I’ve been away from Romania for nearly 3 years. As the 2021-22 season draws to a close, let’s see what’s changed since I left. Oh, not much.
The League
CFR Cluj are champions for the fifth time in a row. Remarkably, Dan Petrescu has been their coach for all of those wins – though he’s popped out for spells in China and Turkey during two of these seasons before dragging himself back to Transylvania each time. The Badger can now be acclaimed as the joint-second-most successful coach in the history of the Romanian league, with six championships (having previously won the title with ludicrous village side Unirea Urziceni in 2008-09). He is level with Emeric Jenei, the man who led Steaua to European glory – though you might point out that the first five of Jenei’s six league wins in charge of the army club are somewhat tainted by the rampant match-fixing and huge finance and power differential that defined football in the Ceaușescu era.
In today’s game, the huge financial advantage lies with FCSB, the disputed successor entity of the mighty Steaua. Outspoken owner and occasional shepherd Gigi Becali buys the best players, pays the highest wages, and comes out with all kinds of garbage that maintains the media circus. He also often hires good coaches, and then quickly fires them if they show signs of a mind of their own. Edi Iordănescu arrived in August as the best young coach around – he had been in charge at CFR for the second half of last season – but endured the routine public humiliations by his boss for only three months before deciding he needed to move to rescue his reputation. He was appointed coach of the national team in January. Becali replaced him with the man who had led the club to second place the previous season, Toni Petrea, and Toni has delivered the same again. Runners-up for the sixth time in seven years. It’s become FCSB’s natural home.
The last time they won the title, in 2014-15, they did so thanks to the league leaders Târgu Mureș’ unexpected – and, for some, suspicious – final-day home defeat by an already relegated Oțelul Galați. At that point, Becali had only just been released on parole after serving prison time, partly for having tried to bribe U Cluj with over a million euros in a suitcase before a crucial match for the title race, against CFR several years earlier. That’s just for context, by the way.
The disappointed Târgu Mureș coach in 2015 was Liviu Ciobotariu, who is now boss of Voluntari. Last weekend, satisfyingly for Liviu, Voluntari were the team who denied FCSB the chance to mug CFR for the championship on the final day. They did so by holding them 2-2, with the aid of a wrongly given offside goal. In Romania there is no VAR, even though this time last year – also after blaming his team’s failures on refereeing errors – Becali offered to pay from his own pocket the half-million euros it would cost to implement. Nor did Becali waste time last week before speculating that perhaps the mayor of Voluntari had taken a bung from CFR to play well; said mayor, Florentin Pandele, happens to be his son-in-law. Pandele made time during his pilgrimage in Greece to deny the accusations: nobody took bribes; even if they did (which they didn’t), the club is independent of the municipality and so there is no way to transfer bonuses from the city hall to the players.
Even beyond that shepherd-stymying result, Voluntari under Ciobotariu are a huge success story this season, achieving their highest ever league position and reaching a second Cup final. However, the decision not to rest players against FCSB may be partly responsible for their 2-1 defeat to first-time winners Sepsi in the showpiece event at Rapid’s shiny new Giulești stadium a few days later. Their path to this year’s final was admittedly eased somewhat by a Covid outbreak in the FCSB squad in October, which caused Becali to forfeit the round-of-16 match between the two teams. The ever-controversial Gigi is a vocal anti-vaxxer, and in February even suggested that vaccinated players would not be picked. (Context again.)
Anyway, back to CFR. The club, whose zenith before being taken over in 2002 was the 1968-69 Divizia B title, have now won eight leagues and four cups in the last fifteen years. Petrescu has taken some criticism this year, and the former Steaua star had this to say:
“I’ve been dusted off this season, like never before, by most. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t say something wrong about me. That’s why I’m so upset. I think I deserve a little respect […] because, for six years, I’ve shown that I’m not a bad coach.”
Also this: “[In Bucharest or Craiova] Everyone shouts, ‘F*ck Dan Petrescu’. I’ve made history and the whole country insults me. Why? Have I given my life for this country so it can insult me? In the match against Rapid at Mioveni, ten thousand people stayed to insult me. […] We’re in a country where we don’t respect anyone.”
Petrescu’s team beat third-placed Universitatea Craiova 2-1 at home to secure the league title. On the Craiova bench, as it happens, sits Laurențiu Reghecampf, arguably the last successful coach of FCSB (in that he won trophies and is still on speaking terms with the owner). In the dead-rubber final match, FCSB beat a second-string CFR 3-1: too little, too late for Becali’s boys.
Europe
Thanks to Romania’s low standing with UEFA, CFR will go into the first qualifying round of the Champions League, where their fellow seeded teams include The New Saints and Lincoln Red Imps. CFR hardly covered themselves in glory in Europe this season, finishing bottom of their Conference League group, but the 666,000 euro prize money for one win and one draw was not to be sniffed at. Times are hard. U Craiova and FCSB were both knocked out in the second qualifying round of the Conference League this season, to the fourth-best teams in Albania and Kazakhstan respectively. Sepsi at least had the dignity of falling at the same stage to the third-best team in Slovakia. Romanian pundits used to yearn for one of their teams to make it into the ‘European Spring’; these days they can’t even get into August.
The Europa Conference League second qualifying round is what awaits FCSB once again. Having again finished third in the play-off phase in the league, U Craiova next have to get through Romania’s European qualification play-off, against Botoșani; the winner of that play-off will join FCSB in the ECLSQR.
Román Kupa
As Sepsi Sfântu Gheorghe won the Cup, they go straight into the Conference League preliminaries too. Terrific to see that Sepsi, from the majority-Hungarian Szekely region, are still being subjected to xenophobic chants from some opposition fans, something also suffered by neighbours FK Czikszereda in the second division. Some parts of the media (and the socials) summoned up outrage that some of Sepsi’s players neither sang nor put their hands on their hearts during the Romanian national anthem before the final, instead singing the Szekely anthem afterwards with the fans in celebration of victory. And there’s apparently a debate about whether Sepsi’s goalkeeper Roland Niczuly should be called up to the Romania squad; he’s a Romanian citizen of Hungarian ethnicity. He’s said he’d like to play for Romania but would be just as happy if Hungary came calling. Traitor!
Nationalist narrow-mindedness aside, although both Sepsi and FK Czikszereda appear well-run and sustainable clubs, and might be taken as good examples for others to follow, there are legitimate anxieties about their funding: both have received millions of euros in subsidy from a foreign state. Hungary gives financial support to projects for the benefit of ethnic Hungarians beyond its borders, and Transylvania, with well over a million ethnic Hungarians, is a major focus: the Szekely area especially so, since there they are in the large majority. Viktor Orban’s obsession with football is well-known, and both clubs have had big grants to build stadiums and run academies. “Sports is a tool to preserve and consolidate national identity and pride,” said Orban’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó earlier this year. Romania’s sports minister, Károly Eduárd Novák, a Szekely himself as well as a lawyer and former Paralympic cyclist, was reported as saying that Romanian sport needed reform and Hungary could help by sharing its best practices. This one will run and run…
The Bottom Half… and the rest
The city of Craiova survived two derbies between the competing successor entities to the former UEFA Cup semi-finalists; both games ended in wins for the bigger boys, U Craiova. The newly-promoted phoenix club FC U Craiova managed to drag themselves clear of relegation, but all is not well: in December they blocked comments on their Facebook page after fans grew angry with the owner Adrian Mitițelu. Mitițelu appears to be ready to sell the club, which he founded only five years ago in the fourth division.
FCSB’s Florin Tănase finished as Liga I’s top scorer for the second year in a row. FC Argeș have secured their highest finish for over twenty years, in sixth. Botoșani finish eighth, as usual. Just below them are Rapid, for whom ninth place represents a satisfactory return to Liga I after a six-year absence. (Or an even more satisfactory first-ever appearance at this level, if you treat them as an entirely new entity.) The legendary Adrian Mutu was appointed as Rapid manager in early March, to the anger of many fans who saw his dinamovist past as an insurmountable barrier to acceptance. Others pointed to his severe lack of coaching experience. However, seven straight victories meant he doubled his career win total in just a few months, and a side that was struggling badly under loyal servant Mihai Iosif secured its Liga I status beyond all doubt. Mioveni have avoided relegation from Liga I for the first time in their history. The merger of Hagi’s Viitorul with Farul Constanța yielded a customary top-half finish.
The bottom of the table has attracted a lot of attention all season, thanks to some serious doldrum-wallowing by Dinamo, Romania’s second most successful team, with eighteen league titles, who have never been relegated since their foundation in 1948. They finished 14th out of 16 in the league, saved from automatic relegation by the implosion of the two teams below them: Academica Clinceni were deducted 20 points and Gaz Metan Mediaș 65 (I think), for debts owed to former players and staff.
Gaz Metan (the name means, romantically enough, Methane Gas), who have spent thirteen of the past fourteen seasons in the top flight, will cease to exist at the end of the season. The coach (their third of the season), local boy and academy product Flavius Boroncoi, took a padlock with him to the press conference on the last day, to lock the stadium gates. The first team were released in February, so in the latter stages of the season, in order to fulfil their fixtures the team from Mediaș fielded their under-19s in the league, with matchday expenses paid by the league itself (amounting to around 100,000 euros per game). This enabled the league to receive the full amount of TV money, 28.5 million euros for the year, which would have been reduced with one fewer team.
So Mediaș, a sizeable town in central Transylvania, will be without a football team next year. Clinceni, meanwhile, is a non-place of just 5,000 inhabitants, not far from Bucharest, that shouldn’t have had a first (or even second) division team to begin with. Academica won promotion in 2019 thanks to a feeder agreement with FCSB. In fact, the club is suffering from last year’s success, when they unexpectedly reached the top-half play-off and consequently had to pay the players a bunch of bonuses they couldn’t afford. They then had to offload the quality, and won just three times this season. The club has burned through five coaches during the season and will also be wound up this summer, to the dismay of approximately no-one.
The league administrators are making noises about rethinking the financial rules to try to avoid this kind of thing…
Dogs Poo
Dinamo finished just above these two basket cases. The grand old lady of Ștefan cel Mare has not finished in the top two for fifteen years and has been plagued by debt and bad management for a decade. Dinamo was briefly in the black after a takeover in 2020, but the new Spanish owners didn’t pay players any more regularly than the last lot, and the supporters now have a 20% stake in partnership with even newer owners. Under the competent Cosmin Contra they mounted a semi-serious title challenge in 2017, since when they have changed manager seventeen times. Former owner Nicolae Badea has barred Dinamo from using their name and logo, which he says are legally his property, for commercial purposes. So next season’s badge will be designed by a competition winner.
The past four years have been increasingly nightmarish, culminating in this mess, their worst-ever season. Early in the season the Red Dogs went four months without a victory. They took a 6-0 beating at arch-rivals FCSB, the biggest win by either side in 183 eternal derbies over a 73-year period. They used an all-time record 53 different players during the season (though Clinceni later got to 54). They lost 24 of their 39 matches, their points tally in any other year would see them condemned, and they have been terrible. Yet they still have a shot at survival: the baraj, a two-legged play-off (Romania loves a play-off) against U Cluj, who finished third in the second division. The League saved Dinamo from demotion in 2020 by expanding the division to 16 teams. This time the Dogs must save themselves – but do they remember how to win matches?
[Edit, 30 May 2022: U Cluj won the baraj, 2-0 and 1-1, so they’ll be in the top tier next season. Dinamo’s first ever relegation has become a horrible, humiliating reality!]
Liga II
These days it seems a better option to play in Liga II than Liga I, as several clubs are financed, at least in part, by the local authority, pay wages on time and enjoy a certain stability. U Cluj are in this category, as are the two teams which won automatic promotion, Petrolul Ploiești and Hermannstadt of Sibiu. Meanwhile, clubs that recently competed in the top half of the top flight, and even in European competition, such as Pandurii Târgu Jiu, ASA Târgu Mureș, and even 2016 champions Astra Giurgiu, are all now either Liga 3 part-timers or out of business altogether. However, there is more to this than meets the eye: although Petrolul owe money to former players and Hermannstadt are insolvent, both clubs have been awarded licences to compete in Liga I. How this fits in with a more rigorous financial climate is as yet unclear.
One club not happy with the outcome of the promotion battle, however, is CSA Steaua, the army’s successor club to the country’s most successful team. Despite finishing fourth, after two successive promotions, they were denied a place in the baraj for the top flight because their ownership by a government ministry bars them from competing in Liga I. I seem to remember that they were originally not going to be allowed in to Liga II for the same reason (and Liga III before that), but these problems must have got sorted out somehow. The situation at the moment is that the football federation backs a change in the law which currently forbids state-owned clubs from competing in the top division; in the meantime the owners of CSA Steaua have the option to convert into a private company this summer in order to permit promotion next season.
[Edit, 30 May 2022: Fans of this Steaua can now comfort themselves with the exciting prospect of derbies against Dinamo! They have not been slow to put up welcome-to-Liga-2 messages around the city.]
National Team
Former Romania captain Mirel Rădoi‘s two-year reign as senior national team coach came to an end in November 2021, after Romania failed to reach the play-off for World Cup qualification. The campaign had featured draws with Iceland and North Macedonia, plus a first ever defeat to Armenia. To face the challenge of Euro qualification, the federation tried to secure the services of another ex-skipper, László Bölöni, who – unusually for this position – does have a pretty good coaching record, and was most recently in charge of Panathinaikos. However, Bölöni – a man, incidentally, who identifies as a Hungarian but amassed a hundred caps for Romania – passed on this wonderful opportunity to revisit his ten-game stint in charge in 2000-01. Dan Petrescu similarly demurred. So the suits turned to the best domestic candidate, the last man standing, Edi Iordănescu.
Iordanescu guided Gaz Metan to 7th and 6th in consecutive seasons, and Pandurii to an unlikely 3rd, before the second half of a title-winning season with CFR, and then the rite of passage of being sacked by Gigi Becali (after 8 wins in 11 games). He is the first Romanian with no international caps to do the job for thirty years, with the exception of Răzvan Lucescu, whose dad Mircea is the most lauded Romanian coach of the modern era. Luckily, Edi has that element of magic, too, in that his dad Anghel just happens to be the national team’s most successful manager of all time.
The under-21 side got to the semi-final of the Euros in 2019 and were knocked out unbeaten in the following edition in 2021. Many of the players involved are now on good deals, learning their trade in competitive environments overseas. Can the new boss get anything out of this talented crop of players at senior level? Montenegro, Bosnia and Finland await in the Nations League in June.
romaniaballs 
Leave a comment