Csikszereda

Dezső Varga wore the shirt from 1959 to 1965 and captained Romania, and in Miercurea Ciuc that name still stands for what the club considers itself: not just a team but a source of local pride. The claim rests on numbers few Romanian sides in any sport can match — 17 national league titles and 16 domestic cups.

It started, according to the story still told locally, with a film. In January 1929 a group of young men in the town watched a newsreel of an ice hockey match and decided to form a team of their own. The club joined the Romanian championship four years later. For decades afterward it played under a different name, SC Miercurea Ciuc, adopted in 1973; the switch back to the Hungarian HSC Csíkszereda came only in 2010, backed by the town's mayor, Róbert Ráduly, and followed a strange season in which two rival clubs from the same city, HC Csíkszereda and SC Miercurea Ciuc, had finished first and second in the same league.

The clearest measure of what the club built came in 2012, when it won the IIHF Continental Cup, beating Yunost Minsk in the deciding group stage in Rouen. Three further Erste Liga championships followed within the decade, in 2020, 2021 and 2022, played in front of crowds at the Lajos Vákár Ice Hall. Blue and white have stayed the colours throughout, and the closest thing to a needle match remains the Székely derby against Gyergyói HK, two Hungarian-speaking towns in Transylvania separated by little more than the road between them.