They are the youngest footballers Ungheni has — children born in 2018, seven or eight years old — and they have just returned from a trip to Romania with the silver medal around their necks. The “Champions 2018” group of Ungheni District Sports School took second place at the “Junior Mamaia Cup”, a children’s football tournament held in Mamaia, on the Black Sea coast.
In the photograph sent from the scene, the ten or eleven children are lined up in the light-blue kit reading “UNGHENI”, with their coach behind them and the flag of the Republic of Moldova spread out on the grass in front. “Constantin Lungu’s kids finished the tournament strongly,” the school wrote, proud that the little ones “fought for the team and for our town of Ungheni.”
The youngest link in a whole school
The silver from Mamaia is not a stray result. It is the smallest end of a district school that, in just a few weeks, has ticked off achievements across several age groups.
In early July, the same Ungheni District Sports School — and with the same coach, Constantin Lungu — promoted its U16 junior team to the National League, the highest tier of junior football in Moldova, where from the autumn it will face the Sheriff and Zimbru academies. And in beach football, the “Viitorul” children’s team of the same school already held, since 2023, a 3rd place at national level in the children’s category — according to the Moldovan Football Federation standings of the time.
In other words, at Ungheni children’s football runs on a conveyor belt: from the seven-year-olds who have just lifted a trophy in Romania to the juniors climbing among the best in the country.
The coach and the people behind
The common thread of these results is Constantin Lungu, a graduate of the National Institute of Physical Education and Sport, who coordinates several age groups at the school. The institution is public, under the Ungheni Education Directorate and District Council — a structure that keeps high-performance sports training close to home, in the district, not in the capital.
And behind a trip by seven-year-old children, all the way to Mamaia, stand the parents who accompanied and supported them — the effort that usually goes unseen in the photo on the podium.
The result — the silver medal — is the one communicated by the school and the Ungheni Education Directorate, with photographs of the team at the tournament. The full standings of the competition, with the opponents and scores on the way to the final, were not made public by the organisers, so the team’s run remains, for now, the one told by the institution that took the children there. What is certain is the podium — the youngest in a summer full of children’s football for Ungheni.