Eleven seasons, one unbroken line
A decade and more of Serbian football belonged to Red Star Belgrade, and the names who carried them through it still echo.
Eleven. That is the number that matters, the number that frames a generation of Serbian football. From 2031/32 to 2041/42, FK Crvena zvezda Beograd won the Serbian SuperLeague every single season. Not once, not twice, but eleven times in succession, a run that turned a competition into a private estate and left every other club in the country chasing shadows that grew longer with each passing year.
They did not stumble in 2042/43, at least not in a way that suggests collapse; the run simply ended. But for those eleven campaigns, the title was theirs before the first snows of December, and often long before. The rest of the league learned to play for second place, for a cup run, for anything that might offer a sliver of meaning in a landscape dominated by red and white.
The scorers tell part of the story. Slobodan Mitrović, with 32 goals in one of those title-winning seasons, was the spearhead, the man who turned draws into wins and wins into routs. Ninoslav Rajković contributed 14 in another, a complement rather than a rival. Andrej Mirkovic added 8, Aleksa Tanasković none—but even the latter was part of the machine, a name on the team sheet in a side that rarely needed heroics from everyone.
There is a particular melancholy in a dynasty's end, even when it comes quietly. The league did not celebrate Red Star's dominance; it endured it. And yet, for those eleven years, the SuperLeague had a certainty that many competitions lack: the knowledge that the best team in the country would be crowned, again and again, without doubt or dispute. The title race was not a race at all; it was a procession.
One thinks of the old Yugoslav First League runs, the three in a row from 1989/90 to 1991/92, or the Yugoslav Cup treble in the late 1940s. Those were eras of iron control, but even they pale beside this. Eleven years is a long time in football; players come and go, managers change, fortunes fluctuate. Red Star did not fluctuate. They simply won.
The current side is on another streak, three in a row as of last season, and still going. The echoes of that earlier run are impossible to ignore. The same club, the same colours, the same expectation. The supporters who remember 2041/42 will tell you that nothing lasts forever, but they will also tell you that while it did last, it felt like the only truth the league had ever known.
And so we sit, in December 2063, with Red Star once again at the top, and the old run a memory. But it is a memory that shapes the present. Eleven titles in a row: a number that will not be forgotten, and a standard that may never be matched.