# The town hall's team: what Romanian towns and villages paid for sports clubs

Public money in sport · 2025

314 sports clubs in Romania are institutions of town halls and county councils. In 2025 they paid out 920.1 million lei, and only 6.1 lei in every 100 came from sponsors, tickets and services. Town halls and county councils gave another 318.1 million lei to private clubs. The 64 state school sports clubs that report on their own spent 214.0 million lei.

## Clubs that are the town hall

A municipal sports club (CSM or SCM), a commune club or a county club is, as a rule, a public institution set up by the local or county council, with a budget voted by the councillors, just like a library. That is why it reports its payments to the Ministry of Finance, as the town hall does. (6 of them still carry "association" in their name but report as town-hall institutions.)

In 2025, 314 clubs in 309 towns, communes and counties reported this way. Together they paid out 920.1 million lei. In 2024 there were 295 clubs, with 899.0 million lei, and in 2023, 760.6 million lei.

Of every 100 lei these clubs paid out, 6.1 lei came from money the club earned or private backers gave: sponsorship (3.1 lei), tickets, services and rent. Another 7.4 lei came in on income lines that do not say where the money came from. For the remaining 86.5 lei, the clubs' reports show no source other than subsidies and payments by the town hall or county council. At the typical club among the 105 that paid out more than a million lei, that part is over 95 per cent.

## Money given to private clubs

Many well-known teams, especially in football, are private associations or companies. They get public money too, through calls for sports projects. In the town hall's budget this money has its own line: "sums for sports programmes run by private-law sports structures".

In 2025, 853 town halls and county councils paid out 318.1 million lei this way, against 285.5 million lei in 2024 and 230.4 million lei in 2023. The most came from the county councils of Buzău (17.8 million lei) and Brăila (16.8 million lei) and, among town halls, from Cluj-Napoca (24.0 million lei), Iași (18.8 million lei), Pitești (17.1 million lei), Sibiu (15.8 million lei) and Chiajna (15.0 million lei).

The data do not say which club got each leu. The winners are listed in each local council's decisions, so the receipt shows the sum without naming a club.

## Where town halls pay the most per resident

Per resident at the 2021 census, the largest sums among places with at least 5,000 people came from communes and small towns with clubs of their own: Afumați (996 lei), Blaj (628 lei), Voluntari (599 lei), Ghiroda (562 lei) and Ștefăneștii de Jos (555 lei). The average for big cities, over 100,000 people, was 93 lei. Among smaller places, Colonești (Olt) reached 727 lei per resident.

The map counts the payments of the town hall's own club and the sums the town hall gave to private clubs. County councils pay separately, for the whole county; each place's receipt shows them on a line of their own.

## Schools, universities and ministries

School sports clubs (CSS) belong to the state, not the town hall: the Ministry of Education pays for them out of the education budget. The 64 school sports clubs that report on their own spent 214.0 million lei in 2025, 81 lei in every 100 of it on staff. School clubs that do not report on their own and sports high schools, whose budgets include ordinary schooling, are not included.

Town-hall clubs paid out 4.3 times as much. These are two different payers with different jobs. The ratio shows that, nationally, town-hall clubs spend several times as much as the state's school clubs.

The state also has clubs of its own, apart from the school ones: 58 clubs of ministries and other state bodies paid out 414.5 million lei in 2025, among them CS Dinamo (147.9 million lei) and CS Rapid (104.7 million lei). They are not counted as town-hall money. Universities have 21 sports clubs of their own, also under the Ministry of Education, which paid out 81.2 million lei.

Taken together, the payments of town-hall, school, university and ministry clubs, plus town halls' grants to private clubs, come to 1.95 billion lei in 2025. The clubs have some income of their own, but little: at town-hall clubs, 6.1 lei in every 100. Separately, town halls and county councils reported another 520.3 million lei of Sport-chapter payments outside their clubs and their grants to private clubs.

## What these data do not say

They do not say what a point or a goal costs. Many town-hall clubs run several sections, from handball and volleyball to chess and dance, and the budget is not split by team. No public club could be confirmed as fielding a single senior team in one of the top two leagues; only for such a club would dividing by points be fair.

A public club's name does not tell you which teams play under it. Slobozia's football team, in Liga 1 during 2025, is AFC Unirea 04 Slobozia, an association, not CSM Unirea Slobozia; Gloria Buzău's football moved to an association, and Reșița's Liga 2 place passed in July 2024 to the association ACSM Reșița. FC Argeș, promoted to Liga 1 in 2025, is also an association, separate from the public institution "Fotbal Club Argeș".

They do not cover all of sport. Many town halls report sports grounds together with parks, on one shared line, so they are left out here. So are stadiums built by the state or by national companies. The data also leave out free use of public halls and pitches: an advantage nobody pays for never passes through the budget.

## How it was calculated

The money comes from the budget execution each public institution reports to the Ministry of Finance (Forexebug), read through the public copy at Transparenta.eu. Amounts are payments made in the year. Three 2025 amounts were checked against the execution accounts the town halls published, and match to the leu: Sibiu's "Sport" line (16,386,690 lei), Pitești's "Sport" line (27,522,403 lei) and Pitești's grants to private clubs (17,072,000 lei). CSM Constanța's own report gives 37,134,599 lei for 2025, 360 lei below the ministry data (37,134,959 lei); for 2024 the two match to the leu.

A town-hall club is a public institution named as a sports club, with payments under "Sport" that year, that answers to a town hall, a county council or a Bucharest sector. School, university and ministry clubs are counted separately. For each club, all its payments in the year are added up.

The private share: sponsorship, income from services and tickets, rent. Some clubs are paid directly by the town hall and do not book the subsidy as income, so the public share is worked out from payments: payments minus what the club earned. Income lines that do not name a source ("other voluntary transfers", "other income") are shown separately. The pre-registered test used the club's booked income as the denominator (for 2024, 94.7 per cent subsidies at the typical club, among the 102 that book income; for 2025, 95 per cent among 101); because many clubs do not book the subsidy as income, the page uses payments.

Money given to private clubs: the line "sums for sports programmes run by private-law sports structures" in the chapter "Culture, recreation and sport", plus sums for associations under the "Sport" subchapter. Lei per resident: what the town hall paid (its club plus money given to private clubs) divided by the resident population at the 2021 census. For a county council, the county's population. Bucharest's sectors are shown without a per-resident figure.

The test was registered before computing: if the typical club's public share had been under 70 per cent, or if town-hall clubs had received less than school clubs, the page would have dropped those comparisons. Dividing by points was proposed in advance too, provided at least five public clubs fielded a single senior team in a top league; the condition was not met, so the page gives no such figures.

## Sources

- Ministry of Finance, budget execution of public institutions 2023–2025 (Forexebug), via [Transparenta.eu](https://transparenta.eu). Source: Ministry of Finance, via Transparenta.eu.
- National Institute of Statistics, 2021 Population and Housing Census, resident population by administrative unit.
- Place outlines: geo-spatial.org, [ro_admin_lau_polygon](https://geo-spatial.org) (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Checks: [Sibiu town hall, execution account at 31.12.2025](https://www.sibiu.ro/ro2/pdf/Bilant_executie/Cont_2025_tr4.pdf); [Pitești town hall, council decision 234/2026 and 2025 execution account](https://www.primariapitesti.ro/uploads/pages/files/234_HCL_cont_executie_dec_2025.pdf); [CSM Constanța, 2025 activity report](https://www.csmconstanta.ro/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Raport-de-Activitate-Final-Anul-2025.pdf).
- Teams and their clubs: [AFC Unirea Slobozia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFC_Unirea_Slobozia), [FC Gloria Buzău](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Gloria_Buz%C4%83u), [FC Argeș Pitești](https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/FC_Arge%C8%99_Pite%C8%99ti) (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA); [CSM Reșița's place transfer](https://ro.soccerway.com/stiri/fotbal-liga-1-superliga-csm-resita-a-obtinut-oficial-dreptul-de-promovare-in-superliga-moment-important-pentru-clubul-nostru/xj2HVDtm).