Red Star, former UCL winner in 1991. and Partizan, UCL finalist in 1966. are against ESL. Before someone says that they are small clubs, I must assure you that they are clubs with tradition and just because they aren't rich, doesn't mean that they are small. Also, Red Star won a game against Liverpool two seasons ago when LFC won UCL and had two draws against AC Milan in Europa League in the last 32 this February. The fans of these clubs live for this kind of games and they will tell them to their children, grandchildren, etc.
Sources:
The Serbian Superliga has reached its halfway point in this unusually big season courtesy of the decision to expand the league in response to the COVID crisis and the shortening of last season. COVID call-offs of individual games have been mercifully rare, albeit there is one remaining fixture to play before the break officially begins (Javor vs TSC) and football pauses until the beginning of February after 19 autumn games. So, where are we at and what’s going to happen?
1st: Crvena Zvezda, 53pts 2nd: Partizan, 44pts 3rd: Vojvodina, 42pts
The big three of the league (of the two big Belgrade clubs and whoever Lalatovic is managing) have had varied seasons. Zvezda have, most notably, progressed in the Europa League to face AC Milan in the First Knockout Round. Similarly to the season their impressive Champions League Group Stage under Milojevic in 2018-19, Zvezda enter the break unbeaten in the league having dropped only four points all season. It’s difficult to come up with an argument as to why they would suddenly drop form - under Dejan Stankovic, they are often attractive and rarely threatened at the back, having conceded only 7 goals in 19 games so far. They dominate possession and oppress teams into submission and will, surely, be champions once more.
A short hop away, Partizan endured a poor start to the campaign, resulting in the departure of Savo Milosevic after a defeat to Vojvodina in which he booted a microphone to death and threw a bottle at the referee. Now back under the management of Aleksander Stanojevic, they remain a bit unpredictable but have negotiated a potentially tricky end to the Autumn and look capable of securing second in the long run, even if their media game of essentially claiming everything is a plot against them by Zvezda and the FA is starting to wear a little thin. In addition, Takuma Asano is great.
They will, however, be challenged mightily by Vojvodina to get second - Nenad Lalatovic may have many faults, but he consistently gets his teams to perform well and provide a real challenge to the Belgrade clubs. However, the club have financial issues - Vojvodina’s last home game ended in a press conference in which Lalatovic gathered the entire squad in the press room and embarked upon a 12 minute long monologue about how no-one’s been paid at the club for months and to take the club to task for it. They have since begun to pony up the money but it shows Lalatovic’s charisma that he could pull such a thing off but it’s cl
... keep reading on reddit ➡After the brief resumption of football in Serbia at the end of May into June, the full season is back upon us and the break has been a bit, well, COVIDy - when football was last with us, fans were back in the stands as it was thought the best way to carry football on was to have thousands in the stands without any real social distancing. This, inevitably, was quite a bad idea and part of the COVID spike Serbia has had can be laid down at the decision to let fans into grounds - especially given the high amount of footballers, referees and fans known to have attended games and become infected.
This season starts, unsurprisingly, with empty stands but an especially full league - having stopped relegation last season, four sides were promoted from the second tier to make a twenty team season for one season only with six going down at the end of this season to bring it back to 16 for the start of next season.
Not among those extra sides are Graficar, who had come second in the second tier, as they are Crvena Zvezda’s farm side and declined promotion in favour of better player development. Coming up in their place are Novi Pazar, tenth in the second tier, who won the auction for their place.
Yes, auction.
So this season is peculiar from the off due to the impact of Coronavirus but some things are bound to be comfortably familiar. For a start, Crvena Zvezda will probably win. They were well clear last season and have spent the summer clearing out fringe wages while spending their Champions League cash on players that could do well elsewhere.
Not least among those is noted husband of a racist Aleksandar Katai, back in Belgrade after his wife made him unemployable in MLS after a series of posts on Instagram made clear her views on Black Lives Matter. He, much like Marko Marin joining a couple of years ago, is comfortably better than the league and, unlike Marin, is a direct goal threat that, while not offering Zvezda extra options, adds well to their general effectiveness. Srdjan Spirodonovic has looked good during pre-season and they have been linked with a couple of other big name signings - it would be little surprise to see another big name for the league come in over the coming weeks. Those looking for an argument against them will note that Dejan Stankovic wasn’t as impressive as Milojevic in the first half of the season in the dugout but he would have to be really poor to mess this up given the advantage on the rest of the league he has.
As most will
... keep reading on reddit ➡Having started out looking like it may be one of Europe’s most exciting leagues, the Superliga has fairly swiftly become one of its most elementary. With the break coming 20 games into the season, it leaves us 10 games in the spring until the league halves points and splits into two for the final 7 games of the season.
Regardless, most of the maths of the league seem rather elementary and we can already comfortably split the league into three.
1 - Crvena Zvezda - 52 (playing final game before break today)
2 - Vojvodina - 42
3 - Partizan - 41 (playing final game before break today)
4 - Cukaricki - 40 (playing final game before break today)
5 - TSC Backa Topola - 36
6 - Vozdovac - 35
These sides are all basically certain to be in the Championship Group post-split and, if we’re honest, even with points halving come the break, it would take a brave person to not back Zvezda to romp away with the league.
However, as anyone watching them in the Champions League will know, the Zvezda outfit are a far less impressive one than last season’s, in spite of there not having been that much in the way of sales. If nothing else, they are simply far less efficient and effective up front. In part, that’s down to a slight drop in form from Marko Marin (who remains on another level from the rest of the league but has dropped from God-tier play to Demi-God-tier) and a lot of rotation. No player has appeared in every Superliga game and the several good players they have for this level up front (Pavkov and Vukanovic in particular) are operating at a level below last season.
But they don’t have much in the way of competition in the league and have only dropped 5 points all season. They aren’t doing much wrong and their defensive record remains the best in the country - the drop off has all been in attack to the point where they are not the league’s top scorers.
That honour goes to the entertainingly inconsistent and frustrating Partizan. Savo Milosevic’s charges are entertaining to watch but oscillate from demolishing sides to missing bucketloads of chances and losing games they shouldn’t.
In part, this is down to having Umar Sadiq as the main striker. Sadiq is the joint top scorer in the league and the only way I can describe him is if the makers of the QWOP game (where you control a person who doesn’t know how to walk solely through the keyboard controlling their joints) had designed a footballer from the ground up. He has the gait of a startled giraffe, the comp
... keep reading on reddit ➡The Linglong Serbian Superliga, sponsored by a Chinese tyre company building a plant in the north of Serbia, is going to be won by Crvena Zvezda. There’ll probably be a couple of match-fixing allegations, a bunch of players not getting paid, some top young talent, a walk-off after a contentious decision, some terrible decisions made to allow games to carry on and the sort of scandal more befitting of a trashy soap opera than what is supposed to be a professional football league. And that’s, ultimately, why we love it – it’s unpredictable and full of talking points, even if a great many of those talking points aren’t exactly positive.
Even before the league starts, that sort of thing has been going on. Take Simo Krunic, Radnicki Nis’ new manager. At the end of last season, his Cukaricki side ended his new employers’ title ambitions in a game where he attempted to fight the Radnicki Nis coaching staff, ending with police having to separate the two coaching teams and then gave a press conference about how much he was Zvezda supremo Zvezdan Terzic’s best friend. Don’t even mention the stuff around the national manager’s job. This sort of thing is just an accepted part of daily life in Serbian football.
But out of the madness must come a functioning football season and, to give it it’s due, Serbian football has delivered of late. While many will look on Zvezda’s CL appearance last season as evidence, it was merely a follow up to Europa League goodness from both they and from Partizan the season prior. The players being produced are moving for closer to their value than before, players such as Dejan Joveljic or Filip Stuparevic, when they go abroad and last season’s title race went almost all the way with the relegation race being even more exciting, not to mention an eventful relegation playoff.
So when looking ahead to this season, there seems plenty to be encouraged by when it comes to what entertainment the season will provide. Ultimately, however, only one team is going to win it.
Crvena Zvezda are that rare thing in Serbia – a relatively well-run club. They are the dominant side in Serbia not because of shadiness but because they have invested their money better, kept their over-performing manager and brought in some really very good players. Of the players they’ve lost over the summer, only Goran Causic is of great detriment – Joveljic is the major sale monetarily and for the
... keep reading on reddit ➡Ever Europe’s most volatile league, the Serbian Superliga has had a half-season to remember featuring match-fixing, fights, walk-offs and a title race that was dead on arrival. In defence of the league, Crvena Zvezda’s achievement in not just getting to the Champions League but then not looking out of place when they got there, giving Napoli two close games and memorably beating Liverpool in Belgrade.
More to the point they are unbeaten. Arguably, they have never really looked close to being beaten domestically dropping only four points so far this season and with a goal difference rising at over 2 a game. First and foremost, even with the format of the Superliga meaning that points halve after 30 games, it’s pretty hard to escape the feeling that the league is more or less wrapped up even with so much time between here and the end of the season. Not only are Zvezda utterly ruthless, they have such depth that they can more or less put out a second team and still beat the majority of sides in the league. In Ben, Boakye, Pavkov, Joveljic and Stolijlkovic, they have a quite absurd amount of strength and options in attack but, arguably, the key has been in bringing Marko Marin into the team which has given the side a creative edge that has tied things together both domestically and continentally – all while rehabilitating the reputation of a man who was once one of Europe’s most hotly tipped young midfielders. In addition, the growth of Marko Gobeljic into an all-action utility player has added further dynamism all across the pitch. It sounds boring, but Crvena Zvezda are top because they are by far the best side in the league.
Obviously, most Partizan fans would disagree with that. It wouldn’t be Serbia if there wasn’t a conspiracy theory or ten to accompany even the most routine of victories for Zvezda. Given the controversy that surrounded the eternal derby earlier in the season, one of Zvezda’s two draws, Partizan fans probably have fair reason to moan about, at least, that result.
They would, however, have little reason to complain about the large gap between their team and their Belgrade rivals. This season’s Partizan are solid, organised and have had a little bit of luck (see their win vs Proleter earlier this season in which the promoted side had more than enough chances to win and win well). Their early season form saw them drop off the pace quickly thanks to an uncharacteristic bluntness in attack. This may begin to turn as Ricardo Gome
... keep reading on reddit ➡
BREAKING: 12 teams announce the formation of a midweek competition, the ’Super League.’
Clubs:
▪️ AC Milan ▪️ Arsenal ▪️ Atletico ▪️ Chelsea ▪️ Barcelona ▪️ Inter ▪️ Juventus ▪️ Liverpool ▪️ Manchester City ▪️ Manchester United ▪️ Real Madrid ▪️ Tottenham
https://www.facebook.com/100044187438640/posts/306643200818592/
Notícia de "O Jogo":
Oficial: 12 clubes anunciam a Superliga Europeia
Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético de Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester City, Inter, Milan e Juventus são os clubes fundadores da Superliga Europeia.
A Superliga Europeia está oficialmente criada. Os 12 clubes fundadores emitiram um comunicado, na noite deste domingo, a dar conta da criação da prova.
Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético de Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Manchester City, Inter, Milan e Juventus são os emblemas que fazem parte do projeto.
Através de um comunicado, os clubes explicam a razão que leva à criação da Superliga, anunciando ainda a forma de disputa da prova
https://www.ojogo.pt/internacional/noticias/oficial-superliga-europeia-esta-criada-13585507.html
#EDIT: Cada Clube Fundador receberá #3.5 Biliões de Euros:
https://twitter.com/SkySportsNews/status/1383924141984604163?s=19
0-1 Nemanja Nikolić 37'
1-1 Milan Pavkov 74'
