CSM Constanța

Debt buried HCM Constanța in the summer of 2015, and within weeks a replacement side, HC Dobrogea Sud, took shape in the same city to keep top-flight handball alive there. Seven years later it merged with the multi-sports club CSM Constanța and took that name, folding the old crest into a broader municipal identity rather than starting again from nothing.

The nine Liga Națională titles won between 2004 and 2014 belong to the club's earlier incarnation, but the run tells its own story: a side that won the league nine times in eleven seasons, then had to be rebuilt from the ground up under a different name after the money ran out. The Romanian Cup has been kinder to continuity — Constanța lifted it as recently as 2023, its seventh, spread across both eras of the club's existence.

Aihan Omer has run the bench since 2017, long enough to have overseen both the Dobrogea Sud years and the switch back to the Constanța name, which makes him the closest thing the current squad has to institutional memory. Zoran Nikolić has been a constant presence on court across that same stretch, one of the few players to carry over from the earlier roster into the current one.

Sala Sporturilor holds 1,500, modest against the club's continental ambitions; a 2010 run to the Champions League round of sixteen and a 2006 semi-final in the EHF Cup Winners' Cup remain the high points in Europe, and nothing since has matched them. Domestically the fixtures against CSM București and Dinamo București carry the weight of rivalry without ever earning a name of their own beyond the generic "derby-ul Ligii Zimbrilor."