The club was founded on August 6, 1913 in the restaurant "Kasino" in
Belgrade, by a group of dissidents from another Belgrade football club –
BSK. Dissatisfied over a decision to travel to
Austria-Hungary in order to play a friendly match with
Hajduk Split, this group left BSK and formed their own club, naming it
SK Velika Srbija. The leader of the group was
Danilo Stojanović, better known as
Čika Dača, considered one of the major pioneers of football in the
Kingdom of Serbia. With the beginning of the
First World War in 1914 the club suspended its activities. It reappeared in 1919 renamed
SK Jugoslavija, as the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929) was created a year earlier and colloquially named
Jugoslavija from the beginning. The first post-war match was played against a team of British sailors, a 9–0 win, which was the first time the club played with a red kit, which will characterize them from then on and become the main reason for their nickname
The Reds (
Crveni). That same year the field where the matches were played was reconstructed and an athletic track and a new football and tennis fields were created. That field, named
Trkalište, located close to city centre, will be demolished in 1925 when the club moved to a new one, founded in the area of Belgrade known as
Topčidersko Brdo, exactly in the area the
Red Star Stadium is located now. The new stadium had a capacity of 30,000 spectators, and included an athletics track, a grass pitch, a training field and a club house. It was officially inaugurated on 24 April 1927. In the period between the wars, there were two sports newspapers in Belgrade which also followed the trend marked by the rivalry of the city derby,
Sportista, which was close to BSK, and
Sport, close to Jugoslavija. SK Jugoslavija won the
Yugoslav Championship in
1924 and
1925, and participated in 14, out of 17, final stages of the Yugoslav Championship. Jugoslavia also won the
Yugoslav Cup in 1936. In 1941 the club changed its name to
SK 1913 after the
Axis invasion of Yugoslavia. The
football branch was composed of former "
reds"
Milovan Ćirić (the first captain of Red Star),
Predrag Đajić,
Božidar Drenovac,
Ljubomir Lovrić, Mladen Kašanin,
Mile Kos, Milivoje Đorđević, Dragomir Diklić, Miomir Petrović,
Aleksandar Petrović, and Miodrag "Mališa" Petrović amongst others. The new squad was further amalgamated by a substantial contingent of BSK players, which included
Svetislav Glišović (serving as the first coach of Red Star),
Kosta Tomašević,
Rajko Mitić,
Branko Stanković,
Miodrag Jovanović,
Srđan Mrkušić, and Đura Horvatinović. Slobodan Ćosić and Zoran Žujović from Slavija Belgrade were appointed as club directors. On 5 May 1945, Communist Party Secretary of Sports
Mitra Mitrović-Djilas officially signed a decree dissolving all football clubs without formal ties to the regime. Labelled as "bourgeois collaborators", these included most major pre-war clubs who continued playing during the
occupation. The new club carried much of SK Jugoslavija's fan base and served as the national team of
SR Serbia, winning the
first post-war tournament in September 1945, before officially commencing the
1946-47 Yugoslav First League season as Red Star. The SK Jugoslavija Stadium, colloquially named "
Avala" was appropriated and renamed "
Red Star Stadium". The club also inherited the red and white colours of
Jugoslavija, reviving the now iconic vertical stripe jersey in 1950, as worn by
Jugoslavija in season 1943–44. That year the club also adopted a new crest resembling ''Jugoslavija's
shield albeit with a superimposed petokraka''. Although Red Star Belgrade has at times acknowledged its historical links with SK Jugoslavija it does not consider itself a formal successor, unlike, for example
OFK Belgrade and
Dinamo Zagreb who claim continuity with the respective local pre-war football clubs. By the late 1980s all living former
Jugoslavija players were inducted as honorary
Crvena Zvezda veterans in an association headed by Rajko Mitić. In 2020 Miodrag "Mališa" Petrović died at the age of 94. He was the last surviving former member of SK Jugoslavija and the last witness to the formation of
Crvena Zvezda. == Name ==