Generally, though, Belodedici was less happy. "I didn't like the regime," he says. "I didn't like the way the players were treated after the European Cup victory. Old players weren't treated as well as they had been before. They weren't allowed to go abroad. I decided to go to the team I loved most – Red Star; I could have gone to Italy, but something told me to go to Belgrade. I didn't have a clue that there would be a revolution after a year."

He resolved to flee, but that required significant planning. "When the players left for international games they were given passports in the airport and when we came back they were taken from us again," he explains. "I asked Valentin Ceausescu and the president of Steaua, Ion Alecsandrescu – he was the general who ran the club – for a passport. They asked why I wanted it and I told them that my mother had a permit to cross into Yugoslavia to visit her family and I wanted to go for a week to take her and then come back. I drove across the border. On the other side of the river, we waited for my sister. It was a foggy morning and at that time of year the river is low, so the soldiers patrolled there. But we knew when they patrolled and with the help of a friend my sister got across."

That was the first step, but Belodedici still had to be accepted in Yugoslavia. "The Yugoslavs told me there would be no problem giving me political asylum," he says. "I was afraid because I had a military rank – every player from Steaua was in the army." Technically that made Belodedici a deserter, and it was for that reason that he received a 10-year jail sentence – a verdict rescinded after the revolution of 1989.

He went to watch a Red Star match, paying particular attention to Bosko Gurovski, who was by then playing as libero. He was a legend of the club, but was probably past his peak by then. "I knew how he played; I wasn't worried," Belodedici said. "I knew the team. I'd watched them from childhood and they always had problems at libero. I came to Belgrade with a military discipline – they always commented on my discipline."

Afterwards, Belodedici went to the office of the club's sporting director. "I knocked at the door and asked if they wanted a player," he says. "I explained who I was and where I'd come from. I had to explain six times. He looked at me and he couldn't understand. But then he suddenly realised who I was." An equivalent today is hard to imagine – this was one of the best players in the world turning up and saying "Any chance of a game?"

At first there wasn't, as Fifa banned Belodedici for a year for breaking his contract with Steaua (quite how legally binding that contract was remains unclear). He helped Red Star to the title in 1989-90, and the following year to the European Cup. His composure as a defender was clearly seen in the buildup to Red Star's equaliser in the first leg of the semi-final in Munich, his short pass out of defence feeding Robert Prosinecki, whose pass down the line released Dragisa Binic, whose cross was turned in by Darko Pancev.