Red Star Loses Water Polo License, Vojvodina Takes Its Spot

The coach left for Bulgaria, the players scattered to other clubs, and Red Star’s locker room has stood empty since summer. When the Serbian Water Polo Federation’s board met on September 11, it snuffed out the last hope that anyone would be sitting in that locker room once the new season starts. The club that was European champion thirteen years ago no longer has the right to play even in its own country.

That week the board made a decision that only formally confirmed what water polo circles had suspected for months: Water Polo Club Red Star will not receive a license for senior competition in the 2026/27 season. No license means no place in the competition, so the red and whites’ spot in the Regional League’s Premier League goes to Vojvodina starting this season.

Why Red Star did not get a license

The reason is not sporting but administrative and financial. Red Star failed to file its licensing application within the deadline, and on top of that it never settled its debts to the Federation from the previous season. For clubs that wanted to play this season, the Federation set four groups of conditions.

The sporting criterion required at least one coach with a valid license, a four year development plan, a plan for the season itself covering at least two age categories, and a designated club official to oversee all of it. The infrastructure criterion required a lease agreement for pool time for training and matches, plus two backup pools. The third criterion, covering staff and administration, required at least 25 registered players spread across at least two competitive categories. The last, financial criterion, required that the club have no outstanding debt to the Federation. Red Star failed that last condition, and it appears it fell short of the first three as well.

None of this came out of nowhere. The leadership under president Vesna Nikolic has delivered on almost nothing it announced since the end of last year, and the club has been hollowing out in the meantime. Red Star somehow survived last season and finished fourth, a decent result given the circumstances. Then came another blow. Coach Aleksandar Filipovic left for Bulgaria’s Cherno More, and virtually every player followed him out the door. Attempts to find sponsors through the sports society went nowhere, and the idea of an outside takeover never got off the ground either. Fielding a junior team for the season was also considered, but that turned out not to be workable.

What’s next for Red Star and the league

The club has the right to appeal the board’s decision, but there is little realistic chance the appeal changes anything. Red Star currently has neither a senior squad nor a coach to run one, no money for even regular pool rentals for training, and its competition in the younger categories is uncertain too, since the club would essentially have to rebuild from scratch there. Even before this decision, Red Star had already withdrawn from European cup competition, so its exit from the domestic league was more a matter of time than a surprise.

For the league, this means one open spot and one serious contender fewer. Vojvodina steps into the Premier League in place of a team that, until yesterday, was one of the pillars of Serbian water polo, though by the club’s own account the situation in Novi Sad is far from bright either.

What remains is a record that is hard to compare with anything else in Serbian sport in recent years. The club that won the Champions League and the Super Cup in 2013, on top of a pile of domestic trophies, cannot today field enough players for a single team. Serbian water polo is used to watching Red Star and Partizan fight for the title, not reading statements about who lost their license. The question is no longer whether Red Star will return to the league, but whether there is anything left to build that return on, and right now nobody at the club has an answer to that.