FK Partizan

Partizan Stadium holds 32,710 people in the heart of Belgrade, though for decades the ground carried a different name: Stadion JNA, after the Yugoslav People's Army. That link was no accident. The club itself was founded on 4 October 1945 as a team of the army's Ministry of Defence, and it carried the connection long after football moved past military patronage.

For the first thirteen years Partizan played in red and blue. The switch to black and white came in 1958, and the colours gave the club its name on the terraces: Crno-beli. The supporters go by a different name altogether — Grobari, the Gravediggers — a tag that has stuck regardless of how the team on the pitch is doing.

The trophy count runs to 27 Yugoslav and Serbian league titles and 16 domestic cups, but the match still talked about happened away from home: the 1966 European Cup final in Brussels, lost 1-2 to Real Madrid. No side from Eastern Europe or the Balkans had reached that final before. Velibor Vasović and Milutin Šoškić played that night; Stjepan Bobek, voted the club's best player in a 1995 poll, belonged to an earlier generation.

Across town, Red Star has mattered more than any final. The two have met in the Eternal Derby since 5 January 1947, when Red Star won 4-3, and the balance has stayed with Red Star ever since. What Partizan has built instead is an academy that keeps sending players north and west — Dušan Vlahović, Aleksandar Mitrović and Stefan Jovetić among them — production the CIES Football Observatory has rated among the strongest in Europe.

None of that changes what the ground looks like on a matchday: black and white end to end, the old army stadium still standing where it always has, in Belgrade.