Eastern Europe’s Soccer Hopes Rising

The logo of Serbian team Red Star Belgrade. Wikimedia Commons.

English soccer giant Liverpool has been humbled in a two-nil loss to Serbian debutants Red Star Belgrade at the top flight of European football on November 6. Liverpool’s chance of leaving the group stage of the Champions League is now under threat, while the Serbs secured their first-ever Champions League win.

Man of the match Milan Pavkov was seen celebrating his two goals with his club’s Delije ultras -- the most fanatical core of supporters -- after the final whistle. An ecstatic crowd greeted him after a victory over a team whose market value is nearly ten times larger than Red Star Belgrade’s own.

Despite holding nearly three-fourths of possession time and taking more than twice as many shots as Red Star, one of which was on an open goal, Liverpool failed to deliver.

Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp admitted that his own team was at fault. Asked if he could put his finger on what went wrong, he said that his ten fingers were not enough to cover everything. “We made life a bit too easy tonight for Belgrade,” stated Klopp.

While this match may seem like a miracle for Belgrade and a disastrous performance from Liverpool, the result may have been received with less surprise in past years. Before the end of the Cold War, Eastern teams consistently performed on par with their Western counterparts. From the 1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of Yugoslavia, Eastern clubs had taken the Winner’s cup -- the predecessor to the Champions League -- six times and had come in second place on 1 occasions. After 1991, not a single team from the region accomplished either feat.

After the Iron Curtain fell, domestic rules protecting Eastern clubs were suddenly gone. Players in the former USSR no longer had to be at least 31 years old to be transferred abroad and subsequently flocked West. As football writer Jonathan Wilson explained, clubs that were funded by the state suddenly found themselves unable to pay wages and mired in corruption.

Eastern clubs could not compete with the heavily commercialized Western teams. At the same time, oligarchs that bought the teams after the collapse of the Soviet bloc created huge disparity within domestic leagues that has killed competition.

Stories like those of Otelul Galati became normalized. The small Romanian club were sprung into the Champions League after winning their local league in 2011. Today they find themselves in the fourth tier of the country after the owners asset-stripped the club and left. FIFpro found that three-quarters of Romanian players have been paid late in the last two seasons.

Few remember that Red Star Belgrade was the last Eastern club to seize the European cup in 1991. Shortly thereafter, a team that had produced household names like AC Milan legend Savićević found its squad torn apart as the Yugoslav wars began and Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin players were forced out.