Romanian Football Results Disappoint Fans

For a country that once had some of the best football club teams in Europe, such as Dinamo Bucharest or Steaua Bucharest, the latest results in the European cups are disappointing. Also, the national football team results weren’t quite consistent, during various competitions, including the Olympics.

Football is a phenomenon in Romania, as well as in most European countries. Romania even attended the first World Football Championship in 1930, in Uruguay. Unfortunately, since then, the team has only qualified for 6 other championships. The last world football championship Romania qualified for is the one in France, in 1998.

Besides, Romania hasn’t qualified for the last European Championship, even though Bucharest was one of the cities to organize the competition along with others.

On top of that, the Romanian National Team disappointed its fans during the current Tokyo Olympics. It didn’t score any goal and left the competition after beating Honduras with an own-goal scored by the opponents, lost versus South Korea with 4-0 and draw with New Zealand, 0-0.

Now, for the disaster to be complete, three Romanian football club teams were eliminated on Thursday from the European Cups they were playing in:

• FCSB Bucharest lost the qualification away on penalties against FC Shakhter Karagandy from Kazakhstan
• Sepsi OSK lost the qualification at home on penalties against FC Spartak Trnava from Slovakia
• Universitatea Craiova draw at home with FC Laci from Albania, after the Albanian team beat them with 1-0 in the first leg

The only Romanian team to continue the European competitions is CFR Cluj, the current football champion in the country, but the team isn’t particularly one of the most loved in Romania. Some would say ‘but on the contrary‘, but we refrain from such comments.

Football doesn’t offer many enjoyable moments to its fans in Romania. Those days when the Romanian football clubs were a force in Europe are gone. Now the supporters barely remember the good old days when Dinamo, Steaua, or the national team offered them reasons to take to the streets and enjoy the victories.

The lack of investments in sports, the financial problems of the clubs, the economic context, the European competitions’ new rules that favor the rich clubs, and the country’s European ranking regularly make Romanian clubs lose in the eliminatory phases of the competitions. The pool of potentially good players shrinks year after year and Romania is clearly not in a good moment in football. Moreover, nothing good seems to come ahead.