Crvena zvezda beat Rad to secure the Superliga title with three matchdays to spare and made it three in a row. This is the third time in our history that we’ve completed such a feat. We have been dominant since the 2017/18 season onwards and repeated the hat-tricks of titles that were achieved between 1968 and 1970 and also between 1990 and 1992.
By winning the thirty-first national title, the club has marked the best spell since the turn of the century. A fine period for the most decorated team in the country was made even more exciting by strong showings in European competition. The knock-out stages of the UEFA Europa League were reached in 2017/18 before a couple of Champions League group stage participation followed in two seasons since.
Director of Football Mitar Mrkela and Head Coach Vladan Milojević laid the foundation to this success back in the summer of 2017 by selecting a talented squad that was hungry for success and talented enough to satisfy the hunger. That team set off on a journey that would see the red and whites return to the football map of Europe and produced some of the best results since the all conquering team of early nineties.
Setting up the right system never failed to yield results and the legendary Miljan Miljanić was the first to put this simple truth to the test in his spell as Head Coach. His side was dominant between 1967 and 1970, winning three titles on the bounce and playing some amazing football with a side led by the maestro Dragan Džajić. To this day, Miljanić is the only man to manage a Crvena zvezda team to three straight league titles.
There were some strong red and white teams in the following twenty years, but it was the collaboration between Dragan Džajić, now the club’s Director of Football, and Vladimir Cvetković acting as the club’s chief operative that gave us our biggest result in Europe as well as three consecutive titles. The team featured such stars as Dragan Stojković, Dejan Savićević, Darko Pančev, Robert Prosinečki, Miodrag Belodedić, Ilija Najdoski, Dragiša Binić and was arguably one of the best teams ever seen in Europe. In those years there was three men managing the side to the famous hat-trick: Dragoslav Šekularac in 1989/90, Ljubomir Ljupko Petrović in 1990/91 followed by Vladica Popović in 1991/92.
Next season Dejan Stanković will have a chance to make it four titles in a row for the very first time in Crvena zvezda’s history.