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Universitatea Craiova to face Belarus champions Vitebsk

Florin Orban, 07.07.2026, 13:45

Romanian clubs will be holding their first official match of the new season on Wednesday. Universitatea Craiova make their debut in the Champions League qualifiers, facing the Belarus champions Vitebsk in their first preliminary round. The Romanian side will play the first leg away from home, in the Hungarian city of Mezőkövesd, as UEFA has banned Belarus from hosting official European competition matches. The match will be played without spectators.

This is the first time that Universitatea Craiova are competing in Europe’s major tournament since the shift to the new format. They last played in the European Cup, as the Champions League was formerly named, in the 1991–92 season, when they faced Cyprus’s Apollon Limassol in the first round and winning the first leg 2–nil but losing the return leg nil–3, being thus eliminated from the competition. However, a decade before that, Craiova had achieved their best-ever European Cup results by reaching the quarter-finals, where they were defeated by Bayern Munich. On route to that stage, they had eliminated the Greek side Olympiacos Piraeus in the first round and Denmark’s KB Copenhagen in the second round.

Universitatea Craiova are now embarking on their European campaign after winning the Romanian Superliga for the first time in the last 35 years. Managed by Portugal’s Filipe Coelho, the squad were by far the best Romanian team of the year, having also won the Romanian Cup. Universitatea Craiova is also the club that contributed the most players to the Romanian national team and have signed up new talent, such as goalkeeper Răzvan Sava, who came over from the Italian side Udinese for 2.5 million euros; the Jamaican defender Ronaldo Romario Webster, from the North Macedonian club Shkendija for half a million, and the Portuguese forward Heriberto Tavares (a Cape Verde international), who was transferred from Maccabi Netanya for 200,000 euros.

The Belarusian club ML Vitebsk are a relatively new team, founded in 1983 and rebuilt in 2014. They won their first national championship last year, having just been promoted to the first-tier league. The squad consists mainly of Belarusian players, though a few foreign players stand out, including Jamaican forward Shamar Nicholson and Serbian midfielder Aleksandar Mesarović.