Serbia's Minister of Sport Zoran Gajić inspected the National Volleyball Training Center in New Belgrade – a project that is already in its final construction phase and is expected to be completed by the end of summer.
The complex, whose construction began in June 2023, includes two halls – a main one with about 1500 seats and a smaller one with a capacity of 800 spectators. It will become the permanent home of the Serbian national teams and a key base for the development of volleyball in the country.
This is exactly where the parallel with Bulgaria begins. In early April, the Bulgarian Volleyball Federation also announced its ambition to build its own home for volleyball.
"Our goal is for the home of volleyball to have two halls. One for training, and the other with a capacity for 2000–2500 spectators, where qualifying matches for youth teams can be held. We want it to have a hotel section, offices, a fitness hall, and a restaurant," stated then-president of the federation, Lyubomir Ganev.
The project already has a specific direction – the idea is to implement it in the capital's Poduene neighborhood, near a metro station. For now, however, everything is at the conceptual and discussion stage.
While the project in Serbia is already in the final stretch, in Bulgaria, the groundbreaking is yet to come. And although the context is different, there is one interesting common point.
Zoran Gajić is a volleyball man – a former coach of Yugoslavia and Serbia, who has worked in Russia, Iran, Greece, and Turkey, as well as president of the Serbian federation from 2017 to 2022.
This is where the Bulgarian connection comes in. Former national team captain Vladimir Nikolov is now part of the National Assembly, and his name is increasingly mentioned as a possible future Minister of Sport. If this happens, Bulgaria could find itself in a similar situation – with a volleyball person having a key role in infrastructure development.
Then the question will not be whether Bulgaria needs a home for volleyball. But how quickly it will go from idea to groundbreaking in Poduene.
