https://twitter.com/mattdebary/status/1483254007166648321?s=21
With an estimated global following of 4 billion people, football (or soccer as the North Americans call it) is the world's most popular sport, and this is also the case in the Eastern European country of Romania, where the fans are so passionate, they will angrily chase the players of the opposite team and referees if their team loses, and the football club owners are uncreative enough to come up with team names such as "Methane Gas Medias", "Oil Ploiesti", "Romanian Railways Cluj" "Textile Factory Arad" and the now defunct team known as "Chinese Man Timisoara" (which surprisingly, has nothing to do with China). But today we will talk about Romania's top football club, it's eccentric owner and how it lost it's name and brand
The Golden Era
In June 1947, in the then Kingdom of Romania, the Ministry of National Defense founded a football club called Steaua Bucharest, fully owned and controlled by the army. Steaua quickly rose through the ranks of the Romanian football divisions and eventually became the star of Romanian football, literally, as "Steaua" means "the star".
The club reached it's peak in 1986, when Steaua faced Spain's Barcelona in the final of the Champions League, the biggest football competition in Europe and the second biggest in the world, right after the FIFA world cup. After 120 minutes, neither team managed to score a goal so the match entered the penalty shoot-outs, where each team has 5 shots and takes turns shooting at the goal, with the goal only defended by the opposing team's goalkeeper. Fortunately for Steaua, their goalkeeper, Helmuth Duckadam, was about to set a world record and managed to defend the goal from 4 consecutive shots. (this is the only source I could find in english, the full penalty shoot-out I could only find in Romanian).
Steaua became the first Eastern European club to win the Champions League, they were praised personally by the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu and the club continued strong until 1989, when the Eastern Bloc fell. Now, in a democratic, capitalist country, many of the football players of the "golden generation" departed Steaua to join the richer football clubs of Western Europe and despite Steaua still being a strong competitor in the Romanian football league, it would never again compete at the highest levels of European football. In 1998,
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