BC Steaua București

Steaua go into the 2024–2025 season back in the Liga Națională after slipping into the lower divisions, a return that on its own counts as progress for a club that spent recent years being reassembled under other names. What plays under Sala Mihai Viteazul's roof today carries the same badge as the side that won 21 league titles between 1956 and 1991, but the line between those two eras runs through bankruptcy, a 2009 merger with BC Târgoviște and a further merger in 2013 with CS Municipal București.

The club began in 1952 as the basketball wing of the Romanian Army's sports club, which is where the nickname Militarii comes from, alongside Steaua and the Red and Blues. Through the 1950s to the 1980s it barely gave up the domestic title, taking the league in nineteen of those seasons plus 1990 and 1991, and adding the Romanian Cup in 1966 and 1981. Its one real run in Europe came in 1960–61, when it reached the semi-finals of the FIBA European Champions Cup.

No player is tied to that history more than Anton Netolitzchi, who played from 1977 to 1993 and won eleven league titles along with the 1993 Romanian Cup, staying through the club's transition from state institution to private outfit after 1989 and outlasting the collapse that followed.

The rivalry with Dinamo București, played out as the Eternal Derby, has never needed a trophy to matter, and it survived the years when Steaua itself barely did. The domestic games are still played at Sala Mihai Viteazul, which holds 2,000, while European nights move to the larger Sala Polivalentă.

Twenty-one league championships is the number that still separates Steaua from every other side that has tried to match it.