Today Portugal will face Hungary at the Ferenc Puskas Arena in Budapest in front of 60,000 fans. It’s the only venue being used at Euro 2020 that, in the group stage at least, will be at full capacity. Everywhere else, Covid restrictions mean limited attendance. But not in Hungary, not for its prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Orbán’s love of football is unfeigned. He played for the youth team of Videoton, a club based in Székesfehérvár about 20 miles south-west of his home village of Felcsút, who reached the Uefa Cup final in 1985. His first foreign trip as prime minister was to the World Cup final in 1998 and he has been a regular at major finals ever since. It’s said that there are days when he watches as many as six matches — he played the game, he loves the game, and he dreams of returning Hungary to the glories of the early 50s, when it could realistically claim to be the greatest football team in the world.
The end for Hungary as a great football nation came with the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Uprising. Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor, three key members of the great side that had taken Olympic gold in 1952, reached the World Cup final in 1954 and twice hammered England, defected and moved to Spain. The Under-21 squad, who had been in Geneva when Soviet tanks rolled through Budapest, didn’t go home. And it turned out that the brilliance of the Aranycsapat — the Golden Team — had disguised an underlying mounting crisis within the Hungarian game.
Hungarian football had boomed in the years after the First World War, the vacant lots of the rapidly expanding capital proving fertile ground for a lingering British cultural influence and the coffee-house intellectuals who became fascinated by football. During the decades that followed, economic and political turmoil led to a great diaspora of players and coaches, who had a profound influence on the development of the game, in Italy particularly, but also in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, France, the Netherlands and South America. Yet the generation of talent, largely through two clubs, MTK and Ferencváros, never stopped. Hungary reached the World Cup final in 1938, and the final of the 1939 Mitropa Cup (a forerunner of the European Cup for sides from central Europe) was contested by two Hungarian sides.
Although neither club was at all exclusive, MTK were seen as the side of the assimilated Jewish middle class and Ferencváros of a nationalistic, often ethnically German, working class. MTK were forcibly disbanded by the Fascist government in March 1942 and although they were reconstituted after the war, there had been not just a catastrophic loss of life but also the destruction of vital links with the past. The Communist government that took power in 1947 was suspicious of Ferencváros and its Right-wing leanings, and so when football was nationalised in 1949 it was given to the food-workers union rather than one of the bigger state organisations such as the army (Honvéd) or the secret police (MTK), a deliberate attempt to limit their resources and influence. Again, the result was to undermine the foundations of Hungarian football’s excellence. After the defections of 1956, there was no means of replacing what had been lost.
The memory of how good things had been, though, remained — and proved inhibitive. The side that reached the quarter-final of the 1966 World Cup always suffered by comparison with the Aranycsapat. The 1978 World Cup side suffered by comparison with them, and the 1986 side was in turn seen as being not as good as the 1978 generation. After that the returns diminished to such a point that Hungary stopped even qualifying for tournaments.
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