Olimpico, Allianz Arena, San Siro, Anfield, Velodrome... Football temples and places where history was written, the question is whether they will be welcomed by a Montenegrin club in the near future, but at the same time, thanks to "people from the shadows", the flag of our country has flown and on them.
And while there are still clubs in Montenegro that openly have a lot to say about them, Montenegrin referees, along with some masters with the ball who made big transfers, remain the best product of our football league.
Proof of that is the new recognition that came from UEFA.
Nikola Dabanović, along with assistants Srđan Jovanović i Vladan Todorović and the fourth judge Miloš Bošković, will lead another Champions League match tomorrow evening.
And that at the iconic "Anfield", the home of the club that won the biggest club competition six times, all to the beats of the famous anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone".
The match between Liverpool and Bologna (21 p.m.) will be Dabanović's second in UEFA's elite.
Dabanović is already elite
Our best referee has been gaining the trust of UEFA for years. He led many Europa League matches, qualifiers for the European and World Championships, and before the match in the city of the Beatles in the Champions League, Dabanović refereed the duel between another great Bayern Munich and Viktoria Plzen, in October 2022.
Apart from Liverpool and Bayern, he also served justice in matches Mourinho Roma, Chelsea, Porto, Benfica, Rangers, Setik, Lazio, Marseille, but also the national teams of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Scotland, Norway...
How his team and he did the job is perhaps best expressed by the fact that they never lost the trust of UEFA.
New trump cards
Miloš Bošković will play the role of the fourth referee tomorrow, previously he was also in Dabanović's team Miloš Savović, and the two are slowly building their careers as chief arbitrators on the international stage.
Both of them have behind them several matches in the qualification for the Conference League, then the matches of the youth national teams, as well as those in the UEFA Youth Champions League...
The three of them currently represent Montenegro in international competitions with a Fifa badge, and apart from Dabanović, who has a standard team of assistants, Bošković and Savović were assisted by several "swingers" from our country.
And where there are referees, there have always been mistakes, so a disastrous one from Bijelo Polje (where Savović was the main arbitrator) recently toured Europe.
However, even that does not diminish the enormous journey that the "boys in black" took from the Montenegrin fields, often plowed fields, to the football temples from the beginning of the story.
Bonus video:
