Playing for and against the nation: football in interwar Romania

Abstract

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions.

Keywords:

• football
• nationalism
• interwar Romania
• regionalism
• sport

“It's inadmissible to create a state within a state.” This short quote appeared in large, bold letters on the front page of a Romanian sports newspaper in August 1937.¹ The line was taken from an interview with Viorel Virgil Tilea, president of the Romanian Football Federation, a distinguished member of the National Peasants' Party and a reputed diplomat. Almost 20 years after the creation of Greater Romania, Tilea was publicly voicing and reacting to one of Romanians’ greatest historical fears – the perceived danger of statehood in peril, jeopardized by an enemy within. Tellingly, he was doing so as the chief administrator of the game of football, translating one of the major tropes of Romanian political history into the realm of sport. For Tilea, the passionate debates surrounding the alteration of the national football league were clear signs of instability and danger at the very heart of the state. Throughout the interwar period, Romanian sports administrators were at odds regarding the ways in which to best balance the highly uneven regional participation in elite competitions, skewed toward Transylvania and Banat, and to redress the ethnic composition of the participating clubs. He envisaged a solution in the complete Romanianization of the game and promised measures in that direction. His intervention is remarkable in the way it captures the problems of the interwar Romanian nation-state as these presented themselves in the development of the game of football.

By engaging from the very top the organizational and political problems of Romanian club football, the interview clearly depicted three central dimensions of modern Romanian nation-state making: territorial unification, state centralization and nationalization. Looking at the regional distribution of the clubs contesting the national league, Tilea noted that “twenty years since the Union, the championship is still disputed between four Transylvanian cities and Bucharest.” Clubs in all other regions were still trailing well down the line. He warned that the uneven regional development of the game was perpetuated since the establishment of Greater Romania and was likely to be reproduced without determined state intervention. Geographically, the “national championship” was hardly “national” in its membership, and failing in its scope to bring together representatives of towns and cities across the land.

To that effect, the Federation's president argued for measures to alter the geographical distribution of the participants in the divisions of the national championship, allowing clubs from the major towns of Wallachia, Moldavia, Bukovina and Bessarabia to take part, alongside those from Transylvania, Banat and the capital-city Bucharest. While cartographically reasonable, the expansion collided with the ethnic distribution of Romanian interwar society, where most towns and cities were homes for large numbers of ethnics other than Romanians. Fully aware of the issue Tilea retorted that the included clubs might not be Romanian when it came to their players, “but they are Romanian as an environment (mediu).” In the 1930 census the reported ethnic composition of Greater Romania was 71.9% Romanians, 7.9% Hungarians, 4.1% Germans and 4% Jews, while Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Gypsies and other ethnics made a sizeable presence (Livezeanu 1995, 9–10). However, the Romanians made only 58.6% of the urban population. By 1930 Romanians made slightly more than half of Transylvania's population (57.8%) and Hungarians were close to a quarter (24.4%). Nonetheless, Hungarians were slightly better represented in urban spaces, making 37.9% of the Transylvanian urban population to 35% Romanians (Livezeanu 1995, 135). For example, in the same year the population of the regionally significant town of Cluj in central Transylvania was made of 34.6% Romanians to 47.3% Hungarians (Brubaker et al. 2006, 93).

In this article I tell the story of the Romanian “environment” that Tilea hinted at, one emerging out of the juncture of state formation and nation building aggressively pursued by Romanian interwar administrators in sports. This “environment” consisted of an array of often-conflicting practices, institutions and interactions that hardly resembled the promoted image of a “national sport.” Moreover, his choice of words is highly suggestive for the process of naturalizing the Romanian nation-state. The Romanian “mediu” strongly emphasizes the geographical and ecological determinations of one's being and, in Tilea's usage, is highly consistent with the politics of “national character” being forged in this period all over Central and Eastern Europe (Trencsényi 2012, Ch. 1; Verdery and Banac 1995). Scholars of nationalism have long stressed that making the “nation” appear natural is key to understanding its enduring salience in modern times (Anderson 1983; Handelman 2004; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992). Research on the formative years of the modern sporting movements in both Western and Central Europe have shown the critical role of sports and physical education in grounding and disseminating precisely such understandings of the nation (Cronin 2003; Hargreaves 1986; Holt 1981; McDevitt 2004; Naul and Hardman 2002; Nolte 2002; Weber 1971).

However, studies of sport and nationalism have tended to emphasize the importance of the national scale in the historical development of sport. In Eugen Weber's foundational studies on the establishment of French sport (1970, 1971), this tendency worked to subdue the dynamic interplay of scales in the making of modern sports. Analyzing the development of Romanian sport in the interwar period, particularly of association football, allows me to expose the uneven and incoherent nature of the state's territorial policies, thus debunking the myths of territorial unity and cultural contiguity that modern nationalism holds dear. The emerging geography of interwar Romanian sport provides an alternative spatial vision, made out of towns and regions found in unexpected configurations that cut across administrative national and international boundaries, challenging the pretensions of a uniform national space. I find a potential solution to such conceptual and empirical problems in a recent intervention in the historical sociology of the nation which has emphasized and reworked the “modular” character of the “nation form” (Goswami 2002), prompted by Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities (1983).

For his part, Anderson (1983, 4) famously noted that the nation is a specific “cultural artifact” in the making at least since the eighteenth century, crystallized by the interplay of “discrete historical forces” and established in a “modular” form – that is ripe for transplantation in various other social formations. In her substantive reworking of “modularity,” Goswami (2002) observed that subsequent research has enthusiastically taken up Anderson's suggestion of the nation as a cultural phenomenon opening the way for culturalist analyses of the ways in which nations were and are imagined. This shift has favored the observation and analysis of the particular practices, categories, institutions and narratives mobilized into the making of nations, but have obscured the logical and historical similarity of the “nation form” beyond its particular instantiations. Goswami (2004) argued that this culturalist tendency, partly derived from Anderson's loose attention to the notion of “modularity,” has reinforced varieties of methodological nationalism and hampered the development of a “sociohistorical” analysis of the nation able to grasp the at once universal and particular character of the modern nation form.

The analytical force of Goswami's conceptualization derives from the fact that it recognizes and dynamically integrates the spatial and temporal unevenness of the world system, expanding it well beyond Anderson's understanding of the “nation” as a transferrable model. By acknowledging the unevenness of the modern predicament, this theorization opens a major route to investigate the interplay between local, regional and global scales in the making of the nation into the privileged locus of politics, economics and culture and the sustained and incessant work required to that end. It puts into perspective the formal equality and substantive inequality of the modern world of nations, presumably equal on the international scene and often highly fragmented and internally unbalanced. The result is the exposure of the contradictions at the heart of the world-system, of regions and of local communities that the modern nation-state attempts to fix.

While Goswami underscores Anderson's major insight regarding the transferable character of the nation form, she crucially adds that its “transposable” character should be understood as “dynamic,” allowing for “the agentic and dynamic reconfiguration of cultural categories, institutional repertoires and meanings” in its transfer (Goswami 2002, 785). This configurational dynamism accounts for the nation form's “doubled” character, at once universal and particular, objective and subjective, highly similar relative to other such national forms and highly different in their particular discourses and structures (Goswami 2002, 785). All of the above account for the “durability” of the nation form which in its historical unfolding has thoroughly permeated “practices, institutions and conceptual categories,” in the process becoming “second nature” and “treated as natural” (Goswami 2002, 786).

It is at this point that modern sport decisively operates to accomplish or to undermine the territorialization of the nation form. It does so materially through the construction of stadiums, parks or sporting grounds; institutionally through clubs, federations, competitions and their regulative frameworks and culturally through inventing its own national traditions and national styles of play. In this way, the organization of modern sport materializes the infrastructural power of the state (Mann 1984) in its national modality. However, the case of Romanian and Transylvanian football during the interwar period presents the challenges faced by the state in grounding and safeguarding sanctioned visions of the nation. Previous research has convincingly showed that the Romanian state entertained “legal fictions” and national narratives that hardly matched the social and cultural dynamics of an ethnically plural society (Egry 2013a, 2013b). A resilient Hungarian urban civil society, the strong regional affiliations and attachments of the Transylvanian Romanian middle-class and competing ideas of national development among Romanian elites set major limits to the manifestation of state power. Ethnic plurality, class distance and political fragmentation worked to produce a social space that offered opportunities both to transgress and to harden forms of national belonging and loyalty for both Transylvanian Hungarians and Romanians. The development of football and the meanings that came to be attached to it poignantly show precisely the unstable and hardly coherent nature of Romanian nation building in interwar Transylvanina.

Overall, I argue that the modularity of the nation form is neatly paralleled by the modular character of modern sport, making it instrumental in the dissemination and grounding of modern nationalism. Hence, the article engages a configuration of developments and events that are rarely considered in their conjunction. I start by presenting the institutional infrastructure designed to establish and develop Romanian sport. The tensions and frictions underwriting this effort of making the interwar Romanian nation-state appear as natural were very early obvious in the game of football, the most popular game on the land. Accordingly, I follow the founding moments of the “Universitatea” Cluj sports club, the leading Romanian sports club in central Transylvania as depicted in the recollections of some of its members. Finally, to depict the vagaries of national representation, I move to explore the early days of the Romanian national football team through its contested participation at the 1924 Paris Olympics. The institutional transformations, the assumed positions and ideas and the sporting scandals present a historical configuration that by the late 1930s made the calls for the creation of a Romanian “environment” increasingly radical and exclusive.

Unification through sport

In the realm of sports, the task of centralization and homogenization was delegated to the Romanian Federation of Sports Societies (F.S.S.R.). A sports federation had already been founded in 1912 in the Old Kingdom and significantly reshaped in 1921 to accommodate the territorial expansion of the country. Significantly, the Sports Federation's constitution pre-dated Romania's territorial expansion of 1918, when Greater Romania was formed through the addition to the Old Kingdom of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina sanctioned at the Paris Peace Conference. The institutionalization of sport in interwar Romania and its efficiency as a strategy of nation building and state formation obviously rested on a work of mediation and articulation between dispersed and diverse local institutions and central authorities. Throughout the interwar years, the Federation and the subsequent specialized federations sought to harmonize and integrate the existing sports clubs into a national framework of competitions and regulations. Thus, the Federation was dominated by top-down initiatives to introduce and disseminate modern sporting practices. Writing the history of these endeavors, one active participant and observer made it clear that a small group of elite enthusiasts were behind the initial attempts:

In our country, there were almost no sports clubs at the time [1912], and the few in existence were pursuing different sports and did not care at all about one another. On the other hand, some sports were little practiced, while others were completely unheard of. In this context, the founding of the FSSR [the Romanian Federation of Sports Societies] did not spring out of a real need of coming together, but was created by a few pioneers, following the Omni-sportive model of the French USFSA [Union des Sociétés Françaises de Sports Athlétiques], to disseminate the taste for practicing physical exercise, for the founding of sporting associations, to regulate sports, to acquire fields and to establish a central sports park.²

After 1918, the Federation was confronted with a plethora of thriving sports clubs in Transylvania, a large majority of which were owned and used by ethnics other than Romanians. Transylvania's incorporation posed serious problems of leadership and regulation. A cohort of Transylvanian Romanians took positions of management in sports regulatory bodies, mirroring their presence in central political institutions. Given the better shape of Transylvanian sporting institutions, their bargaining power was bound to be high relative to their counterparts from the Old Kingdom. The case of association football is probably most instructive in this respect, where from 1925 onwards the football committee of the Federation and from 1930 the Romanian Football Association Federation (F.R.F.A.) were run by Transylvanian Romanians.

Faced with these national and nationalizing developments, the “minority” sports clubs and associations in Transylvania had little interest in sanctioning and abiding by the rules of a Romanian Federation. They could easily pursue their activities through private arrangements. From 1921 onwards, reports abound in the Romanian sports press presenting competitions that went ahead in spite of the interventions of the Federation or simply by neglecting its jurisdiction. In 1921 the newly constituted club “Makkabea” Oradea went on to play its inaugural football game against “Törekvés” Satu-Mare although the regional committee of the Federation did not recognize the legitimacy of its players.³ The report noted that the event went “down the road of nationalism and anti-Semitism” as “the Jewish public in Oradea believes that this was a hit directed towards Jews”⁴ and ended by stressing the “mistake” of allowing the creation of clubs based on “race and nationalism.” At the same time in Cluj, the Hungarian club K.A.C. (Kolozsvári Atletikai Club) was castigated for dragging sport down the line of “minority hypernationalism” when it failed to send its athletes to compete against Romanian students of “Universitatea,” only to presumably repeat the trick when the “Society for the Care of War Orphans” organized its own sports festivity.⁵

Hence, when the F.S.S.R. convened its first Congress on 21 June 1921 under the patronage of Prince Carol, the participation was less than humble. Alongside the representatives of students from Bucharest and of two Bucharest-based clubs, only three other bodies – all Transylvanian – cared to send delegates.⁶ The turnout was surprisingly low considering that the modification of the Federation's Statutes topped the agenda. However, the turnout provides an accurate picture of Romanian sports in the early days of Greater Romania. On the one hand, the sporting activity outside Bucharest, in the Old Kingdom, in Bessarabia or Dobruja, was modest. On the other hand, wherever sports were thriving, namely in the towns of Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina, the Germans, Hungarians or Jews supporting them found little interest in upholding a Romanian umbrella institution such as the F.S.S.R. The sheer number, the sporting quality as well as the stance of these clubs' members toward the new geopolitical configuration probably offered little incentive to abide, and thus implicitly sanction, a Romanian national sporting institution with modest resources and credentials. In their daily practice in the early interwar period minority clubs could certainly do without the backing of a Romanian sports federation and, if need be, promote their own understandings of national loyalty and belonging.

The Romanian Transylvanians' position in relation to those problems were clearly addressed by Silviu Dragomir, professor of history in Cluj, president of the “Universitatea” sports club and later to be minister in several right-wing governments of the late 1930s, briefly holding the portfolio of “minister of minorities.” Dragomir's intervention is in itself contradictory were it not for the compromise he was trying to bridge. The professor tried to secure the high regional bargaining power of Transylvania when faced with the centralizing pressures from the capital city of Bucharest. The compromise was designed to leave enough space for the establishment of Romanian sporting institutions in Transylvania, without affecting the non-Romanian ones. Thus, he first stressed that existing sports societies should be independent and that “private sport” should not be obstructed by the coming reforms.⁷ Through this, he addressed the pressing question of property and use rights over existing infrastructures as

in Transylvania there are sports arenas built from private money, arenas that the army also asks for its own societies. Such requests can hardly be satisfied, given the large number of private societies whom have the right to use them. Professor Dragomir proposes to start the construction of new pitches.⁸

He went on to ask for a tax exemption on sporting competitions as well as for a reduction on railroad travel for sports societies. However, the professor also asked and saw approved an amendment stating that the official language of the Federation is Romanian, and that all the correspondence between societies, regional committees and the federation must take place in Romanian. One can hardly fail to note the overall strategy at work there. Dragomir worked to secure the material basis of the sporting movement in Transylvania, making sure that property rights would not be affected and that public investments will not eschew it, while with the appeal to exclusive language use, he worked to silence the voices of its non-Romanian competitors thus pleasing the agents of the central state. This was the position of a prominent Transylvanian Romanian intellectual, seasoned in ethnic politics and in touch with the needs and claims of ethnic minorities making sure to advance the cause of his region on the national stage.

The position of Prince Carol, the later-to-be King Carol II, in relation to these problems, is also telling for the visions of sports development at play in the early interwar period and does a lot to elucidate why only a handful of Transylvanians and Bucharesters attended the Congress. His major contribution in the field came toward the end of the period, with the creation of the fascist inspired “Sentinel of the Country,” a full-blown national militarized youth organization of physical education and military training. Nonetheless, as soon as 1921, Carol was envisaging a so-called House of People's Culture (Casa Culturei Poporului) that was supposed to include physical education and sports in its broad competencies, where private sporting societies would stand on an equal footing with military ones, under a unique regime of regulation and taxation.⁹ The Transylvanians were not the only ones posing problems for the centralization and national integration of sports institutions. In 1926, Cernăuţi, capital of Bukovina, probably the most cosmopolitan urban setting in Greater Romania, was the scene of an intricate feud between the German and Jewish football clubs dubiously mediated by the local and central committees of the Romanian Federation. The feud concerned the winner of the local football league due to play in the eliminatory rounds of the national league against Fulgerul Chişinău. The end of the season hierarchy was hotly contested by the officials of the local Jewish rivals “Maccabi” and “Hakoah,” seconded by the followers of the German club “Jahn.” According to one “Maccabi” representative, his club contested to the local subcommittee a game played by its rivals “Hakoah” against the local Polish club “Polonia” on an unapproved pitch. They had initially won the appeal, only to see the decision overturned by the central committee following the intervention of a rival official. In this situation, yet another contestation was made regarding “Hakoah's” right to field a certain player.¹⁰ At the same time, a local army major was pointing fingers at the workings of the local subcommittee, accusing the partiality of its leadership.¹¹ Depending on the ways in which the hierarchy got altered, several clubs felt entitled to play the league's final.

Things descended into chaos when the final eventually got organized. The local Germans felt that their club – “Jahn” – was the rightful winner of the local league. Meanwhile, the local subcommittee of the Federation failed to assign referees for the encounter, due to a boycott against “Hakoah.” Prior to the game, an ad hoc meeting of the subcommittee was summoned on the pitch and only the intervention of the central committee in Bucharest gave the go-ahead for the game. The game did finally kick-off, but was abruptly called off when the fans and players of “Jahn” invaded the pitch to request their favorites be declared winners. The referee decided to abandon the game for a later date, but when a venue was found for the re-match, the pitch was found devastated with broken goalposts and seats and pickax holes across the pitch. A police investigation found that an engineer in a local factory sent four of his workers to destroy it. Nonetheless, the game did somehow go ahead on that day¹² and was clinched by “Fulgerul” Chişinau against “Hakoah.”

The situation in Cernăuţi shows the remarkable diversity of the game as well as the dominant position of minorities within it. As such, at a time when football was still largely amateur, the passions were bound to flare quickly and remain high. At the institutional end of the spectrum, only a month prior to the events in Cernăuţi an anonymous member of the Federation was complaining in the sports press of “the lack of order” holding sway in the institution.¹³ He identified two major problems that have brought this situation about: “unjust statutes” and “an abusive minority.” On the one hand, reproaches were directed toward the autonomy and subsequent influence of committee presidents across the country, who were presumably able to pursue their personal interests, to protect their “friends,” to easily get reelected, while the central committee had no power “to intervene regarding selection, which would mean: determination, ample views, sporting management and strict financial control.”¹⁴ On the other hand, one sports journalist noted that the “ruling minority is abusive.”¹⁵ The minority that he had in mind was not that of the usual suspects represented by non-Romanian ethnics, although this was obviously implied. This time the minority hinted at was that of the Transylvanian Romanians in charge of the F.S.S.R. The reasoning rested on the simple calculus that Transylvania only had 110 clubs affiliated to the F.S.S.R., while the rest of the county, “the disconsidered majority,” was made of 160 clubs.¹⁶ In a series of radical allegations, the official went on to question the loyalty, leadership skills and financial ethics of the Federation's Transylvanian leaders. They were found wanting on every account: taking advantage of the national institution's financial resources; plotting for the creation of alternative, regionally based institutions, for example the Football Federation envisaged in Oradea and Timişoara¹⁷ and obstructing the financial central committee in its regulatory dealings. With the “honor of Romanian sports” at play, the press went on to call for a thorough regulatory transformation, one that would suit the perceived need for central coordination and control.

The anonymous observer correctly noted that a different organizational dynamics was at play in Transylvania and Banat. By the late 1920s the western town of Timişoara emerged as the hotbed of dissent in relation to the central sporting authorities. The professionalization of the game in Hungary and Austria had placed a huge pressure on players, especially so among those of Transylvanian Hungarian extraction, to try their luck at Hungarian and Austrian clubs in search of substantially increased earnings. The dynamic somewhat mirrored the reverse flow of players from Hungary to Romanian Transylvania of the early 1920s in search of career opportunities, while the game was still amateur in Hungary. The exodus posed a major dual problem for the Romanian administrators of the game. On the one hand, one might have expected Romanian officials to easily and happily dispose of the services of players who were members and visible representatives of a minority population. However, there was little “home-grown” talent springing up in their place. These were the finest players that could be recruited for both Romanian clubs and country. On the other hand, the departure of players to Hungary, the arch political rival and enemy, could easily be seized upon as an act of aggression, one strategically presented and used to undermine the legitimacy of claims coming from across the new border.

The situation is telling for the ambiguous position of Hungarian Romanians, not only in football, but also in many other spheres of life. Hungarians made up most of the urban Transylvanian population, and were consequently better educated and much more familiar with the workings and opportunities offered by modern urban institutions relative to most Romanians in the region. Not only sheer numbers made them unavoidable, but their resources and skills were also often critical for the functioning of Romanian institutions (see also Egry 2013a). As one commentator aptly put it, at odds with stereotypical accounts of resentment between Romanians and minorities, “when the Romanian international Albi Ströck defended the Hungarian flag against Austria, we've all felt a painful heart ache.”¹⁸ Moreover, with professionalization, a new occupation was making its way into the world of football, that of player manager or impresario. This shadowy figure could not help but fuel the stories of conspiracy against Romanian interests. Thus, “the mirage of the Hungarian coin forcefully introduced in the minds of our round ball artists by Hungarian emissaries, swarming along our Western border, has borne fruit.”¹⁹ The efforts of Romanian administrators constituted strong reactions to such developments and there was a discernible tendency to support ever more statist and nationalistic forms of sport and physical education, which would ultimately culminate in their full militarization in the late 1930s. The creation of the “Universitatea” sports club at the University of Cluj, one of the pillars of Romanianess in Transylvania, allows a more in-depth reading of the issues at play.

The Transylvanian arena

The modern and contemporary history of Transylvania has been described as emerging “between states” due to the claims and counterclaims made by Hungarians and Romanians regarding sovereignty rights over this territory and its population (Case 2009). The ongoing disputes, synthesized in the so-called Transylvanian question, made their way to the forefront of European politics, often in a make or break fashion that threatened regional and even continental peace and stability (Case 2009). In the post-World War I period, with its yardstick of national self-determination, both Romanians and Hungarians were keenly aware that the short-, medium- and long-term sustainability of their states could only be assured by addressing , once and for all, the national question. They were trying to do so as close as possible to the ideal of one nation, one state. Consequently, the Romanian Transylvanian elites of the interwar years were left to navigate a narrow and mine-packed path between Bucharest and Budapest, if they were to have a say on national and international developments. This highly constraining situation manifested itself both in local, regional and national politics and in everyday life, and was immediately obvious in the development of competitive sports. Given the intensity of the debates and conflicts and the suspicions arising on both sides, any public action or development was bound to be charged with contradictory meanings and intentions.

For the agents of the newly consecrated Romanian state, the obvious ultimate aim was to achieve and represent Romanian greatness in the world of nations, a scope turned into the developmental national credo that has marked the last century of their social formation up to the present day. Obviously, the minority populations sought to preserve and best develop their existing institutions and in doing so espoused alternative and contrasting forms of national association, allegiance and belonging. Numerous Transylvanian Hungarians, Jews and Germans were actively involved and highly visible in such institutions, with the sporting ones being prominent among them. The territorial greatness of “Greater Romania” obscured the fact that the post-World War I social and economic situation was far less than great. Greater Romania was an overwhelmingly rural society where state institutions were chronically understaffed and often under-skilled, making the meeting point of modern state and society in the form of citizenship difficult to achieve in any meaningful way (Livezeanu 1990). Uneven regional development and contrasting historical trajectories (Murgescu 2010) posed a major pressure for accelerated state integration and centralization. In Transylvania, a large contingent of minorities other than Romanians was overwhelmingly urbanized and holding large swaths of the available pool of private capital. This situation made Romanianization a key political effort actively pursued in public education (Livezeanu 1995) and, more generally, in political and economic life (Case 2009). The perceived artisans of nation building and state formation – the Romanian lower middle-class intellectuals from Transylvania – were caught “between state and nation,” while tending to stress the failures of the former in relation to the needs of the latter (Livezeanu 1990).

As soon as the Great War came to a halt, long before the peace accords were even drafted, Transylvanian towns were arenas of population displacement and replacement. As proud victors, Romanians were taking over what they came to perceive as their territory, while Hungarians were either leaving to a much reduced homeland or socially retrenching for the hardships and confrontations to come. Triumphant Romanianness was attached, materially and symbolically, to public spaces and institutions and there was little that remained untouched by this frantic effort of nationalization (Egry 2013a). The former “Franz Joseph University” in Cluj, re-baptized as “The University of Dacia Superior,” was a prime locus and battleground of these transformations (see also Brubaker et al. 2006). As latecomers to the thriving international sports scene of the early twentieth century, the Romanians were retying the knots of old debates when they sought to find the best ways to introduce and establish physical education and sports in the Romanian society of the interwar period. Similar processes have already been at work in Western countries, and elsewhere on the European continent, with Hungary as a better documented regional case (Hadas 2007). Transylvania shared in the developments taking place in this area in imperial times and was rightly perceived as more developed than the Old Kingdom of Romania not only in sports, but also in other spheres of life.

In this situation, the written testimonies of some of the players and officials at the club at the time of its founding provide a unique window to what was at stake in the early days of Romanian football in Cluj. Written roughly half a century later, as part of a drive to gather information for an intended history of the “Universitatea” sports club, in a vastly different socio-political environment dominated by the nationalistic turn of the Romanian socialist regime, the recollections present ways of drawing and fixing connections between personal memory and national history, as well as ways of reconciling individual biographies with fast changing social and political forces.²⁰ The sports club at the University in Cluj, founded in 1919, was designed from the onset to affirm Romanianness in the world of sports and physical education. Thus, one active participant in its creation remembered the dawns of the Romanian “Universitatea” football club in Cluj in the following terms:

On the 22^nd of October 1919 I was demobilized from the Romanian Army as a university student through a telegram of the 6^th Army Corps of the “Horea” legion where I had served as a sub-lieutenant in reserve. Once back in Cluj, on the 15^th of November 1919, after meeting some high-school colleagues, friends and war comrades, we started inquiring about the local sporting life. So it was that us, a few orădeni [from Oradea], bănăţeni [from Banat region], known sportsmen since high school, discussed and decided to begin a sporting activity. We went to the sports arena where we found out that ever since Hungarian times students had a sports club called K.E.A.C. (Kolozsvári Egyetemi Atletikai Club) (the University Athletic Club of Cluj). We tried to get in contact with its representatives, with its leaders, but we were not able to reach an agreement with them. After several attempts and struggles we did manage to take over the dressing room, which was located under the stands of the sports arena, and thus the “U” Cluj Sports Club was born, the great and much-loved Cluj University's Club.²¹

Another one, more prone to historicizing, remembered the constitutive moments thus:

In the autumn of 1919, after the bell on the Caporetto in the Italian Alps sounded the closing of the First World War armistice, the arms went silent and young fighters were returning to their homes. Peace was perfected in Paris, Romania got whole (s-a reîntregit) with Transylvania and the other Romanian regions in its natural boundaries, constituting what history called “Greater Romania”. In this new situation, in Cluj, Transylvania's quasi-capital, where the University was, young Romanians came by their thousands to pursue different faculties, to obtain university titles and to become legitimate leaders of the Romanian people.

In the period November 1919 to January 1920, the young students started organizing themselves by faculties, in order to start a spiritual Romanian activity living up to the surrounding atmosphere, full of an impressive enthusiasm. As countless students were sportsmen ever since high-school, the initiative was soon taken to create a University Sports Club, the more so given that rooms, a gym for indoor sports like fencing, gymnastics, Greek-Roman wrestling, boxing, and an office were already available.²²

These memories are telling in relation to the actions of appropriating a newly conquered territory as well as for the narratives legitimating those very actions. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that the conditions of possibility for the emergence and articulation of such narratives and their renewed valorization were due to Romanian socialist regime efforts to selectively recapture and reuse facets of the Romanian nationalism of the interwar period, with ethnic struggle and heroism being key among them. On the one hand, Sabin Tîrla, a left-winger at the “Universitatea” football club from 1919 to 1920, pointed to the mundane practices involved in this effort and their highly charged symbolic content. According to his narrative, the taking up, by Romanian students, of the already existing dressing room of the Hungarian students' football club meant no more, no less than the birth of a new institution. Our player does not forget to add that it did not go quite smoothly, thus adding a bit of heroism to the scene. In this act of appropriation a material continuity, an ideological rupture and a startling process of ethnic exclusion are affirmed at once. First, the unfolding of highly ethnicized class relations was at play to account for the preservation and taking over of even such modest things as the belongings of one lowly football club. Alongside Tîrla, soon after disbanding from the army, “thousands” of Romanian youths were heading to Cluj – “the quasi capital of Transylvania” – to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the newly Romanianized university. Just like him, most of these youths were not born and raised in town and were confronting an urban space that was by and large thoroughly Hungarian. In this situation, Romanian private investment in sport was nowhere to be found, making a parallel development of clubs along ethnic lines a veritable non-option. Concurrently, this lack of resources made the destruction and renewal of the existing structures into yet another dead end. Hence, Romanianizing the local and regional public sphere provided the strong incentive to quickly redistribute and nationalize whatever modest means there existed.

Second, the ideological back-up of this type of appropriation rested on a form of restorative justice central to modern Romanian nationalism which placed territory at the heart of any argument. As Dr Ioan Eugen Meţianu, a left-back in the football team at “Universitatea” and an official at the club throughout the interwar period, made plain in the second quoted statement, the constitution of “Greater Romania,” from a Romanian perspective, simply meant a return to “natural boundaries.” By way of implication, it was all but natural that all the goods of the land were Romanian. Just note the ubiquitous absence of any reference to Hungarians in his written record. Fortunately, rooms, a gym and an office happened to be “available” when Romanian students needed those most to start their “spiritual Romanian activity.” This type of Romanian radical national discourse effectively operated to immediately and universally solve the thorny issue of property and rights, at once affirming full Romanian sovereignty and blocking any claim of any other ethnic group even before it could be voiced.

The constitution of the “Students' Sporting Society of the University” further clarifies what this kind of decision-making actually meant. By May 1920, the “Sporting Society” notified the University's Senate to officially sanction the dissolution of the Hungarian Athletic Club²³ and at a subsequent meeting in June one of its members notified the Senate that the Society did not present any records or inventory of the goods that were taken over.²⁴ Nonetheless, the Senate authorized the Rector to “make an intervention at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, so as to declare the disbandment of the old ‘Egyetemi Athleikai Klub’ (University's Athletic Club) and to pass its assets to the new ‘Sports Society.’”²⁵ In order to solve and provide some sense of legitimacy to what was essentially a local and minor problem, the Rector was summoned to make a personal “intervention” at one of the highest order institutions of Romanian government. Finally, the suspension of previous history and the silencing of alternative claims obscure the violent nature of this process of national appropriation, an issue that would resurface time and again in disputes between Romanians and Hungarians during the interwar period and after (Case 2009). However, the actual reality of local social and ethnic relations could hardly be brushed aside.

To be sure, Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania did make a living, did entertain strong social relations and were to be found in the most unexpected places and arrangements. From the recollections of players and officials at “Universitatea,” there emerges a pattern of arrangements meant to accommodate the ethnic divides. From Constantin Buga, a goalkeeper raised and promoted at the club from 1919 to 1933, we learn that a Hungarian trainer from Szeged, Döme Francisc, coached the team at one point, remembering him as “a good knower of football, a good technician, a good pedagogue, and … a big mouth. In his time, the team reached one of its highest levels.”²⁶ Virgil Dalea, an official at the club from 1926 until the outbreak of the Second World War dealing with propaganda and later in the committee of the football section, notes that the Austrian Eckhardt from F.C. Wien was also in charge of the team at one time in this period.²⁷ We also found that “Universitatea's” senior team was at one time sharing the pitch in training with the players of the local Hungarian club K.A.C., and often practicing against each other. One former player strongly stresses that “on the pitch we were arch rivals, but of an exemplary fair-play, and not that much rivals, but playing partners. Outside the pitch we were best friends, a friendship that lasts, among those left, until today.”²⁸ The goalkeeper humorously recalls one interaction that took place in one such training:

There was a training at one goalpost, at the other the K.A.C. team was training. At one time, one of the “veterans” from our team sends me (at the time I was a novice in first team) to the player nicknamed “Kayla” to ask him to train at two posts. I go and I address him thus: “Kayla úr” (I thought this was his name, but in Hungarian “kayla” means “crotch”, as his legs looked like brackets.) He does not even allow me to finish and sends me back with a beautiful swear. Anyhow, the training did go on at two posts. Many years after, I've learned that his name was Kovács and what “kayla” means. On top of that, we had been living for years on the same street, a few houses away from each other. We've ended up good acquaintances after all.²⁹

Such recollections are probably typical of the ways in which people of different ethnic backgrounds got along on a day-to-day basis. The language barriers or the sporting rivalries appear subsumed by good humor and fair play, ultimately leading to long-lasting friendships. Nonetheless, recollections that bridge the ethnic divide remain extraordinary. This is what accounts for their evocative power. In their memories, most of the players of “Universitatea” produce clearly bounded national narratives, where experiences extending beyond the national ties have already fallen into silence. This is hardly surprising provided that modern nation building in Eastern Europe powerfully worked precisely to that end and points to the durable historical connection between sport and nationalism in the region. As we have seen, Romanianiziation meant the erasing of old inscriptions, the taking over of properties and the dissemination and fixing of sanctioned narratives of the nation. The University of Cluj was the prime locus of such national pedagogical work in Transylvania from the early 1920s onwards.

The University in Cluj and its sports club were obviously not the only sporting institutions looking to secure fame and glory and to make their national message heard. On the contrary, a simple browsing of the most notable football teams in operation in town in the early 1920s shows an impressive list of five Hungarian, two Romanian and one Jewish teams. The city was a cosmopolitan football scene that reflected not only the town's demographics, but also the class structure of the early interwar period. Four of the Hungarian teams were workers' clubs or associations, thus the commercial employees, the railroad workers and the butchers could take up some sport activity in their club, alongside a workers' club proper and a municipal athletic club. The Romanian teams were catering to students and to the residents of the Romanian neighborhood on the outskirts of the Old Town, while “Haggibor” was a Jewish Zionist club.

To place things into perspective, we should only look at the situation in Iaşi, the capital of the historical region of Moldova, where by 1929 an emerging sports newspaper had to contend on its front-page that this was “a sports newspaper in a city without sports”³⁰ and its publishers could only hope to somehow aid to remedy this situation. Telling for the crucial importance of state supported initiative in this field is the description of the three existing football clubs of the time in Iaşi, to be found in the same issue. “Victoria” and “Concordia” were run and staffed by the military and students, respectively, making the Jewish club “Hakoah” the only private initiative in the field, thus the only club where, according to our reporter, “players are free men, playing out of pleasure and not to obey orders.”³¹ The interwar sporting scene in Iaşi probably presents an extreme case of underdevelopment, but as the debates of the time show little could be left to the mercy of private enterprise, thus making the state and its agents key actors in the process of grounding Romanian sport. Owing to their relatively superior industrialization and urbanization in imperial times, Transylvanian towns espoused a far more significant number of clubs whose identity was largely focused along class lines. To this extent, they represented an asset in supporting Transylvanians' claims of having a leading role in the development of national sport. Nonetheless, these clubs were perceived as minority institutions, potentially destabilizing the Romanian state and hampering the development of the Romanian nation, while the fact that they were representing urban centers where “minorities” made large “majorities” worked to curtail such claims.

The effort of post-war Romanian unification was thus immediately confronted with at least two major obstacles. On the one hand, while clearly supporting the goals of the nation, Transylvanian Romanians were nonetheless continuing and establishing intense social connections with their neighbors – Transylvanian Hungarians, Jews or Germans. Sports, especially team sports, were prime arenas of such ethnic interaction. Due to the organizational format of modern sports, these were placing the politically feuding ethnics on an equal footing, at a time when the agents of the Romanian state were making every effort to affirm their “rightful” control over this territory. On the other hand, the incorporation of Transylvania posed the problem of integrating a social formation often more advanced and more endowed with modern institutions relative to the center of power. Sports were again one major and immediately visible arena of such advancement.

A national team?

As we have seen so far, beyond the anachronisms of unity, historical destiny or brotherhood professed by romantic nationalist historians, the integration of Transylvania into Romania was never a friction-free process (Bucur 2002; Livezeanu 1995). After centuries of imperial administration, with an elite, although vociferously nationalist, born, raised and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a massive Hungarian population that dominated all the important regional urban centers, many eyes and ears were as much oriented to Budapest as to Bucharest. The tumult from the stadiums of the old imperial capital certainly caught the attention and interest of many Transylvanians, Hungarians and Romanians alike, and resounded well into the Old Kingdom. Invitations for Budapest-based clubs to come and play in Transylvania soon followed and were recurrent and highly popular events throughout the interwar period. Talented players were soon signing contracts with these clubs and went all the way to play for the Hungarian national team. Unsurprisingly, for a majority of Romanian politicians and bureaucrats, keen to develop national sports and to Romanianize Transylvania's urban spaces, such practices were anathema in no time. All of these tensions and frictions were at the fore in the scandal surrounding the participation of the Romanian national football team in the Paris Olympics of 1924. This was the very first scandal to be reported by the emerging Romanian language sports press.

The creation of Greater Romania in the aftermath of World War I soon posed the problem of affirming the new polity on the international scene. Major international sporting competitions, most notably the modern Olympics and Olympic movement, had already devised a framework geared precisely toward that end. The Paris Olympics of 1924 thus presented itself as a golden opportunity for a new nation to present its image to the world, not to mention the symbolic strength of a return to Paris, the place where the new map of postwar Europe got its official consecration. What Romanian politicians, sports officials and sportsmen sought to present was an image of unity and national solidarity. What they ended up with showed that the task of national integration runs into much deeper problems than expected. The story of the Romanian football association team at the 1924 Olympics vibrantly makes this case, in that it draws together most of the problems of post-unification: a regional bias toward Transylvania in terms of recruitment, the overwhelming presence of ethnics other than Romanians under the national flag, the never-ending questions of betrayal and deceit voiced on both sides of the Carpathians and the pressing problem of materializing and affirming Romanianness.

The difficulty of fielding the “best” and “proper” Romanian football team for the Paris Olympics is immediately obvious in the highly intricate process of selection devised by the Federation to that end. The central figure of the process was the “national captain” Adrian Suciu. He was assigned the task of recruiting the best line-up out of a series of test games opposing local/regional teams to teams of the “Rest” of the country. This was an intricate and variable pattern of selection. In practice, each encounter pitted against each other a local/regional representative to a representative of all the other regions – “the Rest.” Thus, the team called “the Rest” was in fact each time closer to the line-up of the national representative, less the players from a certain region. “The Rest” was due to play a game against a representative of the Cluj region, followed by games with other regional representatives and a final game against the Bucharest region. Given the highly uneven regional grounding of the game during the early interwar period, coupled with the higher level of skill of minority players, the likelihood of ending up with a Romanian representative comprised of Transylvanians other than Romanians was bound to be high. Once established, the national team was expected to engage difficult opponents such as Hungary, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, in several test games to be held in the capital city of Bucharest.³²

In the given circumstances, the national captain's task was never going to be easy. The process set in motion by the need to recruit a Romanian representative laid bare most of the lines of fracture dividing Romanian society at the time, ethnic and regional ones ranking prominent among them. After a good performance in Cluj,³³ the series of selection games culminated with two humiliating defeats for “The Rest” at the hands of the regional teams of Timişoara and Bucharest. While the defeat in Timişoara was rather expected, as most of the footballing talent was concentrated in this western region of Romania, the result in Bucharest was utterly shocking, especially in Transylvania. Although a test game, the match in the capital was largely perceived as an encounter between Bucharest and Transylvania, as in this case all of the players of “the Rest” were coming out of the latter region, most of them of Hungarian and German extraction. One sports reporter from Cluj immediately stressed that “on this occasion an undeniable hostility towards Bucharesters” was felt in Cluj and thus the result, when unofficially announced by a journalist in a local café, came down “like a lightning out of the blue.”³⁴

The selection made for the Bucharest regional team said much about the strained relations between Transylvania and the Old Kingdom. It synthetically presented the dissonant understandings making up Romanian citizenship in the interwar years. The pattern of selection locally replicated the one devised for the selection of the national team. Four line-ups were initially formed out of the existing clubs in the region that played a mini-championship to establish the final one.³⁵ In spite of the fact that the game was meant to aid the selection of the Romanian national team, most of the recruited players of Bucharest were actually Hungarians playing for Bucharest-based clubs, thus only few of them were actually eligible for the national team.³⁶ Local newspapers of Hungarian language quickly seized the opportunity to pronounce that a weak Hungarian team had defeated the Romanian Olympic team, pouring scorn over Romanians' inability to produce sporting talent.³⁷ It appears that in the contemporary hierarchy of priorities, it was much more important to clinch the game in the name of the capital in front of Transylvanians than to aid the selection of a Romanian national team. As our reporter aptly noted, these developments only helped fuel the already sensitive ethnic relations.

In the end, the national captain did complete his Olympic line-up in May 1924 but failed to select any player coming from a club outside the Carpathians. Out of 19 players, 6 were from Cluj-based clubs, 6 from Timişoara, 5 from Oradea and 2 from Târgu-Mureş.³⁸ The training plan of the team on its way to Paris included two test games in Bratislava and Vienna. The events surrounding the former ultimately tarnished Suciu's already weakened public image. The Bucharest-based sports press started questioning the selection as soon as the list was out, stressing the obvious: no player from the Old Kingdom was capped. In these circumstances, the first test game played in Bratislava represented the chance of proving the selection right. Unfortunately for Suciu and his lot, the football game was not advertised to take place between Romania and Czechoslovakia, as everyone expected, but was presented as an encounter between Transylvania (in some reports, the “the Representative of Transylvanian Hungarians”) and Bratislava (or “the Representative of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia” or “the Association of Hungarian Footballers from Slovakia”). Agreeing to replace the national name with any other in an international sporting encounter was highly likely to completely destroy the public image of all those involved. This was just what the Romanian sporting press set out to do with the national captain Adrian Suciu. It mattered little that in the early 1920s Bratislava was a Hungarian–German town where teams fielding Hungarian players were much more likely to attract public interest and spectators. The accusations against Suciu went on to border national treason³⁹; his Transylvanian background was invoked to suggest close relationships with the Hungarian “enemies” in a conspiracy against Romanian interests.

Suciu's national team went on to lose the second test game against Austria in Vienna, 4-1, before being utterly crushed by the Netherlands in the Olympic competition proper in Paris, 6-0. A report in a local newspaper in Cluj synthetically rounded up all the problems and accusations, by now extending well beyond the errors of a single individual:

What makes Cluj's sportsmen nervous is not so much the defeat, but the doubt that quietly enters everyone's souls that the traditional lack of organization led us to the failure in Paris. The football team was selected at random and the players were assigned roles other than their usual.

Finally, we get to the central point, symptomatic for all of Romanian sport. Partly out of the words of the returned players, partly from the correspondence of foreign newspapers, it comes out clearly that the lack of liveliness (însufleţire) of our players led to these result. Even worse, they showed a complete carelessness.

How are to enliven for the cause of Romanian sport those nine, out of eleven players, Jews and Hungarians brought up in the school of Budapest? The facts have dismissed any illusion of a sporting federation. The Judeo-Hungarian chauvinism in Transylvania has shown its teeth once more, this time in Paris, and managed from Budapest.

The Romanian players showed throughout their journey their Hungarian quality; and in their turn, the representatives of Budapest and their people have cheered for the Romanian team as if it were a second-hand Hungarian team. [ … ]

The one making this manifestation possible is to blame. If the responsibility in question might be glossed over, at least our sporting ruling circles should look for a new mission in sport: a Romanian national.⁴⁰

The article expressively shows the complex web of relations between regionalism, ethnicity, nationalism and statism historically at work in Romanian football and sports. There is a discernible pattern emerging regionally and nationally throughout the interwar period, linking sport and politics in a highly fluid dynamic of regional affirmation, re-affirmation of central state power and ethnic backlash. Any success or failure against Bucharest was seized upon as affirming Transylvanian superiority and distinctiveness, as shown by the dismay brought about by the defeat of the Transylvanians in Bucharest. Such claims were soon countered from the offices in Bucharest, regularly with an emphatic stress on the divisive nature of actions and plans readily attributed to minority populations like the perceived Hungarian conspiracy regarding the recruitment of players in the national team. Crucially, as soon as such claims were made, the regional opinion shifted to denouncing the nefarious values and actions of ethnics others than Romanians. At the same time, the same regional voices called for the state, seen as the protector of national interests, to do its job of regulation and control. The failure of state agencies to do so usually prompted yet another cycle of this dynamic that the world of sport has so vividly dramatized on an almost daily basis for almost a century now.

The major point to be made is that in such chains of action and reaction, the state takes on a life of its own and is invested with power and will, detached from the social and cultural relations constituting and upholding it. It is in this modular dynamic configuration (Goswami 2002, 2004) that modern sports work as major institutions of state making and nation building. The development of interwar Romanian football shows how the agents of this new state sought to transpose and ground a vision of the Romanian nation through sport, the ways in which ethnic pluralism and competing understandings of the nation posed limits to such endeavors and the enduring historical importance of these efforts. Moreover, in a highly unstable and conflict prone polity like Greater Romania, the world of football dramatized the inherent tensions of modern nation building. At particular times and in specific places football worked to bridge and transcend ethnic and class boundaries, while at others it helped fuel radical affirmations of social distance and difference. During the formative years of national sporting traditions and movements, little straightforward attachment and loyalty can be granted to either the players, the officials or the sports enthusiasts. The process to ground sports, and football in particular, as “national” operated in the much more complex, indirect and mediated way described earlier in the paper. Ultimately, the fortunes of the 1924 Romanian Olympic football teams and of its coach might have been soon forgotten in Transylvania and elsewhere, but the accusations, claims and proposals made in this context did certainly have traceable repercussions in the subsequent projects and policies. This particular Romanian team might have humiliatingly lost, playing under various designations, but the jurisdiction of national institutions was once more affirmed and calls for state backed nationalization got renewed and more thoroughly legitimated.

Notes

1. “Creiarea de Stat in Stat nu-i admisibilă”, Sportul Capitalei, An 1, No. 162, 9 August 1937.

2. Boerescu, Neagu. 1931. F.S.S.R., U.F.S.R si O.N.E.F. Începturile şi organizarea sportului in România. Boabe de grâu, Anul II, Nr. 6-7.

3. Chestiunea clubului “Makkabea” din Oradea. Sportul, Cluj, 27 Iunie 1921, 2.

4. See Note 3.

5. Sport sau politică? Sportul. Cluj, An I, No. 5, 30 Mai 1921, 1.

6. Congresul Federaţiei Societăţilor Sportive din România, Sportul, Cluj, An I, No. 9, 27 Iunie 1921 1.

7. See Note 6.

8. See Note 6.

9. See Note 6.

10. În jurul rebeliunei de la Cernăuţi, Gazeta Sporturilor, An II, No. 251, 3 August 1926, 3.

11. See Note 10.

12. Un scandal fără precedent în istoria foot-ball-ului român. Gazeta Sporturilor, An II, No. 243, 15 Iulie 1926.

13. Nedreptăţi şi lacune. Gazeta Sporturilor, An 2, No. 222, 27 Mai 1926, 1.

14. See Note 13.

15. See Note 13.

16. See Note 13.

17. See Note 13.

18. Exodul jucatorilor români în Ungaria. Gazeta Sporturilor, An V, No. 453, 21 Ianuarie 1928.

19. See Note 18.

20. The documents that I allude to were collected by the medical doctor Mihai Iubu in 1978–1979. Iubu was the president of the football section of “Universitatea” during the Second World War when the university and subsequently the club relocated to Sibiu following the Second Vienna Arbitration. He sent out a questionnaire to former players and officials across the country, but many of them went on to produce extensive memories. The doctor did not live long enough to use this material. It was passed on to the local historian Gheorghe I. Bodea. Thanks to the generosity of the late Gheorghe I. Bodea that I am able to use these materials. I have gained access to 30 such recollections. Extensive quotations in Romanian are available in Bodea (2004, 2009).

21. Sabin Tîrla, Dr Iubu Collection, no. 2. Note that I use the ordering numbers assigned by Bodea.

22. Dr Meţianu Ioan Eugen, Dr Iubu Collection, no. 40.

23. Romanian National Archives – Cluj County Direction (Henceforth: RNA-CCD), Fond Documentar “Universitatea Regele Ferdinand I”, Proces Verbal al Senatului Universităţii, 28 Mai 1920, 215.

24. RNA-CCD, Fond “Universitatea Regele Ferdinand I,” Proces Verbal al Senatului Universităţii, 4 Iunie 1920, 221.

25. See Note 24.

26. Constantin C. Buga, Dr Iubu Collection, no. 27.

27. Virgil Dalea, Dr Iubu Collection, no. 20.

28. See Note 27.

29. See Note 27.

30. Un ziar sportiv într'un oraş fără sporturi. Sportul, Iaşi, An I, No. 1, 19 Iunie 1929.

31. Culisele sportului ieşean. Sportul, Iaşi, An. I, No. 1, 19 Iunie 1929, 2.

32. România la Olimpiada VIII-a, Sportul, An I, No. 3, 22 Martie 1924.

33. Echipa restului ţării învinge reprezentativa Clujului 2-0, Sportul, An I, No. 8, 10 Aprilie 1924.

34. Păreri din Ardeal asupra înfrângerii “Restului” la Bucureşti. Sportul, An I, No. 17, 15 Mai 1924.

35. Matchurile de selecţionare pentru reprezentativa Bucureştiului la foot-ball asociaţie. Sportul, An I, No. 8, 10 Aprilie 1924. It seems that the interest was not running high among the footballers in Bucharest. The first game was delayed by an hour as some of the players failed to show up and no ball was available in due time!

36. See Note 35.

37. See Note 35.

38. Echipa română de foot-ball spre Paris. Sportul, An I, No. 18, 18 Mai 1924.

39. Nemulţumiri în lumea sportivă din Ardeal. Sportul, An I, No. 19, 22 Mai 1924.

40. România la olimpiada din Paris. Clujul românesc, An II, No. 23, Cluj, 8 Iunie 1924.