red Star Belgrade


You might think that the winners of the worst European Cup final anybody can remember surrendered their right to misty-eyed what-ifs the moment that Ljubomir Petrovic instructed his players to return the ball to Marseille at any and every opportunity, for fear of being caught on the counterattack. (Even Sinisa Mihajlovic himself later admitted that it was "the most boring final match in European Cup history.") You might, but you would be mistaken. The side that beat Marseille – having also beaten Bayern Munich in the semi-final after a sashaying run through the tournament – was the product of five years of team building: Ilija Najdoski, Darko Pancev, Miodrag Belodedici, Vladimir Jugovic, Dejan Savicevicćand Mihajlovic added to the 1988 league-winning squad already containing players such as Robert Prosinecki and Dragisa Binic (both signed in 1987) to give Red Star a league and cup double in 1990. The break up of the European Cup-winning side, in the midst of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, happened so quickly and so completely that within two years of the final the entire squad from that inglorious night in Bari, and the manager, were gone. Even by the time they contested the European Super Cup with the Cup Winners' Cup winners, Manchester United, in November 1991, the team looked drastically different.


In Behind the Curtain: Football in Eastern Europe, Jonathan Wilson recalls a conversation with Stevan Stojanovic, the goalkeeper who joined Red Star in 1982 and who captained the side to the European Cup. "The tragedy is," Stojanovic says, "we will never know how good we could have been." In Mihajlovic's version of events, Red Star sacrificed possession in the final not because they thought Marseille were better than them, but because of the differences in experience between the two sides. Marseille had been semi-finalists a year earlier, losing to Benfica on away goals, and reached the semi-finals of the Cup Winners' Cup the year before that. Red Star were a younger side than the one that had taken Real Madrid so close in the 1986-87 quarter-finals, a "squad full of 21, 22 and 23-year-old kids", as Mihajlovic put it. They were on the brink of greatness and could not afford to find out how well they might cope with having to come from behind in the club's first European Cup final; why should they trouble themselves with aesthetics?


It was not as if they had not proved themselves over the course of the competition. In the first round, after a 1-1 home draw, Red Star clobbered Grasshoppers 4-1 away from home – a match watched by Walter Smith, scouting for second-round opponents Rangers, whose report back to the manager Graeme Souness was famously brief: "We're fucked." Rangers duly travelled to Belgrade and took a 3-0 hiding, rendering their second-leg match a formality. "Graeme Souness and his team retreated last night with tails tucked firmly between their legs," wrote Joe Lovejoy in the Independent, "uncomfortably aware that if the Yugoslavs' finishing had done justice to their technical expertise or had Chris Woods not been in heroic form, emphatic defeat would have become dire humiliation." Red Star's 6-0 aggregate quarter-final win over Dynamo Dresden is asterixed by the second-leg walkover forced by fan violence, but with little of the match remaining the Yugoslavs were on course for a 5-1 aggregate victory in any case. The first leg was over as a competition before an hour was up, with Prosinecki and Savicevic orchestrating things. All of the other potential semi-finalists – including Bayern, Porto, Spartak Moscow, Real Madrid, Milan and Marseille – wanted to avoid Red Star.


Bayern were the ones to draw the short straw, falling to a 2-1 home defeat in the first leg despite taking the lead through Roland Wohlfarth midway through the second half. A trademark left-footed free-kick from Mihajlovic extended Red Star's lead in the second leg, in front of an 80,000-strong crowd at the Marakana, but Klaus Augenthaler and Manfred Bender levelled the scores in the second half. With extra-time looming, Augenthaler deflected a Mihajlovic ball past his own keeper to put Red Star through in the 90th minute. The trial of this match arguably fed in to Petrovic's gameplan for the final against Chris Waddle's Marseille, who had relatively little trouble seeing off Spartak Moscow in the other semi-final. There was also the small distraction of near-war at home – as one supporter put it, a win in the final would permit them to "live normally for another three days." Though the end of the tournament was hugely anticlimactic, we should not forget the context, nor the glorious counterattacking football that Red Star had played up to that point: fast, powerful, unpredictable. Savicevic, popping up on both wings and just as difficult to handle on each, finished second in the voting for that season's Ballon d'Or.


The loss, eventually, of Savicevic, and others much sooner, was sadly inevitable; Yugoslav players left the league in droves as their earnings plummeted and the country was consumed by conflict. A gaggle of scouts took up seats at the final to watch Red Star's key players, and though "they kept their gifts well hidden", as David Lacey put it in the Guardian's report, Prosinecki joined Real Madrid that summer, while Binic, signed only a year earlier, joined Slavia Prague. Stojanovic went to Royal Antwerp; the defender Refik Sabanadzovic to AEK Athens; Slobodan Marovic to Norrkoping. Still Red Star retained the Yugoslav First League title the following season, Pancev scoring 25 goals to outstrip Partizan, but come the following summer he too was gone, to Internazionale. Indeed, Serie A was a particular beneficiary of the breakdown of the Yugoslav league in 1992: Savicevic signed to Milan, Jugovic joined Sampdoria, and Mihajlovic went to Roma. Belodedici made off in the direction of La Liga and Valencia, while Najdoski joined Real Valladolid. GT