Gordan Hears A Coup
Partizan's season falls into acrimony on all sides - but all seem to sum Serbian football up
When a cohort of thirteen Partizan “fans” turned up in Moldova the other week, they were turned away in one of the most bizarre incidents of the season. They would be sent back home, the Europa Conference League tie they were due to watch would be shoved behind closed doors and Moldova would shut their airspace while the Serbian government issued denials about knowing what was going on.
For most clubs, that would be enough drama to last a few seasons. For Partizan, it’s turned out to be merely a chapter in an ongoing saga of poor results and poor decisions in a period where the club appear to be a microcosm of the larger issues around football in Serbia. If anything, having fans turn up in another country and then get sent home because that country suspected they were about to launch an armed insurrection and overthrow the government is something approaching blessed relief. As we approach a fixture in the Eternal Derby that is regularly as febrile as it comes, we find Serbian football in a period where everyone seems annoyed and everyone has a very good reason for feeling that way.
You’ve GAT to be kidding me
Partizan entered that tie against Serif Tiraspol on the back of one of the worst results in the club’s history - losing 4-0 at home to relegation candidates Mladost GAT Novi Sad. To put that result in some historical context - before this game, the last time Partizan lost a league game by four goals was in 1990 at which point they were part of a different country and at which point I was three.
Quite aside from being embarrassing, the 4-0 loss was arguably flattering. Partizan put in a performance with nothing in the way of a redeeming quality. Of their 25 shots on goal, precisely 2 were on target. Romain Gall’s opener was from an easy cross poorly dealt with, Cristian Fagundes’ second featured simply embarrassing defending, Novica Maksimovic’s third from a silly penalty because they couldn’t clear a corner and Nemanja Milic rounded off the rout after Partizan gave the ball away passing round the back (for the second time in three mins since the penalty). Partizan, quite simply, got exactly what they deserved from the game and while in the final 30 minutes of the game they were utterly dominant, racking up around 20 of those 25 shots, it is rather redundant to be in that sort of game phase when already 4-0 down.
That result could have and probably should have been the end for Head Coach Gordan Petric but he was, instead, allowed to continue through the Serif tie. That decision looked like it might have been vindicated after they left Tiraspol with a 1-0 win in the first leg only to see their defensive frailties show up again back in Belgrade as Partizan as, in spite of taking the lead on the night, Serif roared back benefitting first from a ridiculous handball for a penalty and then seeing the tie levelled at half time and then won within two minutes of the second half. Much like against Mladost, Partizan did their good work only once they had let their opposition get an advantage and, once more, they got what they deserved - nothing.
Petric resigned over the weekend stating he was done with the role no matter what the result would have been in the second leg but this was the inevitable result of bad decisions made earlier this season.
How to dig your grave
Petric, ultimately, comes out of things fairly blameless. Anyone taking even the most cursory glance at his managerial CV would rightly note that the second biggest club job in Serbia was clearly far beyond him. His time at Partizan lasted 30 games and six months which, neatly, is about double the length of every single top flight role he had had previously. Criticising Petric for not making the grade at Partizan would be a bit like criticising the Washington Generals for dropping a game to the Harlem Globetrotters.
Things managed to go from bad to worse in the immediate aftermath. While it is certainly too early to make a judgement of new manager Igor Duljaj, promoted from farm club Teleoptik to take the hotseat after being on the Partizan backroom support staff for two years prior, it is not an ideal situation that he inherits. After Partizan’s latest league game, a 1-1 draw in Belgrade to mid-table Radnicki Kragujevac, captain Slobodan Urosevic took umbrage to a comment from one of the under 500 fans in attendance and confronted them in the stand, reducing the fan to tears and further making clear the massive disconnect between club and fanbase at the moment.
Partizan’s fanbase is certainly more splintered than that of city rivals Crvena Zvezda. While the Grobari remain one of football’s most famous ultras groups, the reality is that there is little that unites most Partizan fans and the ultras are split into multiple groups who, at best, create a lively atmosphere and, at worst, are preoccupied with fighting each other in the stands over various interests. It was only two years ago that police made a move on organised crime, bringing in many Partizan ultras and methodically searching the stadium for evidence of criminal activity, turning up drugs and even human remains as an extensive list of charges came from the investigation.
The Partizan board has, as a result, long been less than popular given the shifting alliances in the fanbase and the fact that many of the characters on it aren’t in any way, shape or form the sort of people you want running a reputable national institution such as Partizan. When you add onto that that Partizan are on one of the least successful periods in their history (no title since 2017 - this is the driest period for trophies since the spell that followed the last title of the Babies generation in the 60s) and you can understand why fans are protesting against the board. The second leg against Serif was preceded by fan protests, the game vs Radnicki Kragujevac was empty because of one. The latest pronouncements from board member and professional aggravator Milorad Vucelic were defensive - stating fans should stop moaning because at least salaries are being paid (this is, of course, 2 years removed from Takuma Asano cancelling his contract because the club weren’t paying him) and that the only cross he has to bear is he has to cope with fans calling him gay.
Weakened Weekends
The protest against the Radnicki Kragujevac game was part shared with fans across Serbia and part high farce. On a weekend where snow hit the region and every other club managed to clear their pitch, Partizan, with the game scheduled for Sunday, simply failed to turn the heating on and postponed the game until nature took its course and cleared the pitch for them on Monday. By shifting the game to when everyone was at work, this obviously negated the possibility of there being any vocal protest at the game but incensed fans, understandably, because the game was on while everyone was at work, with it kicking off at 2pm on a Monday.
This, however, was simply the weekend ending how it started with fans of Vojvodina and Radnik having to deal with a 4pm Friday kick off and that game being subject to the same empty seat protest as Partizan with a banner stating “football is for the weekend”.
It is difficult to point fingers at anyone in particular for this problem because almost every party is at fault in one way. For one, there is the problem that is created by VAR - Serbia has the facilities and officials to run a maximum of four games at once. This has manifested itself practically as them running a maximum of four games a day with the kick-offs staggered. In theory, the league can then run four games on a Saturday and four on a Sunday and keep to that - 24 gameweeks in and they’ve done that precisely once. While there will always be wrinkles such as European games in that mix, that is plannable around and there is no good reason why, to use the current gameweek as an example, three games should kick off at 2pm on a weekday or three at 6pm on a weekday or, let’s be brutally honest, at any time of day that is literally in the middle of someone’s working day.
Instead, this week sees gameweek 24 spread across four days with the main game of the week, Zvezda-Partizan in the Veciti Derbi kicking off at 7pm on Friday. The next gameweek then goes over four days also from Sunday to Wednesday with, you guessed it, more kick off times in the middle of the working day.
It’s fair to note that the Veciti Derbi itself is hardly immune. Originally scheduled for Wednesday 1 March, it was moved to 3 March on 24 February - 5 days before the originally scheduled kick-off and after a fair few travelling fans had already made arrangements to travel given that Belgrade’s premier game of football is, as always, a bucket-list trip for a great many football fans around the world.
TV commitments obviously bear some responsibility here but it remains in the gift of the clubs, FA and league to be able to turn around and tell them no, it’s not fair to ask fans to do an 8 hour plus round trip for a game scheduled in the middle of a weekday afternoon (as Vojvodina fans were asked to this week) and that, actually, the TV ratings for a game taking place at that time would also probably be pretty crap too.
Electile Dysfunction
But when it comes to the concept of the powers that be listening to fans, it’s not a surprise that the fingers seem to be in ears going “la, la, la, I’m not listening” if the current round of FA elections are anything to go by.
Currently, the elections for the role of FA head are a battle between reform candidate Nemanja Vidic, running on a campaign platform of actually tackling some of the massive structural issues in Serbian football (albeit, it’s fair to say, is quite light on detail on how that’ll be done) and establishment candidate Dragan Dzajic.
Dzajic could be described, not ungenerously, as a patsy. The executive team he expects to put in place includes the current interim head of the FA, Branislav Nedimovic, who was put in place to replace Nenad Bjekovic. Nedimovic, prior to that, was a senior political figure in Serbia’s ruling party and was obvious for everyone to see as someone simply parachuted in because President Vucic wanted a bit more of a say in things. Dzajic, while more obviously at arm’s length from the political arena, is as Zvezda as they come and accusations that the FSS can be quite… well… partisan. On Dzajic CV also stands a political pardon from fraud charges, a heap of evidence that suggests he’s not an especially nice person (such as his treatment of Dragoslav Sekularac during his retirement) and a playing career the equal of any footballer the region has ever produced.
While Vidic’s attempt at getting elected is admirable, it is also utterly doomed. 85 candidates will vote in the elected and, on my last count, the publicly declared numbers are around 75-2 in favour of Dzajic. Reform is an awfully long way off when the odds are stacked like that and it will not have escaped any Partizan eyes to note that those dictating the next few years in Serbian football will be those of a Zvezdan persuasion (pun entirely intended).
Hum, drawn and quartered
So Partizan’s woes are serious but they are a microcosm of the issues in Serbia as a whole. Partizan’s problems are, of course, framed differently - should their underperformance continue, they may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage compared to the likes of TSC and Cukaricki. The Russian ban from UEFA means that teams finishing second or winning the cup are most advantaged from the access list changes to compensate - should Partizan fail to finish second (they hold a four point gap to TSC in third at the moment) and a side not called Crvena Zvezda win the Cup (given Partizan are already out), then Partizan will not be one of the three Serbian sides guaranteed group stage football next season. A fanciful proposition but also not an unrealistic one.
They enter Friday’s derby with, for once, nothing to lose. They’ve already lost the respect of most of their fans and they’ve already lost the title. They will travel to the Marakana on Friday, they will likely fail to land much of a blow and they will go home having had what will be a comparatively sterile night out - that’s what every side in Serbia does against Zvezda and this limp imitation of a great club are, at this point, no different. The depth of their issues at this time may be unique, but the breadth of their issues - ownership, finances, attracting fans, etc - are shared across the entirely of Serbian football. I’ve even managed to go 2000 words talking about Serbian football and not mention match-fixing once which goes to show just how much else is wrong with football in the nation at the minute.
Even the derby itself is not immune to that. Pyro and passion are one thing but a derby lives and dies on it’s competitiveness - seeing your arch-rivals win six titles in a row with all but one of those at an absolute canter does take the magic away from the fixture a bit and any regular at those games would confirm that. Serbian football has a competitiveness problem, an integrity problem, a fan behaviour problem (occasional racism, Kosovo, etc), a customer service problem, a facilities problem (not having enough and not looking after what they do have), a governance problem and so on and so forth ad infinitum. If Moldova are to be believed, then it also has a “being infiltrated by Russian spies” problem and that’s arguably the least damaging thing going on.
Serbian football has problems and the problem is no-one seems to want to fix it.