Petrocub

In the spring of 2003, a football club from a village near Hîncești was struck off the Moldovan championship mid-season, its accounts and its name both already tangled from years of shuffling between Spicul, Petrocub-Spicul and Hîncești. It had started nine years earlier in Sărata-Galbeni as Petrocub-Condor.

It took over a decade to find out. The club settled on Petrocub, then briefly Rapid-2 Petrocub, before fixing on FC Petrocub Hîncești in 2014 and climbing back into the top flight the following year. In 2023-24 it won the league and the Moldovan Cup in the same season, the first golden double in its history, and followed the league title again in 2025-26.

Vladimir Ambros has scored more of those goals than anyone else who has worn the shirt — 107 in 192 matches since 2014, with top-scorer honours in the league in 2018 and 2022. One of the few constants through all the renaming, Marius Iosipoi, in midfield, was central to the 2023-24 campaign itself, contributing 11 goals and 10 assists across 78 appearances that season and after.

The Hîncești Lions, as the club is officially known, still play in black and white at the Stadionul Municipal, a ground that holds 1,633 people. Petrocub go into the new season defending that second league title with a squad built around the same core that won the double, still working out of a stadium built for a club a fraction of its current size.