Twenty-eight years after Darko Pancev and Dejan Savicevic hoisted Red Star Belgrade to the European football summit, the famous Serbian sports club is shaping up for a challenge of an all together less glamorous kind in far-flung Cumbria this weekend.
Fifteen-hundred miles and a whole sporting world away from their counterparts' glory night in Bari, Red Star's affiliated rugby league side will make their Challenge Cup debut against the world's oldest amateur club, Millom, on Sunday.
Red Star's acceptance into the competition follows Toronto Wolfpack, who endured a memorable competitive debut at rain-lashed Siddal in the tournament's first trans-Atlantic fixture in February 2017.
Getting closer to the weekend and the big match down at Coronation Field, the scaffold has gone up for the @BBCSport team and the town can't wait!! Safe journey over for @RedStarRL and see you's down there Saturday for training session with the young Woolybacks. #challengecup pic.twitter.com/kHCO6igCww — Woolybacks (@MillomRLFC1873) January 24, 2019
The Serbian club's short-term ambitions are more modest. Rather than using it as a springboard towards Super League, Red Star aim to seize their opportunity to raise the profile of the sport in their homeland and beyond.
Their owner, the Australian-based businessman Colin Kleyweg, said the first step is a potential expansion of the current Balkan Super League, in which Red Star are currently an all-too-dominant force.
Kleyweg told Press Association: "When we applied to the Rugby Football League we explained that what we were scared of was that we were winning our matches too comfortably.
"We won one of our semi-finals this season 94-2, and another match by over 100 points, which really isn't a good thing for anybody.
"That was the catalyst for us really pushing for entry into the Challenge Cup. We would like to increase interest levels and hopefully use it to evolve the Balkan Super League into a broader and more competitive European competition."
Wedged on a promontory between the Irish Sea and the Lake District's tumbling screes, Millom is no stranger to inclement weather, with the town's famous poet Norman Nicholson opining: "Whichever way it blows it's a cold wind now."
Such conditions are hardly likely to faze the Serbians, who have recently introduced two American internationals into their ranks, and have been preparing in snow in Belgrade, where the current temperature seldom cracks freezing.
Aleksandar Djordjevic was two years old when Red Star's football club conquered the continent with a penalty shootout win over Marseille. A dual international, who has also represented Serbia in rugby union, he is also a trainee lawyer and will line up at centre on Sunday.
For Djordjevic, who gave up his pursuit of a basketball career in order to devote himself to a sport with far less profile in his homeland, the benefits of Challenge Cup entry are already becoming apparent.
"In Belgrade over the last year the Red Star rugby team has really begun to make a bigger impact," Djordjevic told Press Association Sport. "The media are taking an interest and our crowds are increasing.
"We have big ambitions and we have some very good players, and of course we have the history.
"It doesn't matter what sport you play. When you have that famous red star on your jersey, it makes you want to go out there and do the club proud."
