Partizan's Eighth Title: Why Sport Unites Us While Elections Divide Us

On Wednesday evening, after Partizan beat Buducnost 90-75 to claim the eighth ABA League title (the first in two years of Red Star rule), we sat in a tavern on Marsala Birjuzova Street. We were six.

We were:

• the tavern owner, who keeps a split image on the wall (one half Partizan, the other Red Star, allegedly for the mother-in-law)
• a customer who has voted SNS for fifteen years
• the waiter, who has been at three student protests
• two pensioners who read Politika
• a woman, an economist at a bank, who mentioned in March she pays a million dinars a year for her daughter’s studies in Vienna

Six different electoral biographies, six different media diets, six different class situations. When Partizan entered the final quarter with an eighteen-point lead, all six raised their arms in the same motion, shouting “go.” Fifteen minutes later, when the referee called full time, three of us were embracing in front of the television. The owner laid out free brandies and a piece of Turkish delight for everyone.

A paradox the sociologist has to name

I do not bring this scene as a slice of reportage (that genre has been used in earlier Pavlovic columns). I bring it as a sociological paradox that in Serbian society 2026 is not marginal, it is central.

How do we explain that six people who politically, in media diet, in infrastructure, in class, in values, experience Serbia completely differently, can sit in one room for thirty-nine minutes, with the same emotion, the same aim, the same joy.

The question is not rhetorical. It has a sociological answer, an uncomfortable one, and one worth writing honestly. That is why I am writing this column.

Geertz, Balinese cockfights, a Belgrade tavern

I pivot to the sociology of sport. In “Deep Play” (Hill and Wang, 1973), anthropologist Clifford Geertz studied Balinese cockfighting as “a text society writes about itself.”

Geertz’s thesis:

Traditional sport, particularly that which holds a central place in the collective imagination, functions as a space in which a society symbolically processes everything it cannot directly process in its formal institutions. Competition, combat, class differences, gender differences, all of it is brought onto the field and reworked into forms that are not destructive of the social fabric.

The Serbian fan space in 2026 works on identical logic, but with an extra feature specific to our society. Serbian sport has remained one of the few spaces in which a shared present still exists.

68 percent fans, 41 percent undecided on politics

Two figures alongside Geertz’s framework. According to an IPSOS survey from May 2026, 68 percent of respondents “always” support the Serbian basketball national team when it plays. Only 7 percent never do.

In sports support, Serbian society is structurally more unified than on political questions. For comparison, on the question “Who is responsible for the state of the country,” 41 percent of respondents are undecided or decline to answer. On the national team question, the undecided share is 9 percent.

Sociologically, collective identification with sport in Serbia 2026 has a wider core than identification with any political structure. Sport is what binds us most strongly into a common scene.

We are together, or we have nowhere else to be together

The harder part of the essay must come now. It is easy to celebrate shared fan moments as proof that, despite the divisions, Serbian society is still one. But the sociologist has to put the next question.

If sport is the only space in which we are together, does that mean we really are together, or does it mean we have no other space for togetherness left, and sport remains as the last refuge. The difference between these two readings is vast. The first reading is optimistic. The second is sociologically diagnostic. As a columnist, I am bound to side with the second, not because I am a pessimist, but because the data demand it.

Elias and the mimetic sphere

Sociologist Norbert Elias, in “Quest for Excitement” (Blackwell, 1986), with Eric Dunning, describes sport as a “mimetic sphere” in which the emotions of daily life are reproduced, but in controlled form.

Elias noticed that in societies where daily life is emotionally too deadened (the post-industrial Western middle class), sport becomes the place where emotional stimulation is sought. When Elias writes that, he is describing the positive function of sport.

But he also warns of another possibility. In societies where daily life is too conflicted, sport can stand in for the political articulation of conflict, becoming a technique of depoliticisation.

Serbia 2026 may be in that second register. Political conflicts are real, but the public space for their articulation has been severely narrowed. Sport fills the emotional gap that should otherwise be filled by political means.

Sport is autonomous, but not autonomous from society

A counter-argument should be entered. There is a reading, common in more traditional circles of Serbian fandom and sports commentary, according to which the sociologist who “politicises” sport violates its autonomous value. By that logic, sport is sport, it has its own rules, aesthetics, ethics, and should not be used as a tool for political analysis.

The argument has a partial truth. Sport really does have autonomous value. But it is not autonomous from the society in which it is played. When six people of different political convictions sit in a tavern and cheer Partizan together, sport is autonomous in its aesthetic dimension, but sociologically it is part of a larger story. The story of why those same six will never sit together in that tavern to talk about the elections.

What power wants, what sport gives

One more thing should be said, an uncomfortable one. The political centres of power in Serbia have, over the past thirteen years, systematically used sport as a tool of national cohesion. The Government allocates ever larger sums in its budget for national-team sporting events. State broadcasters carry sports matches freely. Sport is used as one of the core symbols of Serbian identity.

None of this is bad in itself, but it is a political task that recognises sport as a cohesive resource not to be squandered. The other type of resource (institutional trust, civic solidarity, shared public debate) has not received comparable attention, because strengthening it would diminish the political dominance of the ruling structure.

Sport strengthens the social fabric’s elasticity, but does not change the political structure. That is exactly what power wants.

The tavern is a moment, tomorrow is work

I return to the tavern. After the final buzzer, the owner bought drinks for everyone. The SNS voter said to the Politika-reading pensioner: “See, when we’re together, look what can happen.”

The pensioner replied: “Yes, but tomorrow we still won’t agree about the property tax on new builds.”

The customer laughed: “Well, fine, today we cheer, tomorrow we argue.”

An hour later, the tavern emptied. I stayed alone with the owner, who was wiping down the bar. I asked him as I paid: “Is this a good sign, or just a moment?”

He replied: “Well, sir, the tavern is a moment. Tomorrow is work again.”

That is the sociological sentence I carry with me. The question that remains, and which does not belong to fans because it is too cold for them, belongs to those of us who write about society. It goes roughly like this. If sport really is the last remaining shared space in Serbian society, is it enough to hold us together as a community, and if it is, what then about all the other spaces we have lost.