Iskra

The Cup that Iskra Rîbnița carries into its second decade did not come from the top flight. In 2022/23 the club won Liga 2, the domestic cup competition run for third-tier sides, closing a first full decade with the one trophy the current side has to show for itself.

That decade began in 2013, when the club took shape after FC Iskra-Stal Rîbnița, the name under which the city had known its football for years, came apart. Iskra-Stal had been the stronger side by some distance: third in the league in 2008/09, second the year after, and in 2010/11 it won the Moldovan Cup outright, the high point of anything played under the Iskra name in Rîbnița. The 2013 club rebuilt from that collapse rather than continuing it, and the cup it eventually won belonged to a different tier of the game than the one its predecessor had reached.

Artur Ioniță, Serghei Alexeev and Vitali Manaliu all played for Iskra-Stal in those better years, before the split scattered what the club had built.

Now in Liga 1, the second tier, Iskra plays out of Stadionul Orășenesc, the city ground in Rîbnița, which holds 4,500. It is not a stadium that draws crowds anywhere near capacity for a second-division fixture, but it remains the fixed point in a story that has otherwise had to start over more than once.