After defeating the national team England in London with 2:0 and the victory of the Albanian team in Andorra, the Serbian national team was left without a chance to be in the playoffs for the next World Cup.
England was the absolute favorite from the start and nobody saw Serbia as a direct traveler from the day when the qualifying groups were drawn. World Cup. The English have a maximum performance in the round before the end with 20 goals given and zero goals conceded.
However, this does not diminish the performance of the Serbian national team in these qualifications. It is clear that Serbia's game against Qatar is on a downward path and at lightning speed, but a complete knockout happened in Leskovac when the Albanian team defeated Serbia and thus practically kicked them out of the qualification.
Changes should have come sooner
Serbia played well, hand to heart, but defending almost the entire game at Wembley, it was not possible to threaten the powerful English. No one is pointing fingers at the coach after this defeat.
Now it is already clear, even after only one game, that Veljko Paunović had to be on the national team's bench earlier. The FSS was seriously late when it came to changing the coach.
Dragan Stojković Pixi, on the other hand, did something that was dreamed of, he took Serbia to the World and European Championships in just two years, but that was about the success of Serbia under his command.
After all, everything was summed up in one sentence by Filip Kostic after the defeat at Wembley:
"If we had this, i.e. the coach and all the work we did in the previous few days, I believe we would have had a much, much better result and we would have been second, guaranteed. We would not have lost to Albania, it is one of the hardest defeats in my career, it was hard for all of us. That is why we are all suffering today".
If the change of coach did not happen after the failure at the European Championship, it had to happen after the debacle against England at the Maracana and the 5:0 defeat.
Defeat after defeat, and not only on the field, followed one after the other without, and everything reached the bottom with the decision to play the match with Albania in Leskovac in front of "worthy" fans so that by chance the audience would not chant against Aleksandar Vučić.
History will remember one of the worst failures of our state team in modern history.
Signs of order in total chaos
It was not realistic to expect that the Serbian national team, after only a few days of working with the new coach, would soar so high that it could perform a miracle at Wembley.
However, the signs of Serbia's life under the baton of Paunović are visible. The game away from one of the world's football superpowers did not enchant anyone, but the Eagles certainly made a significant step up compared to what they showed in the 2026 World Cup qualifiers.
Serbia played against this opponent twice in the space of two months. Although the possession figures were similar and England was dominant, their way of creating chances, but also the dominance of the English cannot be compared to the last game.
There are chances for placement, but...
Even after the defeat at Wembley and Albania's victory in Andorra, Serbia still has a chance to be among the 48 national teams that will play in the World Cup next year, but everything is in the realm of science fiction.
It is clear that Serbia will not be able to go to the World Cup through the qualification group, but there is a theory that it will do so through the League of Nations, although that chance is so small that it is almost rude to talk about it.
In short: Serbia would need Romania, Sweden and Northern Ireland to finish among the two best placed in their groups in order to get through the needle's eye in the playoffs.
And even if all those teams win all the games to the end, which is not realistic, Serbia would end up in a situation where it depends on the outcome of the match between Kosovo and Switzerland, in which both teams would have enough points.
There is every chance that Serbia, at least for now, will be the best placed national team in the world (currently 36th place on the FIFA list) that will not play in the next World Cup.
Paunović's team will have to do their job against Latvia in the last round, in a match with no result, and this match is scheduled for Sunday at 18:00. The game is played again in Leskovac.
