During the early period playing in Yugoslavia's competitions, Kvarner reached moderate successes in various national and local leagues. Still, the club was relegated at the end of their inaugural season in the Yugoslav First League in 1946–47, due to a purely political decision to favour Ponziana, after Quarnero had already secured its stay in the first league in the course of the season. Upon securing Rijeka for Yugoslavia, the Belgrade authorities were now trying to pander to Trieste's residents through sport, in hope of annexing also that city to Yugoslavia. The club continued to play with mixed results in the second and third leagues of Yugoslav football. The club display worse and worse results over the next ten years concurrently to Rijeka's autochthonous population slowly leaving their hometown over the years. Consequently, also the club was bleeding many of its best players year in year out, because many opted to leave Yugoslavia and move overseas. In 1954, following rising ethnic tensions around the Triest Crisis and the subsequent elimination of all forms of bilingualism in the city, paired with a desire to have a brand more recognizable and associated the club was further renamed into NK Rijeka. 1954–1991 Given the political interferences in the club's life and the continuous mistreatment of ethnical Italians many of Quarnero's best players were forced to join the Fiuman exodus, and the club lingered between the second and third tier of the Yugoslav competition for the next several years. Following new Italian-Yugoslav tensions that arose during the Trieste Crisis, and the subsequent de facto abolition of the city's full bilingual rights by the communist authorities in Belgrade, the club changed its name once again, into the now completely monolingual NK Rijeka (Rijeka Football Club) on the 2nd of July 1954, giving up onto the Italian language in its brand image for the first time in the club's history. Rijeka started to use a white kit for the second time in its history in a match in Šibenik in the 1957–58 second league season. During the previous seasons the kit colors were constantly being changed, depending on what was available to the management at any given time of the season and to what the sponsors were able to offer. The main kit remained white since. Rijeka returned to the First League in 1958 and remained in the top tier for 11 consecutive seasons until 1969, when