Steaua Bucuresti

The army founded the club in 1951 as CCA București, a hockey section built inside the same military sports structure that had already put teams on the football pitch, and by 1961 the name had settled into Steaua. What followed was not a rivalry so much as a monopoly: forty national championships, taken almost every year through the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 1990s, a run broken only occasionally and never for long until it tailed off after 2006. Thirty-three Romanian Cups came alongside it, including a stretch in 1990 and again in 1998 where the club won the competition twice in a single year, spring and autumn.

Mihai Flamaropol set the standard as player-coach through the title-heavy 1950s, and Bucharest's old rink carried his name for decades afterwards until it was pulled down in 2016. Steaua now plays out of the much smaller Berceni Arena, seating 800, though even that has not always held up — a compressor failure once cost the club a forfeited match against Ferencváros TC in the MOL Liga, and technical problems with the ice in early 2025 pushed games out to the Allianz-Țiriac Arena in Otopeni.

The old front against Dinamo București, the Eternal Derby that defines Romanian sport more broadly, followed the club onto the ice as well, though it lost its edge in 2005 when Dinamo's hockey section folded. Beyond Romania, Steaua's record thins out; a first-round exit to HK Partizan Belgrade in the 1986–87 European Cup stands as one of the few traces of European competition. The club remains the property of the Ministry of National Defence, the same ownership under which a group of army officers first put a hockey section together in 1951.