Belgrade Away Day: Football, History, Politics and War
The scoreboard before Red Star Belgrade vs Manchester City, Belgrade, Serbia, 13 December 2023
A LIFELONG DEVOTION TOOK ME TO BELGRADE. Not a devotion to Belgrade itself, or a strong desire to visit it ahead of cities I had never seen. My work as a writer or lecturer would be unlikely to take me there. There are other European cities to which I had never travelled. My trip was to pursue a passion I share with people some of whose politics horrify and terrify me: football.
Since my 1970s boyhood in the suburbs of Manchester, I have supported Manchester City. For many of those decades, City existed in the shadow of more successful teams from the north-west of England. No more. In June 2023, City became European champions–I was in Istanbul to see them win–and they travelled to Belgrade as part of their campaign to retain that title.
It was the final game of the first, group, stage of this season’s competition. City having won their first five games, they were already certain of going through to the next round as leaders of their group. Their opponents, Red Star Belgrade, had once enjoyed their moment of triumph, too–back in 1991, as the Cold War ended and, in what was Yugoslavia, the slaughter of a different, bloodily real, war began.
FOOTBALL PITCH AND BATTLEFIELD
The Red Star fans remembered their team’s earlier success, while mocking the wealth that Manchester City have enjoyed during their recent trophy-laden years, ‘When football wasn’t just about money,’ read the banner with which they taunted the visiting supporters.
Banners in the home end, Red Star Belgrade vs Manchester City, 13 December 2023
There were more menacing messages, too. ‘Ratko Mladic Serbian Hero’ read the slogan painted on a wall opposite the stadium. Mladic is a war criminal, convicted of directing the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, during the wars that some Red Star fans apparently blame for interrupting what might otherwise have been an era of prolonged European greatness for their team.
There may have been an element of wishful thinking common to many football fans, and also particular to Red Star. The programme for the match that night in Belgrade included a picture from the time the City and Red Star first played each other in Manchester, in September. It showed the scoreboard with Red Star leading 1-0, omitting the fact that they eventually lost 3-1.
It was not just the Red Star team whose normal lives were disrupted by the wars of the 1990s. As the BBC reported in a profile of the Serbian warlord, Arkan, after he was assassinated in 2000, ‘some of Red Star’s most violent hooligans’ signed up to fight in his Serbian nationalist militia, the Tigers. Arkan’s ideas, and those of Mladic, disappeared neither in death nor in life sentences handed down by international tribunals.
WHEN NATO BOMBED BELGRADE
Both lived to see Belgrade bombed by NATO during the war in Kosovo in 1999. Fresh-looking graffiti decried the alliance as ‘occupiers’–an expression, presumably, of sympathy for Moscow’s accusations against NATO used to justify its war on Ukraine.
‘Death to NATO occupiers’ graffito on a wall in Belgrade, Serbia, 13 December 2023
The day of the match my friends and I took a walk around the city centre, visiting the Historical Museum of Serbia. Exhibits here naturally included an assessment of the Battle of Kosovo, which the Serbs fought against the Ottoman Turks in 1389, ‘the most important date for Serbs in the whole of their history’, in the view of the historian Anne Kindersley, writing in History Today back in 1970, ‘a physical defeat but a moral victory’ (the picture editor of the football programme perhaps felt the same way about the Champions League).
Exterior of the Historical Museum, Belgrade, Serbia, 13 December 2023
It was a date exploited by Slobodan Milosevic when, in 1989 on the 600th anniversary of the battle, he ‘addressed up to a million Serbs and told them to prepare for war’, as Ian Traynor wrote in his Guardian obituary of ‘the first European head of state to be prosecuted for genocide and war crimes.’
A European of my generation, in my early twenties when the Berlin wall fell, I hoped for a different Europe three decades and more later. As Manchester City supporter in the 1980s, I could hardly imagine the team would come to dominate European football as it has.
The Saturday after my trip to Belgrade, returning from watching City play Crystal Palace in the English premier league, I watched from a train widow as a football fan hit another in the head with a bottle.
It was a rare incident of serious violence in an English game that has largely freed itself from the plague of football hooliganism. The Europe where I was born, and where I have lived and worked most of my life, seems less able to escape its wars. They scar its history, and now, in a time of war in Ukraine, and even renewed tension over Kosovo, threaten its present.
Red Star Belgrade badge stencilled on a wall in Belgrade, Serbia, December 2023
All text and photographs © James Rodgers