Article by Mihai Mironică – Published Thursday, December 18, 2025, 10:20 / Updated Thursday, December 18, 2025 10:37
In the Champions League, in the league stage, there is a team from Cyprus, Pafos. He passed 3 preliminary rounds. He hasn't lost in any of his first 5 trips to the Champions League.
In the playoffs, he eliminated Steaua Roșie, the Serbian champion who had fun with the Romanian one even though FCSB was numerically superior in Belgrade. In the league phase, Pafos, a team embodied in sea foam like Aphrodite from the same Cyprus, continued with miracles, victory with Villarreal, tied with Monaco, 6 points after the first 5 stages.
How did a team from Cyprus achieve performances that Gigi Becali, Gică Hagi, Dan Țucu, Mihai Rotaru are proud of, but which are light years away from it? With the 10 non-Cypriot outfield players.
With the most important reservations, non-Cypriots. While we are having snoring discussions about the poor Romanians who need to be protected by some foreign players, Cyprus has a team in the Champions League that has honorable results there as well.
We collected 13 years, an eternity, without being in the Champions League. Cypriots, people from an insignificant island, enjoy being in the elite.
Club football is the backbone of this sport, not national teams. Fans live daily with club teams in the championship and European cups. The global football industry, one of tremendous expansion, is one of the world's largest entertainment industries. And its main juice is given by the clubs.
But we want to sacrifice club football for the national team. As former minister Novak, the father of our disconnection from the European football landscape, told me yesterday on GSP Live Special.
Sowing in football
This vision of our club teams winning the European Cups through the juniors carefully nurtured in their centers is like the salvation by returning to the cultivation of the field around the house preached by the guru of the disoriented nation.
Bosses at Chelsea's youth centre, one of the strongest in the world, say if they can produce a John Terry once every 10 years, their mission is accomplished. Otherwise, Chelsea maintain their status as a world power by scouring this world for super values.
Pafos has been in the hands of a Hungarian Russian citizen for 7 years who has been living in Great Britain for 30 years. Something like this should be the main target of our football if we want to be in the landscape of elite football.
But how to bring a European investor to Romania when our biggest brands, Steaua and Dinamo, belong to the Ministries of Police and War?
At any moment, a mutation of the Talpan strain appearing in the Ministry of the Interior can begin to strip Dinamo from the first league of its identity. In addition, the large-scale investor will learn that he must have 15 Romanians in the lot, many of them cruel at their age because there is also the “under” rule. That this means 5 Romanians permanently on the field, 15 Romanians in the team.
The best Romanians leave the SuperLiga anyway. And we have to find 75 good Romanians, because we also dream of having 5 teams at least in the European cups. 75 high-level Romanians in the Romanian championship do not even exist in science fiction stories. But never mind this whole picture of flooding our championship with protected mediocrity.
It is important to advance to the national level by protecting the young from the yellow fluff. But protectionism shows no value. The national youth team made up of protected children, with a place in the Super League secured, was crushed, outclassed by Spain or the ski jumpers from tiny Finland.
Countries where there is no discriminatory football based on age. Finland also hid the ball from us with a 19-year-old midfielder who left the nest and plays in Sweden, and Eintracht Frankfurt are preparing a €10 million assault for him this winter.
Florin Tănase in Red Star Belgrade – FCSB / Photo: Cristi Preda (GSP)
Romania does not grow with incubator footballers
Because that's how real footballers are built, “under conditions of adversity”, to borrow Ionuț Chirilă's expression. At the invoked Pafos, a Romanian, Vlad Dragomir, is also playing very well in the Champions League.
He is there because he chose a true path that he had to conquer without any favor, but by value. The other Romanian in a Champions League team, Radu Drăgușin, had a similar path, work, value, no fluff of communist law to protect him.
We continue with the aberrations that do not exist anywhere in real football: halving of points, lumpy “unders”, cohorts of natives who would play only with the ballot. While the English, who have to make their way through the world's toughest competition, the Premier League, the championship that attracts the best foreigners, are having a good time.
England reached the World Cup three times, twice in the final of the EURO, which it had not succeeded in its entire history, won the last two editions of the EURO U21, was European champion at U19 and world champion at U17.
Because good teams are made up of hardened footballers, not lumpy ones. For the national team, Romania does not need many players raised in an artificial environment, but a few who have broken through exclusively by their own strength.
