A Throwback Champion for the Modern Champions League

The tokens are all over the place, pictures of saints past, depictions of wonders lost.

For the present age of players at Crvena Zvezda — the club referred to the English-talking world as Red Star Belgrade — they are inevitable: in the changing areas at the preparation office, in the hall as they stroll into the stadium everybody in Serbia calls the Marakana.

They go about as an update, as confirmation, as affirmation of what Red Star once might have been, of what it once did. There are photographs of the club's most noteworthy players and its most noteworthy triumphs: against Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, all of European soccer's privileged people.

Some are of the Marakana itself, when it could hold in excess of 100,000 fans, when the clamor was deafening to the point that, down in the passage before kickoff, the players say, they could feel the solid dividers vibrating. What's more, more than one is of Red Star's most distinguished accomplishment, the trophy that raises this club into soccer's most selective gathering: the European Cup.

"It's a major thing," Milos Degenek, a protector for Red Star and Australia told Omnisport as of late. "You know you're strolling into a club where a portion of the colossal players played, players who had an effect in European and world football, not simply in Serbia. You know you're strolling into a club that was an European victor, and a title holder."

At the point when the draw for the gathering phase of the current year's UEFA Champions League was made in Monte Carlo fourteen days prior, Red Star pulled in little consideration. All the center was somewhere else: on Real Madrid's endeavor to win a fourth European title consecutively, and Barcelona's endeavor to stop it; on Cristiano Ronaldo's first battle with Juventus, and his arrival to Manchester United; on Paris St.- Germain's coming gatherings with Liverpool and Napoli.

To many — outside Serbia, at any rate — Red Star was, similar to whatever is left of the groups in pot four, something between a makeweight and a bit of hindsight; it could would like to be minimal in excess of a disturbance for whichever superpowers wound up in its gathering (P.S.G., Liverpool and Napoli, at last). No one discussed how that draw may influence its odds of winning the opposition. It would consider out and out a marvel if Red Star even figured out how to make the last 16.

That is the idea of the advanced Champions League, all things considered: it has turned into the select safeguard of a bunch of groups, every one of them drawn from Europe's huge five associations. It isn't only an activity in pointless wistfulness to wail over that. To grieve the way that Red Star's triumph — in the 1991 version — can never be rehashed is to disregard what makes the Champions League such a win.

It is absolutely in light of the fact that a similar couple of groups — three from Spain, one from France and Italy, two from Germany and a pivoting cast of four from England — make the last stages each year that it has such a resolute interest. The Champions League's fame, its regularly expanding importance, is that it is the one rivalry in which the plain best on the planet confront each other each couple of weeks.

But it is fitting that Red Star ought to be there this year, regardless of whether its visit turns out to be just to armada: not simply to make up the numbers, not only as a snag to be survived, but rather as a keepsake, an update, of what has been lost.

Red Star's triumph 27 years prior has a place with a different universe. That was the latest year the European Cup was a straight knockout competition, the last one highlighting just the victors of Europe's household classes. The accompanying season, UEFA presented a gathering stage out of the blue, and by the 1992-3 season, the opposition had been rebranded as the Champions League.

By that stage, the wonderful, skilled group that had helped Red Star vanquish the mainland had been disbanded. Looking for asylum as much as brandishing fulfillment, its players moved to Italy and Spain and France to get away from Yugoslavia's bleeding, fierce discontinuity.

Red Star could never win another Champions League trophy; however it came back to shield its title in 1992, it was compelled to play its home diversions in Bulgaria and Hungary. It would not be until this year that it could welcome the best groups in Europe, the sorts of groups it used to think about its associates, back to Belgrade.