By Liviu Bird, New York Times
Amid rumors of their club folding, players from Universitatea Cluj of Romania’s Liga 1 were paid for the first time in four months on Saturday. After a 2-1 derby loss to UEFA Champions League participant CFR Cluj, a small amount of cash found its way into U Cluj’s locker room — not from the owner’s checkbook, but from the fans’ pockets.Two fan representatives made their way into the bowels of the stadium and through the news media mixed zone after the match with a bag containing 6,514 lei (about $1,900), collected from the stands. As players left the locker room, each was handed a small packet of money that amounted to one of their first paydays of the season.
“It was our desire to collect this money,” one supporter told Gazeta Sporturilor. “We know the difficulties at the club, and we want to help. Each of us gave what we could so the boys could go eat or use the money however they wish.”
With one of the nation’s top 18 clubs reduced to paying its players from followers’ offerings, the events in Cluj led the president of the Romanian players’ union Dumitru Dragomir to say what many already know: many clubs are in dire financial situations.
“There are more clubs in situations like the one at U Cluj,” he said. “Many more, keep in mind. Not coincidentally, I have proposed a reduction of the championship from 18 to 14 teams. You’ll see four or five teams in Liga 1, 10 or 15 from Liga 2 and 30 from Liga 3 disappear.”
U Cluj is a traditional first-division team, playing 53 seasons there in the club’s 93-year history. It has never won a championship, but the club has won Liga 2 six times. At the turn of the millennium, Universitatea found itself relegated to Liga 3, but only for the 2000-1 season.
It was promoted to the second division the next season and up to the first division after winning Liga 2 in 2006-7. U Cluj has oscillated between the top two divisions since then. Along the way, the club has carried one of the more passionate fan bases in the country.
Supporters’ groups promote the slogan “Mamă, te iubesc, dar nu ca pe U!” (Mom, I love you, but not like U!) It is imprinted on their scarves, and it echoes through the terraces on match day.
“Universitatea Cluj is more than a club; U Cluj is a Romanian symbol from Transylvania. It’s a tradition,” the supporter Mircea Cenan said on DigiSport’s “Fanatik Show” on Saturday, the same show on which a manager was effectively fired earlier this season.
It is a quotation reminiscent of Barcelona’s Més Que un Club (More Than a Club) catchphrase, but for a club with the finances that more closely resemble Glasgow Rangers’ at the disastrous end of last season.
The reason for U Cluj’s situation is the owner Florian Walter, who is also a member of the Romanian Football Federation’s executive committee. He left Cluj last summer for fellow Liga 1 team Petrolul Ploiesti.
Thanks to some strange regulations, Walter still controls the cash flow at both clubs, although he clearly favors one over the other. Cluj’s 15 best players from 2010-11 moved to Ploiesti with him, and the Transylvanian club’s search for new investors has thus far come up empty.
This comes less than a year after Walter declared in January that he wanted to win a title with U Cluj and reinvest in the youth academy at the club. Perhaps more telling was his answer, in the same interview, to whether he was happy that he invested in the club nearly three years before.
“In some ways, yes, in some ways, no,” Walter said. “To be honest, I expected more out of everybody [at the club]. If you say that you’re a phenomenon in Transylvania, you expect much more. Not money, because nobody gives you money, but there are many collateral things that, if somebody loves a soccer club, they could do.”
Marius Sumudica was hired as the new head coach earlier this month, but he quit after one game in charge because of the lack of overhead support. After that match, a 2-1 loss to Rapid Bucharest on Nov. 12, the former coach said: “I can’t do purely patriotic work.”
“We have players who walk to training, leaving home an hour ahead of time,” he added. “We went to a hotel before the game, and we didn’t have anything to eat. They didn’t have meat to give us. They gave us fish, but we struggled to debone it.”
U Cluj’s next game, on Nov. 16, was against its owner’s other club. The DigiSport commentator called the matchup “a situation that only Romanian soccer could offer.” In the ninth minute, Adrian Cristea opened the scoring on the way to a 2-0 Ploiesti victory.
Last season, he led U Cluj with eight goals in league play.
Sumudica could be forgiven for not being able to deal with the peculiar situation in which he was placed, but U Cluj fans are no strangers to adversity.
Over half of their ancient former stadium, Stadionul Ion Moina, lay unused because of structural flaws that made it unsafe for spectators. The crumbling monolith was finally demolished in 2008 to make way for Cluj Arena in the same space. The new building is a jewel of a soccer ground, a UEFA Elite Stadium (Category 4), the highest mark possible.
During construction, Cluj played its 2009-10 Liga 2 home games in 2,000-seat Clujana Stadium in Cluj. After its promotion to Liga 1 for 2010-11, the club sought higher-capacity temporary homes in Alba Iulia, Bistrta and Medias, each more than an hour away.
Throughout it all, the fans have remained loyal and proud, a fact not lost on the players who wear the crest. The club captain Bogdan Patrascu announced a new set of players’ priorities before their game against Petrolul Ploiesti, in the wake of Sumudica’s resignation.
“We didn’t make the trip to Ploiesti for no reason,” he said. “We discussed it last night, and not for one moment did we think about not playing. We will play for us — for the fans.”
