Jovan (39) did not see any of the five goals during the football match between Switzerland and Serbia. The hotly contested match between the two nations flickered across the screen right next to him. But Jovan was too busy for 90 minutes to explain to the only Swiss in the packed “Pub Brod” in Belgrade why Serbia and football will never happen: “We as a people are way too emotional. There are always way too many feelings in the Serbs,” says the tall Belgrade resident with the jet-black beard. “It always gets in our way, not just on the football field.”
Jovan will be right tonight. The Serbs fail due to Switzerland and are eliminated. No one is really disappointed in the “Pub Brod” in Belgrade. Because you saw it coming.
Serbia is hungry for new heroes
Serbia, the country of seven million, the backward state of the former sports superpower Yugoslavia, the country with the beautiful capital and the difficult history: it needs new sports heroes to look up to and thanks to whom it can take its eyes off the gloomy past could. Certainly: there are the tennis high flyers Novak Djokovic (35) or Nikola Jokic (27), the two-time “Most Valuable Player” of the North American basketball league NBA. But they are not enough to make people forget about the national trauma.
Right now, in the sad heyday of the Ukraine war, the old trauma, the divide between East and West, is resurfacing. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic (52) has so far steadfastly refused to support Western sanctions against the Russian regime. Together with Turkey and Belarus, Serbia is the only country in Europe that turns a blind eye to Vladimir Putin (70). The Russian trading partner is too important.
And the wounds of the Kosovo war in the late 1990s are too deep. In the spring of 1999, NATO stopped the Serbian warlords with a devastating attack. To this day, the Serbs have not forgiven the Defense Alliance for that. And to this day, the conflict with Kosovo – in the eyes of most Serbs little more than a “separate Serbian republic” – regularly flares up again.
The double meaning of the two-headed eagle
This was evident not least from the heated discussions in the run-up to the match between Switzerland and Serbia. The Serbs have not forgotten that the two Swiss national team players Xherdan Shaqiri (31) and Granit Xhaka (30) celebrated their goals in the last meeting in 2018 with the two-headed eagle hand signal. The plate is widely seen as a symbol of Albanian nationalism, although Serbs like to point out that the double-headed eagle, that ancient Byzantine royal emblem, also appears on the Serbian flag.
In any case, in the “Pub Brod”, almost every longer touch of the ball by Xhaka or Shaqiri leads to a loud buzz. Vladimir Filipovic (33), head of sports at Blic, Serbia’s largest newspaper, which, like Blick, belongs to the Ringier Group, explained in the pre-game interview that politics would no longer play a major role in Serbian football this year. “Half of our team wasn’t even born when the war ended here. They don’t want to get bogged down in those old stories.”
On the field, however, emotions between Xhaka and the Serbian players ran high again. And also: You don’t win a football match with too much emotion. The Serbs must have learned this lesson from their history by now.