Sloboda Uzice

Fudbalski klub Sloboda Uzice (Serbian Cyrillic: Фудбалски клуб Слобода Ужице), known as Sloboda Uzice or simply Sloboda, is a professional Serbian football club from Uzice. The name Sloboda means freedom or liberty in Serbian.

History

Early years (1920s and 1930s)

The club was founded through the initiative of Uzice's workers in 1925, as part of the sports society named URSK Sloboda (Uzicki radnicki sportski klub Sloboda, English: Uzice's worker's sport klub Sloboda). The founders were communist activists Milos Markovic (who was two years earlier the founder of Radnicki Nis) and Josip Siber. From the very beginning, football had a priority over other sports in the newly founded sports society. The first official match was played on 24 June 1926 against Mladi Radnik from Kragujevac ending in a 2–2 draw. In the 1928–29 season, the club began participating in the regional Western Morava county league, along with other area clubs such as FK Era from Uzice, Car Lazar and Obilic from Krusevac, Ibar from Kraljevo, Jedinstvo from Cacak and Takovo from Gornji Milanovac. In 1929, the club officially got accepted under the umbrella of the Yugoslav Football Association as well as the Worker's Sports Union. Due to financial difficulties, the club didn't compete in the early 1930s, playing only friendly matches. The club scaled down its football activities in this period, turning its focus towards politics. Due to its ties to worker unions, the club got infiltrated by members and sympathizers of the banned Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ), becoming in essence the focal point for communist activity in the city of Uzice. Authorities reacted by forcing the club to drop the term "radnicki" (reference to workers) from its name in early 1932. For the May Day that year, Sloboda's co-founder Josip Siber placed the Red flag on the club's facilities. While the authorities conducted an investigation into the event, the flag re-appeared on the cliff overlooking the city.

This page also has a version in other languages :  Слобода Ужице (russian)