The two cities in the western part of the country dispute the primacy of the first football game played on the actual territory of Romania.

Timișoara was the first such match to be recorded in the press of the time. It took place on June 25, 1899. It was a game on the occasion of the end of the school year celebrations at the Piarist High School in the city, played on the Velocitas field, between two teams of high school students, ending, after 45 minutes, with the score 0-0. The organizer was gym teacher Károly Müller. The local Hungarian-language newspaper “Délmagyarországi Közlöny” published a news report announcing the match and later a review of the match.

The first official meeting from a regulatory point of view, with public and referees, took place the same year, on August 15, in Arad, between athletes of the local Football Society. This was the first organized football team on the current territory of our country, founded on 5 July 1899, but it was quickly disbanded and replaced, on 25 August of the same year, by a multi-sports club, with football as its basic sport, called Clubul Atletic Arad (CAA). Thus, the first match recorded in the press took place in Timișoara, and the first match involving players from an organized team in Arad. Both cities were then in Austro-Hungary.

The Poli – UTA rivalry began in 1964. But the Timisoara – Arad football ‘war’ goes back much further.

The two cities are only about 60 km apart, and the Mures River (which divides the historical provinces of Banat and Crișana) was the southern boundary of Arad, a city that later (in the second half of the 1940s) expanded beyond the Mures, i.e. into Banat.

Timișoara and Arad dispute the paternity of the first football match played on the territory of today’s Romania, in 1899 (they were then in Austro-Hungary). Then there were the club rivalries: CAT – CAA (1900s and 1910s), Chinezul – CAA (1910s), Chinezul – AMEFA (1910s), in Austro-Hungary; Ripensia – AMEFA (1930s), CFR – ITA (1940s), in Romania. But the biggest rivalry will be between Poli and UTA.

The Timișoara – Arad rivalry was also amplified by the fact that Arad was included in the Banat Region, with residence in Timișoara, in the new administrative-territorial organization of Romania in 1960 (existing until 1968).

The match with the most serious incidents in history was Știința – UTA, in the spring of 1964, in the first division. The championship match in Timișoara ended 3-3, and the fierce resistance of the guests (who were also nervous about relegation) and the unfavorable refereeing led to clashes between the police supporters and the police (who even fired shots in the air). Crazy courage, at a time when only a few years had passed since destalinization. It ended in arrests and, among the students (mostly Polytechnic) involved, expulsions. Științei’s pitch was suspended and the team played its last home games of that season in Reșița. At the end of the season, the Timisoara club was relegated to the second division. Since then, there has been an extreme rivalry between Poli and UTA.

Ioan Igna, who played for both teams, would later declare: “There was a rivalry that continues to this day, which I simply do not understand. The people of Arad say that when the Banat region was created, the people of Timișoara didn’t give funds to Arad, and that’s where it all started”.

At UTA, Petschowski, from Timișoara, came to the fore, the man who, until Dobrin’s emergence, will be considered by many as the greatest player in the history of Romanian football. He never played for Poli.

On Saturday, the white-violets meet a new club from Arad, Viitorul. The match will be played at the Banatul stadium in Sânicolaul Mic, a district of Arad in… Banat.

Photo: A sequence from a UTA – Poli match in 1973