Season-level reference. Single-matchday material has
been stripped: this is the shape of the division, not a form guide.
Nothing here feeds the model.
Romanian SuperLiga (Liga I) 2026/27: Intel Report
Compiled 22 August 2026. Where I've derived a number myself rather than lifted it from a source, I've said so. Manager entries are omitted because I could not verify them this week and would not guess.
1. League shape, and the rounding rule you have to encode
- 109th season of Liga I. Sponsor name: SuperLiga (Superbet), rebranded from Liga 1 in 2022.
- Sixteen clubs. Started 18 July 2026 (pushed back a week from the original 11-12 July), ends May 2027.
- Phase 1: 30-match regular season, double round-robin.
- Phase 2: split. Top six into the play-off, bottom ten into the play-out.
- Points are halved at the split, and rounded UP.
- Play-off decides the title and European places. Play-out decides relegation.
- Relegation: 9th and 10th in the play-out (15th and 16th overall) go down directly. 7th and 8th in the play-out play a two-legged baraj against the 3rd and 4th-placed clubs from the Liga II play-off.
The rounding rule is the single most model-relevant detail in this report
When points are halved at the split, odd totals are rounded up. A club that benefits from that rounding carries a permanent tiebreak disadvantage for the rest of the season.
The worked example from May 2026: Farul Constanța and Petrolul Ploiești finished the play-out level on points. Petrolul finished above Farul purely because Petrolul did not benefit from the rounding at the end of the regular season. Farul went to the relegation baraj; Petrolul stayed up without playing one.
Model implications.
- You need an explicit half-point ledger. It is not enough to halve and round: you must also carry a flag for which clubs received the rounding benefit, because that flag resolves ties later.
- Half a point at the split is worth more than a point in the regular season, because it decides tiebreaks in a compressed table. That is a genuinely unusual property.
- Combined with Greece's halving mechanic and Bulgaria's group split, three of the twelve leagues covered across these reports have non-linear phase transitions. A single flat-season simulation engine cannot handle any of them.
Other structural notes
- Winter break after round 21 (19-20 December 2026), resuming 16-17 January 2027.
- Play-off and play-out begin the weekend of 20-21 March 2027. Final play-off round 29-30 May 2027.
- The four European entrants (Universitatea Craiova, U Cluj, CFR Cluj, FCSB) were deliberately kept apart in the first seven rounds in July and August because of European qualifying commitments. That means the early-season fixture list is systematically softer for the big four than a random draw would produce. If your model uses early-season form as an input, this is a known bias in the first seven rounds.
- Broadcasters: Prima Sport and Digi Sport.
- Public-sector clubs (Steaua București, CS Dinamo, CSM Slatina and others in Liga II) cannot be promoted regardless of where they finish, though they may play in the promotion play-off. That constrains the pool of possible promoted clubs each year.
2. Baseline: 2025/26
- Champions: Universitatea Craiova, their fifth title and their first since 1991. They also won the Romanian Cup, so this was a double.
- Supercupa (11 July 2026): Universitatea Craiova v Universitatea Cluj.
- Relegated:
- Metaloglobus București, after a single season up. Conceded 80 goals, the worst defence in the league, and were mathematically down by 27 April.
- Unirea Slobozia, after two consecutive seasons, having lost 0-1 at home on the final day.
- Hermannstadt, who avoided direct relegation by beating FCSB 2-0 on the final day and then lost the baraj 3-5 on aggregate to FC Voluntari.
- Promoted: Corvinul Hunedoara (Liga II champions), Sepsi OSK Sfântu Gheorghe (2nd), and FC Voluntari via the baraj, back after two years away.
2025/26 league-level numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|
| Matches | 240 |
| Goals | 613, 2.55 per match |
| Top scorer | Jovo Lukić, 18 |
| Biggest home wins | Unirea Slobozia 6-1 Csíkszereda; Universitatea Craiova 5-0 Csíkszereda |
| Biggest away win | UTA 0-4 Oțelul Galați |
| Highest scoring | Unirea Slobozia 6-1 Csíkszereda; Dinamo 4-3 FCSB |
| Longest winning run | CFR Cluj, 11 |
| Longest unbeaten | CFR Cluj, 14 |
| Longest winless | Metaloglobus, 12 |
| Longest losing run | Unirea Slobozia, 9 |
Note the CFR Cluj anomaly. They had both the longest winning run (11) and the longest unbeaten run (14) in the division and still finished outside the top two, going into the Conference League rather than the Champions League. That is a strong signal of a season with a heavily front- or back-loaded form curve, and it is exactly the kind of profile that a season-average rating will misprice.
European allocation for 2026/27
- Champions League: Universitatea Craiova. Drawn against ML Vitebsk in Q1, with a potential Q2 tie against the winner of Borac Banja Luka v Levski Sofia (see the Bulgaria report, which is the same tie from the other side).
- Europa League: Universitatea Cluj.
- Conference League: CFR Cluj and FCSB.
Four of sixteen clubs in Europe (25%).
3. The 2026/27 field
Sixteen clubs: thirteen retained plus three promoted.
| Club | City | Note |
|---|
| Universitatea Craiova | Craiova | Defending champions and Cup winners. Champions League entrant. |
| FCSB | Bucharest | 28 titles including 2023/24 and 2024/25 as back-to-back champions before Craiova took over. Lost 0-2 at Hermannstadt on the final day and effectively sent them to the baraj. Conference League. |
| CFR Cluj | Cluj-Napoca | Longest winning (11) and unbeaten (14) runs in the division. Conference League. |
| Universitatea Cluj | Cluj-Napoca | Finished second. Europa League. Supercupa opponents. |
| Rapid București | Bucharest | |
| Dinamo București | Bucharest | Beat FCSB 4-3 in one of the season's highest-scoring games. Played home matches at Arena Națională while Stadionul Dinamo was rebuilt. |
| Farul Constanța | Constanța | Survived only via the rounding tiebreak going against them and then winning the baraj against Chindia (1-1, 4-2 on penalties, 3-3 aggregate). |
| Petrolul Ploiești | Ploiești | Stayed up ahead of Farul purely on the rounding tiebreak. |
| Oțelul Galați | Galați | Won 4-0 at UTA, the division's biggest away win. |
| UTA Arad | Arad | |
| FC Botoșani | Botoșani | |
| Csíkszereda Miercurea Ciuc | Miercurea Ciuc | Conceded 1-6 and 0-5. Received a federation dispensation to use their own stadium despite it being below the 4,500-capacity minimum. The Hungarian-speaking Székely Land club, a distinctive identity in Romanian football. |
| FC Argeș Pitești | Pitești | Playing home matches at the Orășenesc Stadium in Mioveni while the Nicolae Dobrin Stadium is redeveloped. |
| Corvinul Hunedoara (promoted) | Hunedoara | Liga II champions. Playing home matches at Francisc von Neuman in Arad while their own complex is redeveloped. |
| Sepsi OSK (promoted) | Sfântu Gheorghe | Back after one season down, having previously spent eight consecutive years in the top flight. The other Székely Land club. |
| FC Voluntari (promoted) | Voluntari, Ilfov | Back after two years, via the baraj win over Hermannstadt. |
Three of sixteen clubs are playing away from their own ground, or with a dispensation: Argeș at Mioveni, Corvinul at Arad, and Csíkszereda under a capacity waiver. That is a very high proportion and it materially affects any home-advantage feature for those clubs.
Bucharest concentration: FCSB, Rapid and Dinamo, plus Voluntari from the Ilfov ring. Cluj concentration: CFR and U Cluj, which produces a genuine city derby at the top of the table.
4. Style and trends: what to feed the model
League-level priors
| Metric | Value | Implication |
|---|
| Goals per match | 2.55 | Middle of the pack. In line with Serie B (2.56) and Greece (2.57). |
| Clubs | 16 | |
| Regular season | 30 rounds | Then a split with halved and rounded-up points. |
| Relegation | 2 direct plus 2 baraj places from 16 | 12.5-25% effective risk. |
| Clubs in Europe | 4 of 16 (25%) | |
| Season | 18 July to late May 2027 | Nine-week winter break equivalent (mid-Dec to mid-Jan). |
Structural features to encode
- Points halved and rounded up at the split, with a persistent rounding-benefit flag used as a tiebreak. This is the rule that decided who stayed up last season and it is not in most data feeds. Build it explicitly.
- The first seven rounds are a biased sample. Craiova, U Cluj, CFR Cluj and FCSB were deliberately kept apart in July and August. Their early points totals are inflated relative to a random draw. Down-weight rounds 1 to 7 as a form input for those four clubs.
- Three relegation routes, not one. 15th and 16th go directly, 13th and 14th go to a two-legged baraj against Liga II clubs. Effective relegation risk extends four places deep.
- Public-sector Liga II clubs cannot be promoted. Steaua București, CS Dinamo, CSM Slatina, Șelimbăr, Dumbrăvița, Ștefănești, Gloria Bistrița, Popești Leordeni and Râmnicu Vâlcea are all excluded. This narrows the realistic promotion pool and, in the baraj, means the Liga I side sometimes faces a weaker opponent than the Liga II table suggests.
- Venue displacement at three of sixteen clubs. Argeș, Corvinul and Csíkszereda. If you carry a home-advantage term, these three need adjusting downward or flagging.
- CFR Cluj's form-run anomaly. Longest winning and unbeaten runs in the league, no title, no Champions League. Check what your rating produces for them.
Clubs with distinct markers
- Universitatea Craiova: the double, and a first title in 35 years.
- CFR Cluj: extreme form-run concentration without the finish.
- Metaloglobus: 80 goals conceded, the worst defence, gone after one season.
- Csíkszereda: conceded 6-1 and 5-0, plays under a capacity waiver, Hungarian-speaking identity.
- Farul and Petrolul: the rounding tiebreak worked example.
5. Caveats
- No head coaches verified. Romanian managerial turnover is among the highest in Europe and I would not guess at any of the sixteen. Pull the list.
- I do not have the 2025/26 final table or draw share. The goals-per-match, top-scorer and run figures are solid; the draw share is not derived and I have not estimated it.
- No attendance data for 2025/26. Romanian crowds vary enormously between the Bucharest and Cluj clubs and the provincial sides, so a per-club home-advantage term is likely needed, but I cannot quantify the range from this research.
- No outright betting market data. Romanian outright markets are thin.
- The exact halving-and-rounding regulation text is inferred from match reporting (the Farul/Petrolul case), not from the LPF rulebook directly. Confirm the precise wording before you code it.
- Some club and city details are from background knowledge rather than verified this week, particularly stadium names and the composition of the retained thirteen. The retained list is arithmetic from the confirmed relegations and promotions, not a sourced list.
Main sources: Wikipedia RO (SuperLiga României 2025-2026 and 2026-2027, SuperLiga României overview, Liga a II-a 2025-2026 and 2026-2027), Wikipedia EN (2025-26 Liga I, 2026-27 Liga I, 2025-26 Liga II), Digi Sport, Flashscore.ro, GOLAZO.ro, LPF official, InfoCons, OnlineSport.ro.