Aerostar Bacău

When FCM Bacău folded in 2014, professional football in a city of that size came down to one address: a works club attached to the aerospace plant. Aerostar had spent most of its life as the second team in town, and it inherited the position by outlasting the first.

The club grew out of Victoria Bacău in 1956, became Aripile Bacău in 1973, and took the name of the plant, Aerostar S.A., in 1992. Two years later it was wound up in bankruptcy. The 1995 revival brought back the name and installed Doru Damaschin as president, and he has held the post ever since, through two promotions from Liga IV and four Liga III titles.

The titles bunch into two eras. The first pair, in 1984–85 and 1987–88, took the club into the second division, where its high-water mark remains eighth place in 1989–90. The second pair came thirty years later, in 2017–18 and 2019–20, by which point the plant's team was the city's only professional side.

That same 2017–18 season produced the deepest Romanian Cup run in the club's history, the last sixteen. The Airmen — the nickname comes from the sponsor, as do the yellow and blue — have never gone further in the competition.

Stadionul Aerostar seats 1,500, which sets the ceiling on much of this. The second division is the frontier: reached once in the 1980s, never held for long, and the eighth place from 1989–90 still stands as the best the club has managed above Liga III.