Red Star Draws Rivals: Salah Heads to Marakana
Red Star learned its six Conference League rivals at the Monaco draw and will host Copenhagen, Trabzonspor and Inter Escaldes, with Mohamed Salah arriving at Marakana.
The last time Mohamed Salah walked out against Red Star, he wore a Liverpool shirt and was playing in the Champions League. That was 2018, and Red Star welcomed him that season as one of the best forwards in the world. Eight years later, Salah is coming back to Marakana, only in a different shirt, with the ball having moved on in the meantime from Liverpool to Trabzonspor.
The news arrived on Thursday, August 28, at the Conference League group-stage draw in Monaco, held around 1 p.m., right after the Europa League draw. As is always the case at this stage of the competition, the draw was run by computer rather than balls pulled from a bowl, and within a few minutes it had mapped out Red Star’s entire European autumn.
The system is simple and unforgiving toward improvisation: 36 clubs from a record 30 countries were split into six pots, and each team drew exactly one opponent from every pot. Red Star ended up with six different rivals from six different countries, three home games and three away.
At Marakana, Alberto Riera’s side will host:
- Copenhagen of Denmark
- Trabzonspor of Turkey, with Salah in the squad
- Inter Escaldes of Andorra
Three away trips await:
- Ghent in Belgium
- Lugano in Switzerland
- Iberia 1999 in Tbilisi, Georgia
The biggest name out of the first pot, Copenhagen, is no stranger to Red Star. The clubs met in the third qualifying round for the Champions League in the 2019/20 season, when a 1-1 in Belgrade and the same scoreline in Copenhagen, after extra time, sent the tie to a penalty shootout. Red Star won it 7-6. Ghent is not an unfamiliar opponent either: in the 2020/21 Europa League group stage, Red Star beat them twice, 2-1 in Belgrade and 2-0 away. The history with Trabzonspor is more recent, from the 2022/23 season, when both Europa League group-stage meetings finished 2-1, each side winning once at home.
One thing that will not happen, perhaps to the disappointment of some fans, is a rematch with Hajduk. The Split club, also a Conference League participant, was kept apart from Red Star by the computer, even though that derby would have been one of the competition’s stories 35 years on. Instead, Hajduk drew Ajax, Sint-Truiden and Nordsjaelland at home, and travels to Midtjylland, Lincoln Red Imps and Thun. Borac Banja Luka, the region’s other representative, hosts Atalanta, KuPS and Riga at home and travels to Panathinaikos, Hearts and Mjallby.
This is Red Star’s first appearance in the Conference League in the club’s history, after dropping out of the Europa League in late August. Czech champions Viktoria Plzen got the better of them in the play-off, losing 3-0 at Marakana but turning the tie around with a 5-1 win after extra time in the return leg in Plzen, sending Alberto Riera’s side down to the lower-tier competition.
The first group-stage round is played on October 15, the last on December 17. The top eight in the single table go straight through to the round of 16, while the teams ranked ninth to 24th face an additional play-off on February 18 and 25. The round of 16 is scheduled for March 11 and 18, the quarterfinals for April 8 and 15, the semifinals for April 29 and May 6, and the final for June 2, 2027, at Besiktas’s stadium in Istanbul.
There are six weeks until the first match, plenty of time for the early story of the draw to turn into something more tangible. But a pattern is already visible: Red Star avoided the toughest team in every pot, got one genuine box-office draw for a full house in Copenhagen and Salah, and a realistic chance to put together a run at home. The question now is not who Red Star plays, but how many of those three home games at Marakana it turns into points, since in a single-table format every point dropped at home comes at a cost come March.
