Football is the most popular sport in Serbia. The Football Association of Serbia (FSS) is the national governing body and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the game of football in the country, both professional and amateur. The association organizes the professional Serbian Superliga (top tier) and is responsible for appointing the management of the men's, women's, and youth national football teams in Serbia. The association also organizes the Serbian First League (second) and Serbian League (third), operating the top 3 leagues.
The FSS is also responsible for organizing the Serbian Cup, the country's league cup competition. It has been played from the end of the 19th century and there were a number of very successful Serbian football players and coaches throughout history.
One of Serbia's top football clubs Red Star Belgrade has won the prestigious European Champions Cup in 1991 and has also won the Intercontinental Cup the same year. Its local rival Partizan Belgrade was the first Southeast and Eastern European football club to reach the European Champions Cup final, when it did so in 1966. The most successful and popular teams are Red Star and Partizan from Belgrade as well as Vojvodina from Novi Sad. An important role also played OFK Belgrade and Radnički Niš in the history of the Serbian football
History
Kingdom of Serbia
Football first came to Serbia in the spring of 1896 when a Jewish student, Hugo Buli, after he had returned from his studies in Germany, brought the first football from Berlin to Belgrade. He brought the ball to his friends from the Belgrade gymnastics society Soko, and founded the first football section in Southeast Europe on 12 May.
The inaugural meeting of the First Serbian Football Society (Prvo srpsko društvo za igranje loptom) took place on 1 May 1899, at the restaurant Trgovačka kafana, at initiative of Hugo Buli, and with support of Andra Nikolić, who was then Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Kingdom of Serbia. Feti Bey, the Turkish consul in Belgrade, was elected as President, and the lawyer Mihailo Živadinović as the Vice-President. In spring 1899, the first football field was built in the Topčider neighbourhood of Belgrade, and the first match was played in May that year between two teams of the members of the football society.
Most of the first Serbian football clubs were multi-sports societies which included football sections. The first football club was founded in Subotica in 1898, the Szabadkai Sport Egylet (Sport Club Szabad), among the then fans better known simply as "Sport", within which was formed a football section in 1898 on the initiative of player and enthusiast Zoltán Wagner. Another club was founded in Subotica on May 3, 1901, the Sports Athletic Club Bačka. More than two years later, on 14 September 1903, the football club Šumadija was founded in Kragujevac. The Subotica clubs were older, but at the time of the foundation of Sport and Bačka, the city of Subotica was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while Kragujevac was on the territory of the then kingdom of Serbia. Being still active, Bačka is the oldest club in nowadays Serbia. Just following the foundation of Šumadija, Soko was founded in Belgrade, and thus became the first football club from the capital city. Since then several other clubs were formed such as Srpski mač in 1906, BSK in 1911 and SK Velika Srbija (later renamed to SK Jugoslavija) in 1913.
In spring 1914, the Serbian Olympic Committee organised the first ever trophy to be played among the best football clubs of the Kingdom of Serbia. It was played in a single-round robin system, and in the final held in Belgrade it was won by Velika Srbija. This seemed to be a promising start of an organised football tournament to be held regularly, however later that same year the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war against Serbia in what will be the beginning of the First World War and the halt of all recreational and sports activities in Serbia.
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
At the end of the First World War the boundaries in the region were changed and the Serbian state was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later in 1929 renamed into Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Football Association (Jugoslovenski nogometni savez) was founded at a meeting in Zagreb, on 18 April 1919. The founding assembly was presided Danilo Stojanović, popularly known as Čika Dača, important because he was the founder of several football clubs such as Šumadija, BSK and others.