Ludogorets have won 14 consecutive league titles, with their first coming in 2012 and their streak still active in 2025. The record was originally set by Latvian club Skonto Riga, who won every title between 1991 and 2004, and Lincoln Red Imps from Gibraltar, who have done so between 2003 and 2016.
While Skonto, founded in 1991, won the first fourteen domestic leagues after the indipendence of Latvia from the Soviet Union and then folded in 2016, Lincoln Red Imps have been a dominant force in the smaller Gibraltar National League for decades: before their impressive streak they had already won 8 titles between 1985 and 2001, and won 7 straight more after missing out in 2017, which means they have won 21 of the last 22 titles awarded in Gibraltar.
Impressive right? Both streaks are incredible, but both happened in countries without much football history or without great opposition. That's not the case with Ludogorets, though: Bulgaria have plenty of history in the beautiful game, the National Team reached the World Cup semis in 1994, Hristo Stoičkov won the Ballon d'Or in that same year and the domestic game has seen clubs become proper giants. CSKA and Levski Sofia, the clubs based in the Bulgarian capital, have won 31 and 26 league titles respectively!
The Sofia clubs do not only have a great domestic record, they have European pedigree too. CSKA, the Army's club, reached the European Cup semis in 1967 and 1982 and the quarter finals in 1957, 1974, 1981 and 1990, knocking out clubs the size of Juventus, Ajax and Liverpool in the process. Levski, who are named after Bulgarian national hero Vasil Levski, have not had as much success as their rivals in the European Cup, but have advanced in the knockouts of the UEFA Cup multiple times, most recently in 2006 when they got to the quarter finals. Yet, they still have defeated multiple big clubs like Stuttgart, Rangers, Ajax and Lazio in their many European appearances.
Impressive cup final scenes between Levski and CSKA Sofia
So, in a league dominated by these two clubs, how the hell did Ludogorets manage to win 14 titles in a row?
To give a little background, Bulgaria is home to 6.4 million people, 2.2 million of which live in the Metropolitan area around Sofia. Other major cities are Plovdiv, home to Botev, Spartak and Lokomotiv Plovdiv, all three former Bulgarian champions, Varna, home to Spartak Varna, and Burgas, home to Chernomorets 1919, who were founded in 2015 as the phoenix club of the original Chernomorets club that was dissolved.
Ludogorets are based in Razgrad, a town of just under 30,000 inhabitants located in the geographical region of Ludogorie, which is where the club's name comes from. Razgrad are the 27th Bulgarian town in terms of population, which makes Ludogorets' complete domination of domestic football look a little odd. Imagine a club like Barnsley dominating the Premier League, surely some success would make for a good story, but fourteen titles in a row? Not even Bayern Munich and Juventus managed that, so let's take a look at their background and see what we find out.
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| Good old Razgrad! |
Ludogorets before the domination
PFC Ludogorets was founded in 1945 by merging some rural clubs in the region of Ludogorie, an area in the northeastern part of the country which hosts a mixed population of Bulgarians, Turks and Romani. Competing in the third division, with the occasional trip to the second division, Ludogorets was one of those village clubs that never really had any ambitions nor the chances to compete in the top tier and challenge CSKA and Levski.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of Bulgaria became simply the Republic of Bulgaria that we know today, and started transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to a modern capitalistic economy. This switch hit Bulgaria like a earthquake, leaving Ludogorets, like most other minor clubs, on the verge of bankruptcy for years. In the meantime, taking advantage of the post-Soviet Bulgarian chaos, two brothers named Kiril and Georgi Domuschiev established manufacturing companies and a privatization fund to acquire shares of a number of Bulgarian companies. These moves proved to be incredibly successful and money started flowing in for the two brothers. They have nothing to do with Ludogorets yet, but keep Kiril in mind.
Ludogorets' history remained pretty stale until it merged with FC Antibiotic Razgrad in 1997, forming FC Antibiotic-Ludogorets. This new club had a short life, and by 2005 it was inactive already as it went bankrupt. In the 2009-10 season FC Razgrad 2000 inherited the history and records of Antibiotic-Razgrad, and was renamed PFC Ludogorets 1945 Razgrad and entered the third division. They won the league straight away and got promoted to the second tier, and went looking for investors in a bid to achieve promotion to the top league for the first time.
The Kiril Domuschiev era
A local football club looking for investors, and a businessman who made a fortune at the turn of the millennium, simply a perfect match. Kiril Domuschiev acquired the club in September 2010, when the club had just been promoted to the second division, and started investing to achieve another promotion. To be fair, other clubs in the Bulgarian second tier do not have much funding available, so the goal was definitely achievable. Ludogorets easily won their group and conquered promotion to Parva Liga for the first time in their history.
Mr. President, Kiril Domuschiev
Finally, in 2011-12, the Eagles had their chance to compete against Bulgaria's biggest clubs. In the summer transfer market, Domuschiev funded the arrivals of Bulgaria internationals Ivan Stoyanov, Marcelinho, Stanislav Genchev, Svetoslav Dyakov, Emil Gargorov and Yordan Minev, spending around €1m in transfer and loan fees. This was around the same amount CSKA Sofia spent, with the little difference that CSKA also sold around €5m worth of players in that same summer, while Ludogorets earned nothing from sales.
The journey in the top tier started remarkably well, Ludogorets won 8 out of the first 9 matches of the season, the only draw coming on matchday 1 against Lokomotiv Plovdiv, and did not taste defeat until late October when then Bulgarian champions Litex Lovech beat them 2-1. A little bit of crisis came in March, with three consecutive league defeats, but 7 wins from the next 8 matches brought the team within 2 points of CSKA Sofia on the final matchday. As if it was some comedy movie about an improbable cinderella defeating the odds, the last match of the season saw Ludogorets face CSKA in Razgrad. The Eagles needed a goal, and a goal they got, winning 1-0 thanks to Miroslav Ivanov and conquering the league title in their first ever season in the Bulgarian top flight.
As if the league title wasn't enough, Ludogorets also conquered the Bulgarian Cup thanks to a Marcelinho brace against Lokomotiv Plovdiv, only to beat them again in July in the Supercup to achieve the domestic treble on the very first attempt!
This season opened the floodgates and trophies started appearing in the cabinet at a rate that even the greatest clubs in the world can only dream of: another league won by just one point in 2013, this time over Levski, then another treble in 2014, then league title, after league title, after league title... You know it, you've read it in the title, they've matched the European record with 14 straight titles, to which they added 3 cups and 8 supercups. That's 25 trophies in 14 years!
After 2012 and 2013, CSKA Sofia came close to breaking the streak in 2019 and 2023, again missing out by just one point. Nobody else even got remotedly near them.
As the titles kept coming, so did the European qualifications. Ludogorets racked in a lot of money by qualifying twice for the Champions League group stages. They earned four points but came 4th in 2015 in a group with Real Madrid, FC Basel and Liverpool, and got 3rd place in a group with PSG, Arsenal and Basel again in 2017. Imagine Ronaldo playing against your local club. Yeah.
Now, the Champions League is where the money was at, but it's the Europa League that made Ludogorets' name known all over the continent: the Eagles topped a group with PSV and Dinamo Zagreb and then defeated Lazio in the knockouts in 2014, and then reached the knockouts three more times, as well as two more in the Conference League in recent years.
The prize money Ludogorets got from all those consecutive European campaigns simply cannot be matched by the likes of CSKA and Levski, and this created a vicious circle that inevitably leads to Ludogorets winning the league and qualifying for the Champions League preliminary rounds, earning money from the UCL or Europa League to then strengthen the squad and win the league again. They haven't been able to close the gap with the rest of Europe, but they've built a massive advantage over everyone else in Bulgaria that will hardly be overcome anytime soon.
We can finally answer our question: how did a club from a town of 30,000 people take hostage an entire league? The answer, as we found out, is very simple and also really easy to guess: money. Keep in mind, Bulgaria is the poorest country in the European Union according to a lot of the most common indexes, so the wealth of an entrepreneur made them the richest club in the country first, and the prize money from UEFA kept them in that position.
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