CSA Steaua București

Bucharest built its army club the way it built its officer corps: from the top down. On 7 June 1947, the Ministry of Defence signed the founding order, and the football section spent its first years cycling through names tied to the barracks — ASA, CSCA, CCA — before settling on Steaua in 1961.

The uniform under Ceaușescu-era football was rank, not shirt number: officers ran the club, and the club ran the league. Between 1951 and 1998 it collected twenty Romanian championships and twenty domestic cups, stretches so dominant that some seasons the title race was over by spring. None of it explains the night in Seville in 1986, when a team from behind the Iron Curtain went to a European Cup final against Barcelona, drew blank through 120 minutes, and won the shootout without missing a kick while Barcelona missed all four. It remains the only European Cup ever lifted by a Romanian side, and it was followed a year later by the UEFA Super Cup.

The peacetime years were harder on the name than the war years ever were. In 1998 the football section was carved off the military sports club and privatised; by 2003 it belonged to businessman Gigi Becali, who renamed it FC Steaua. A 2014 court ruling stripped that private company of the right to use the Steaua name and crest at all — the case that eventually pushed Becali's club toward the name FCSB. In 2017 the Ministry of National Defence answered by re-establishing CSA Steaua București itself, reclaiming the record built between 1947 and 1998 as its own, while the Becali-owned club kept only what it had won since 2003.

Today the club plays in Liga II, at the Stadionul Steaua on Bulevardul Ghencea, rebuilt in 2021 to hold just over 31,000 — a smaller stage than the one where Steaua once beat Barcelona on penalties, but the ground where the Steauari still show up in red and blue.