Serbia Women

Belgrade fills its calendar with basketball noise most of the year, but every world championship cycle the city hands part of its attention over to a different sport entirely.

The federation running the side dates to 2006, formed after Serbia and Montenegro split, and it claims the playing record of the volleyball unions that came before it, stretching back to Yugoslavia. That inherited history barely mattered next to what the team built on its own: a bronze at the 2006 World Championship as Serbia and Montenegro, then, playing simply as Serbia, gold in 2018 and gold again in 2022. Between those two titles sat an Olympic silver in Rio in 2016 and a bronze in Tokyo.

Home matches move around the country, through Novi Sad, Subotica and Niš as much as Belgrade, and for the biggest nights the team trades the 8,000-seat Nikolić Hall for Štark Arena, which holds more than 18,000. The shirts stay blue at home, red and white kept for the flag colours rather than a fixed away kit. Supporters call the players Devojke, plainly "the girls," with none of the branding a mascot nickname usually carries.

No name from that run of results sits above Tijana Bošković's. She has captained the side through both world titles as the team's opposite.