On December 16, 1934, the Belgrade daily newspaper Pravda published the article “Football in the Karsts and the Union: What Cetinje Expects.” Offering a cross-section of the state of football in the Zeta Banovina at the time, the Montenegrin journalist Arsenije Simovic It is written that the Cetinje Football Sub-Association, founded three and a half years earlier, is the poorest of all in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
"He is behind God in terms of our internal competition. Nobody talks about him, the press doesn't write about him, and it's no wonder that his clubs play more in Albania than in their own homeland."
He adds that there is not a single regulated playground in the Podsavez area.
"In almost all parts of Yugoslavia, football players who started and learned football in this Sub-Union play, and no one even suspects under what difficult circumstances this gifted material is created, from which in the end all other sub-unions benefit more than this one here."
In this sketch, one could also fit the short, but turbulent and eventful interwar existence of the Podgorica Civic Sports Club Budućnost (1929-1936), or rather its football and ideological predecessors, the Workers' Sports Club Zora (1925-1929) and the successor to the Sports Club Crna Gora (1938-1941), a stable root from which the Football Club Budućnost would emerge after the end of World War II. Societies that had a strong identity, based primarily on class orientation, and represented platforms for expressing political and ideological stances. Tenacious, defiant, constantly on guard and in opposition to the ruling structures. Or, as could be succinctly presented by the motto of their activist, long-time board member and communist ideologue Sergij Stanić: “The harder you hit the ball, the more it bounces.”
In the social panorama after the end of World War I, shaped by political, national and class frictions and conflicts, Zora/Budućnost/Montenegro found ways to grow into the urban fabric of Podgorica, laying the foundations of the future number one sports address in Montenegro. Coming from the distinctive spirit of an environment, its history - for decades relying more on oral anecdotal tradition and (un)reliable memories of the actors, than on a meager documentary legacy, which gave it mythological, often mythomaniac outlines - records social changes, currents and trends with the precision of a seismographic device.
"Football is the most interesting social phenomenon," wrote the Serbian playwright Slobodan Stojanovic, screenwriter of the once popular TV series "More than a Game" in the former Yugoslav space.
“A reflection of life’s oscillations. A sphere where not only the passions of fans are expressed, but also political legitimacy.” Applicable to the path that Buducnost has taken. The story of football is always a story about the spirit of the times and the nature of a community. After the unification, or rather the annexation to the Kingdom of Serbia, carried out by means of coercion, and yet to a significant extent also voluntary, - the nature and legitimacy of which are still a century later the source of debates that, no matter how much they respect the facts, cannot avoid emotional coloring - on December 1, 1918, Montenegro became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the future Kingdom of Yugoslavia. First as a province, then, with expanded borders in relation to its former monarchy, from 1922 the Zeta Region, and then in the form of the Zeta Banovina (1929–1941) with its headquarters in Cetinje, the Montenegrin territory was an underdeveloped province until the beginning of World War II, in which management techniques often took on the character of terror. A province that economically lags behind other parts of the common state.
(From the monograph “Proud Past, One Future”, which will be on sale soon)
Bonus video:
