Flacăra Moreni

Flacăra Moreni now sit in Liga III, the level they climbed back to in 2016 after a spell as low as Liga IV.

Oil drew the club into being. Engineers at the Astra Română refinery in Moreni, English and Dutch among them, put the side together in 1922 under the name Astra-Română Moreni, and the town's industrial identity has run through it since — first as Partizanul Moreni after 1950, then as Flacăra from 1951, with a decade-long merger into Flacăra-Automecanica alongside the local machinery plant between 1977 and 1985.

The club's one taste of the top flight came at the end of the 1980s, when it operated as a satellite club to Dinamo București, backed by Interior Ministry officials Tudor Postelnicu and Ion Zenoiu. The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 cut the arrangement off almost immediately; without ministry backing the club fell out of the top division within months and out of the second tier by 1995.

Costel and Marian Pănu, brothers who would go on to win the Romanian title with Dinamo București, started out in Moreni during that same run. So did Gabriel Parașiv, who left as a boy, captained Oțelul Galați to the 2011 championship and played for the national team, then came back to the club he grew up in.

Automecanica Moreni remain the closest thing to a derby the club has, a rivalry with its roots in that 1977 merger and the 1985 split that undid it. Flacăra still plays at the Stadionul Flacăra.