North Macedonia

Nikola Gjorgiev has spent much of his career pulling on the same shirt as opposite and captain, and it is around him and a generation of players raised after independence that the Red Lions built their best run. When North Macedonia broke through in the CEV European League, reaching the final in three straight years from 2015 to 2017, it marked the first time the federation had anything approaching sustained success on a European stage — three silver medals rather than one, taken in successive seasons rather than as an isolated result. The team returned to a European final in 2021, this time in the Silver League, and reached the semifinals the following year.

The setter Gjorgi Gjorgiev has run those campaigns alongside him, and the current squad still leans on outside spiker Aleksandar Ljaftov and middle blocker Filip Madjunkov, both products of the same post-independence system that has never sent the team to an Olympics or a World Championship. Progress at the European Championship itself has been slower and more incremental: 17th in 2019, 23rd in 2021, then 16th in 2023, when Skopje hosted the group stage and the team pushed its way into the Top 16 before losing to Italy in front of its own crowd.

Coach Joško Milenkoski now oversees a squad increasingly stocked with players out of OK Štip UGD, a domestic pipeline that has already produced Stojce Arsov and Mihajlo Miraschiev among others coming through behind the senior group. Qualifying matches against Bosnia and Herzegovina have carried real needle in recent years, and the win over Turkey in 2021 qualifying still stands out as the kind of upset the federation had rarely managed.

Home games are played in front of just over 6,000 people at the Boris Trajkovski Sports Center in Skopje, a ground built for volleyball and handball rather than borrowed from football, which gives the Red Lions a genuine home atmosphere on nights when the crowd is up.