Darko Kovačević

Darko Kovačević was born on 18 November 1973 in Kovin, Serbia. He launched his career in FK Radnički from Kovin and then was promoted to Proleter from Zrenjanin. In that first league club he has played from 1992 to 1994, with 63 caps and 25 goals.

He has come to the Belgrade Red-and-Whites in 1994 as one of the league’s best players. In one and a half season he has played 62 competition matches and scored 45 goals. In the season 1994/95 he won a „double crown“ and has contributed in fight for the 1995/96 Cup of Yugoslavia, which his teammates won after he has left abroad on the half of that season.

He was the top scorer of the team, and second in the league in the campaign for the title of Champion in the season 1994/95, with 24 goals scored. The following season, after the sporting sanctions were lifted, he played an excellent autumn semi-season having scored 13 goals in the Championship and 4 in the Cup, only to sign for the British Sheffield Wednesday in the 1996 winter transfer period. During the semi-season he played 16 matches and scored four goals.

After six months in the UK he was transferred to the Spanish Real Sociedad. He has become a goal-getter of the team, which he played with from 1996 to 1999. He was one of the leading goal-scorers of the league. In the season 1997/98 he scored 17 goalsin Primera, and a season later he stopped at 16 goals.

In 1999, when he was at the peak of his career, he signed for Italian Juventus, where he gave good performance. In 47 matches in the Serie A for two seasons in the „Old Lady“ from Turin he scored 11 goals. He excellently performed in European competitions, and was the best UEFA Cup scorer with 10 goals in the 1999/2000 season.

There was a short episode in Lazio, and from 2002 to 2007, again, with great success, he was wearing the Sociedad jersey. He was great in tandem with Turkish national player Nihat Kovacs. They were leading the team in the 2002/03 season, when they lost the championship title won by Real Madrid. That season he scored 19 goals in Primera in 35 matches.

The last club he played with was Olympiacos, with which he won the 2007 Greek Super Cup, the title and Cup in the 2007/08 season.

For the best national team he played 59 matches and scored 10 goals. His debut in the National Team was on 27 December 1994 in a friendly match against Argentina (0:1). He played two matches at the 1998 FIFATM World Cup in France and the 2000 UEFA European Championship in Belgium and the Netherlands. He played his last match for the National Team on 31 March 2004 against Norway (0:1).

Upon the end of his playing career, he was a scout, then Sports Director of Olympiacos.

He speaks English, Spanish, Italian and Greek.