Miodrag Belodedici — The Stag

Imagine this: you are a director of a football club, building a generation that, two years on, would conquer Europe and the world. You are going about your daily routine work, and one day, a world-class defender, who five years prior won the most coveted club title in Europe, enters your office and offers his services to you?

It seems implausible, doesn’t it? Well, let’s try with a couple of names, for illustration purposes: imagine Franco Baresi paying a similar visit to Bernard Tapie in 1991, or even? Or Nemanja Vidic, Vincent Kompany peddling their craft in a similar manner? Even less plausible, you would say. But the story is nevertheless true: this very thing happened toDragan Dzajic, himself a former football great, in 1988, when he was Director of FC Red Star Belgrade. It was a godsend called The Stag. Aka Belo. Aka Mile. Aka Miodrag Belodedici.

The Story of Belodedici is replete with symbolism. A modest man, who merited to become a true a star, but always avoided that image, was defined by that very symbol –the star. First, the Star from Bucharest. Then, the Red Star from Belgrade. And yet another one star, the communist one. Each of them made an indelible mark on the life of this man, who himself made history in European football.

An ethnic Serb, Belodedici (Belodedić in Serbian: in both cases pronounced ‘Belodedich’) was born in the Romanian village of Sokol, in the historical region of Banat. Banat itself is an epitome of the unavoidable coexistence of peoples in the Balkans — a region straddling the border between what was then Serbia and Romania, with a collage of peoples, including many Serbs living on the Romanian side of the border and even more ethnic Romanians living in Serbia.

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