Belgrade and Zagreb Look Forward to Feast of Champions League ...

Football fans in Serbia and Croatia can look forward to hosting some of the biggest names in European football this season after Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb qualified for UEFA’s revamped Champions League, which kicks off on September 17.

UEFA has overhauled the tournament, scrapping the traditional eight groups of four and replacing it with a league table of 36 clubs, each taking on eight different sides in four home games and four away.

Qualifying with a 3-2 aggregate win over Norway’s Bodo Glimt, Red Star have been drawn against Benfica, Inter Milan, AC Milan, Monaco, Barcelona, Vfb Stuttgart, PSV Eindhoven and Young Boys Berne. The Benfica, Barcelona, AC Milan and PSV Eindhoven games will be played in Belgrade.

Dinamo Zagreb, who cruised past Azerbaijan’s Qarabag in qualifying, will host Monaco, last year’s runners-up Borussia Dortmund, Celtic and AC Milan, and play away against Bayern Munich, Slovan Bratislava, Salzburg and Arsenal.

Only if they make it to the last 16 might Red Star and Dinamo face each other, a potentially mouth-watering encounter that would rekindle a decades-old rivalry but pose a major security headache for authorities in the host country.

When the two sides met in the Yugoslav domestic league in Zagreb in May 1990, rioting forced the match to be abandoned amid scenes that seemed to foreshadow the war that would erupt the following year in Croatia as socialist Yugoslavia fell apart and paramilitary forces swelled their ranks with hardcore football fans.

A repeat of such scenes might be unlikely, but there is no love lost between fans of Red Star and Dinamo and police would be on high alert. A ban on away fans could be expected.

Memories of Maradona