Sports
Serbian soccer club faces UEFA charges over banners glorifying late war criminal Ratko Mladic
UEFA has opened disciplinary proceedings into Serbian club Crvena Zvezda over banners appearing to glorify the former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, who died on Thursday.
The club, who play in the Serbian capital and have also been known as Red Star Belgrade, posted images on its social media feeds of its fans holding up banners during Thursday’s Europa League game against Viktoria Plzen stating: “General, eternal glory and thanks”.
Chants of Mladic’s name were also reported during the match.
— FK Crvena zvezda (@crvenazvezdafk) August 27, 2026
Mladic, 84, passed away earlier on Thursday. He was called the “Butcher of Bosnia” and was held responsible for Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II, when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
When his life sentence was confirmed in 2017, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said Mladic’s crimes ranked “among the most heinous known to humankind.”
Mladic died in custody in The Hague, the Netherlands, which houses convicts for international war crimes tribunals.
On Friday, European football’s governing body UEFA said in a statement to The Athletic it had opened disciplinary proceedings on three counts against the Serbian club, including “racist and/or discriminatory behaviour”, “transmitting a message that is not fit for a sports event” and “improper conduct of the team.”
The Srebrenica Memorial Center, which commemorates the 1995 genocide, contacted UEFA following the match to say that the banners could not be “reduced to the behaviour of fans.”
The statement, which is covered in the Bosnian media and has been verified by The Athletic, said: “A club that consciously uses its official communication channels to spread messages glorifying a man legally convicted of genocide cannot reduce such behavior to the behavior of fans.”
The statement added: “This is no longer just a question of the fans, but of the club’s institutional relationship to the values on which UEFA bases European football.”
Mladic lost a final appeal against his conviction in 2021 (Peter Dejong / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
The Srebrenica Memorial Center and Crvena Zvezda have been contacted for comment.
Crvena lost Thursday’s match in Czech Republic 5-1, meaning they missed out on a spot in this season’s Europa League and will drop into the Conference League, European football’s third-tier competition.
Crvena are Serbia’s most successful club, having won a record 37 national league titles — across the former Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro, and modern-day Serbia — and won the 1991 European Cup.
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