Is Rugby Professional in Romania?

[RWC2011Fan]

Was re-watching Scotland vs. Romania from 2011 and I'm having a hard time believing that a team of full-time professionals were having that much trouble against a bunch of amateurs.

Have to imagine that at least a few of them play full-time in France or something.

 

[racer0bv]

In the team that played in that game we had: 3 players from Top 14, 3 from ProD2, one from the Aviva Premiership, one from Federale 1, and the rest from the Romanian SuperLeague (some of them moved to France in the past period).

The Romanian SuperLeague has a semi-professional status, we have teams with only professional players, but 1-2 teams have players who have other jobs, since the income is not great (not very sure about this info, but i think it is right).

 

[white bear]

racer0bv
What kind of budgets at Romanian clubs, I've read that this season Timisoara has 2 million euro?

 

[racer0bv]

yeah, i've heard about that amount also, but i can't confirm it. I know that they have indeed a big budget (for sure more than 1 mil), since they have a lot of foreign, good players and some players with a lot of caps for Romania. Besides them, there are 2 more clubs with some money available (Steaua and Baia Mare), but the rest are barely making it.

To make an ideea, I know that at CSM Bucharest, a team from the bottom of the standings in the superleague, a rookie player has about 800-1000 euros monthly salary- again, a information not confirmed by them.

 

[Jayatron]

I presume the quality would low? What kind of support (crowd size) does the league get?

Any videos or sites you can link us to?

 

[dragos03]

I would estimate the medium attendance this season at around 800-1000 fans per game. One match every round is broadcasted live by the public television TVR1, the rest are filmed in low quality with only one camera and streamed live on this website: www.rugbytv.ro

On www.rugbytv.ro you can also find archived replays of games, post-match interviews, a weekly live talk-show dedicated to rugby and various other rugby-related events (such as games played by the Romanian national team, youth matches, amateur rugby, etc).

Here are some highlights from the Superliga:
Round 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN-4LRGGwCE
Round 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI3_9mGCjPY
Round 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urx9r8Hk4mM
Round 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3hRPjlU97A
Round 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_zlNtoVmjU
Round 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-M2ZosMvfo
Round 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZftRT1viyo

In short: the Romanian league is professional, but the level is much lower than the top rugby leagues in the West. Some of the clubs have big financial problems and the infrastructure (stadiums, training grounds, etc) is usually bad. Still, Romania (along with Russia, maybe) probably has the best and most competitive domestic league in Europe besides the big 3 (France, England, Celtic).

 

[Jaguares]

The Romanians are very strong players, Romanians are known as men naturally strong and tough. It's rare to see a small Romanian, are strong as the Russians. So they have great forwards without investing much money in rugby, still find it difficult to improve on skills such as: Speed, individual technique and collective game. I think with a great fly half like Wilkinson, they could be the surprise in the next RWC.

Regards