Universitatea Cluj

A doctor put it together. Iuliu Hațieganu wanted a sports society for the university's students in Cluj-Napoca, and in November 1919 the Societatea Sportivă a Studenților Universitari began operating. The students stuck as a name — Studenții is still one of the club's nicknames, alongside Șepcile roșii, the Red Caps.

Within four years the club had taken a Romanian team abroad for the first time, playing in France, Italy and Yugoslavia. Domestic football caught up with it in 1932, when Universitatea entered the national championship and reached the final against Ripensia Timișoara. Runners-up, and it would be a long wait for anything better.

The Second Vienna Award pushed the club out of its own city in 1940. It spent five years in Sibiu, playing as Universitatea Cluj-Sibiu, and came back to a stretch of name changes — Știința Cluj for most of the two decades that followed. Under that name it won the Romanian Cup in 1965, beating Dinamo Pitești 2:1. The season after, it took the cup into Europe and got as far as the quarter-finals of the Cup Winners' Cup before Atlético Madrid ended the run.

A third-place finish in 1972, a League Cup final lost to FCM Bacău in extra time in 1998, then the third division by 1999 and eight years spent climbing back. Bankruptcy in 2016 wiped out even that: the club was rebuilt from the fourth tier with the municipality and its supporters behind it.

Home is Cluj Arena, which holds 30,201.

Universitatea finished second in the Romanian championship — matching the 1933 result, and its best since — and reached the Cup final again.