Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  In 2013 Puskás and Hungary’s anger was largely vindicated. A report by Berlin’s Humboldt University outlined an enormous government-funded programme that was involved in doping sportsmen and women. The use of performance enhancing drugs had been well documented among East German sportsmen and women, but the report alleged that it had been widespread in the West, too. Far from being Vitamin C, the substance was likely to have been Pervitin, a methamphetamine. As the German newspaper Der Spiegel pointed out in a 2005 report, Pervitin was the Wehrmacht’s wonder drug. Millions of tablets were sent out to soldiers, pilots and sailors during the Second World War. Between April and July 1940 alone over thirty-five million tablets were shipped to the German army and air force. It was, as Der Spiegel continued, a ‘Blitzkrieg fuelled by speed’. The 1954 World Cup final, it turns out, was a miracle fuelled by speed, too. ‘That the West German World Cup-winning team of 1954 beat Hungary in the final enhanced by drugs is something we have known for a long time,’ the legendary football writer Brian Glanville wrote in World Soccer magazine shortly after the report was released. ‘It was plain soon after the final itself with tales – not least from an enraged Puskás – of German players vomiting in their dressing room. When more than half that team succumbed to jaundice and were out for months it was plainer than ever that their remarkable second-half rally against the Hungarians had a chemical basis.’

  Puskás and the Golden Team would never play in another World Cup final. In fact, that final marked the beginning of the end of that team. True, Hungary went on to qualify for the 1958 World Cup finals, but Puskás and many of the Golden Team would not be in Sweden for it. Puskás was playing for Budapest Honved in the European Cup when the Hungarian uprising took place in 1956. The team refused to go home and many eventually found their way into top European clubs. After serving a two-year ban from UEFA for not returning to Hungary, a now thirty-one-year-old Puskás signed for Real Madrid, where he shone, famously scoring four goals in the 7-3 defeat of Eintracht Frankfurt in the 1960 European Cup final. He would never play for Hungary again. For the next thirty years the Hungarian national team delivered ever diminishing returns. Their last appearance at a World Cup finals was in Mexico 1986, more than a quarter of a century ago. The current crop of players is no Golden Team – who, realistically, could ever match that team? – but in the race for Brazil 2014 Hungary were second in their group and a victory against Romania would make them favourites to secure a place in the play-offs with a chance to see one of the historically great national teams of world football return to what many Hungarians see as their rightful place at football’s top table. The legacy of Puskás and his Magical Magyars had, understandably, weighed heavily on the shoulders of every team and coach that followed.

  **

  A half-hour bus ride outside Budapest, at a training complex near the village of Telki, the current Hungarian team is about to start its last training session before leaving for Bucharest. Their coach is sixty-three-year-old Sándor Egervári. He got the job after taking charge of the Hungary Under 20 team a few weeks before they were due to go to the 2009 Under 20 World Cup in Egypt. Miraculously, he took them to a third-place finish, reviving memories of an age when Hungary could compete with the world’s best. His face and bald head, ringed by tufts of silver-white hair, are tanned, a permanent legacy from his time coaching in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. ‘As you say in football language it is a kind of a six-point game,’ he says in the lobby of the swanky hotel, glasses perched on his nose. ‘Turkey, Romania and Hungary are going for the second place. The game is important for us because of the two nations’ historic past. It was full of problems.’

  Egervári avoided the ignominy of losing to Romania at home, even if that was replaced by the greater shame of having to play the match behind closed doors after the fans had been heard making anti-Semitic chants. The return match in Bucharest will be different as Romania have a significant advantage. ‘We know that the atmosphere will be very special,’ he nods. ‘More than fifty thousand Romanian and maybe three, four, five thousand Hungarian fans will be there. For sure it will be a very, very exciting atmosphere. But we have mental training so that the Hungarian players don’t think about the atmosphere.’ None the less, the press on both sides have been hyping up the game, evoking old slights and perceived historical wrongs. The report on doping in West Germany and its role in the 1954 final had only just been released as well. Egervári played for Budapest Honved as a young man, the same army team as Puskás, but he was too young to have played with him. He had long ago defected by then. ‘I am sorry but the 1950s and the 1960s is the past already,’ he says when I ask about the Golden Team and its effect on subsequent generations of players. ‘But in the past twenty years football has gone really down and only now has it tried to get up again. More than hundreds of pitches have been lost. They built buildings and petrol stations and shops. So we have lost not just our pitches but our values.’ Nor did he have much time for the report on doping at the 1954 final. ‘We don’t care. We knew at the time that the Hungarian team was the best in the world,’ he says, echoing the view of many Hungarians that, regardless of what the record books say, the Mighty Magyars were the true world champions in 1954. ‘We don’t care about whether it was true or not. This is history. We know the Hungarian team was the best in the world. That is important to us.’

  Hungary’s twenty-five-year-old, flame-haired goalkeeper Ádám Bogdán, on the other hand, doesn’t remember anything other than Hungary losing. His generation of international players has no memory of the national team competing in international tournaments. ‘Well, we haven’t been to a World Cup since 1986 so qualifying means everything,’ he says as his coach impatiently waits for the rest of the team to leave for training. ‘I was born in 1987 so I don’t remember anything when I was growing up. I was watching different teams in the World Cup, supporting different teams like England. It means everything for football fans in Hungary. We have to take it as a motivation and keep on fighting.’ According to Bogdán, the constant search for any signs of a new Golden Generation has been something of a hindrance to Hungarian football, but now they have a good mix of players appearing in top European leagues, even if many of them aren’t playing regularly. But in the Arena Naţională form will probably have little bearing on the result. ‘It will be hostile,’ Bogdán replies when I ask him how he thinks Hungary will be received. ‘It is no secret that we don’t have the best relationships between the two countries. But it is the biggest derby against Romania. The problems were only eighty years or so ago. But that’s politics and life and that is a rivalry. I know it means a lot to the people in Romania because when we lost a part of Hungary a lot of people are stuck outside the country. Those people still live there, still speak Hungarian and live as Hungarians so this match must mean a lot to them as well.’ Egervári, though, sees the game as a chance at least to partially right the failures of the past on the pitch while trying to avoid the political arguments off it. ‘For us we don’t care about the political situation. It is not war,’ he says as he finally ushers his players towards the exit. ‘It’s just football.’

  Not everyone agrees. ‘The right wing is so strong now, there are ultra-right-wing parties like Jobbik and they get into the stadiums,’ explains thirty-eight-year-old Szabó Szilárd, a sports journalist for Kossuth Radio who has seen Hungary’s terraces become more intolerant and inward looking as the country has moved increasingly to the right. ‘Because of one hundred or two hundred stupid people Hungarian sport can be damaged. That is what politicians, sportsmen, everyone wants, we want to get them out of the stadium.’ Although the right-wing Fidesz party is in power, it is the ultra-right wing Jobbik party that has made the greater advances. They gained almost a million votes in the previous election by articulating an insular vision of Hungary’s future by parading a largely distorted history of its past. The biggest enemy of all is Romania. ‘Transylvania was part of Hungary, yes,’ Szilárd explains. ‘There are still a lot of pe
ople who think that Transylvania should be part of Hungary. There are voices like that. In every country there are radical thinkers who are not able to accept the history so that is the primary reason for the rivalry.’

  The run-up to the match had worried Szilárd. The chants against the Israel team, the supporter ban for the first Hungary–Romania game in Budapest, the anti-Romania and Slovakia chants that had been heard, and punished, at the previous weekend’s league matches all pointed to a potential car crash. ‘We are all afraid that anything can happen,’ he says. ‘I have some friends who will go to Bucharest. They are going to Transylvania in a mini bus and then changing into a Romanian one. It is just not possible to go to Bucharest for this game with a Hungarian vehicle. I was told in Serbia [where a large Hungarian minority live in Vojvodina] they burned a whole bus.’ Transport was indeed a problem. Despite being neighbours with a shared history, and having been at peace for decades, few flights could be found between Budapest and Bucharest. There was one sixteen-hour night train that left, almost completely empty, every evening. I said goodbye to Szilárd, took his number and promised to meet him in Romania, in Bucharest. ‘Oh no,’ he says, laughing, as he packs up his radio equipment. ‘I’m not going … I’m not crazy.’

  **

  Hungary’s parliament sits on the eastern banks of the Danube in the heart of Budapest. The magnificent Gothic building is one of Europe’s oldest parliaments. Márton Gyöngyösi’s office is found two blocks further down, in a dull, modern block allocated for the daily grind of parliamentary work. His desk overlooks the river and is cluttered but tidy. On one chair sits an old hardback copy of an exposé on the workings of Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency. Tall, youngish and wearing bookish glasses, he looks more like a bank manager than an ultra-nationalist firebrand. ‘In this case there will be a football match that is only partly about sport,’ he says as we sit down. ‘It is about history and politics. It is not only winning a football match. It is also about beating Romania.’ Gyöngyösi is an MP and the foreign affairs spokesperson for Jobbik, the party that has been most vocal in its condemnation of Romania in recent years. The rise of Jobbik has been seen by many as one reason why relations between Hungary and Romania have deteriorated in the past few years. Since its success in the 2010 elections it has been accused of following a radical nationalist agenda, including certain policies that have been labelled anti-Semitic. Gyöngyösi himself was rebuked last year for suggesting that Hungary’s Jewish population should be catalogued in a list. He had reasoned that Jews might now pose a security risk to the Hungarian state post-Arab Spring. ‘I think such a conflict [the Arab Spring] makes it timely to tally up people of Jewish ancestry who live here, especially in the Hungarian parliament and the Hungarian government who, indeed, pose a national security risk to Hungary,’ he was quoted as saying. He was roundly condemned and later apologised, claiming he was mistranslated. ‘Jobbik has moved from representing medieval superstition to openly Nazi ideologies,’ the chief rabbi of the United Hungarian Jewish Congregation, Slomó Koves, had said following the uproar. Still, Jobbik could well hold the balance of power in the next election in six months’ time. ‘I’d love to live in a world, I dream about a world, where Hungary regains the territory we have lost and I think every Hungarian should think that way,’ he says when I ask him about Romania, Transylvania and the run-up to the match. ‘Reality is a different question. We always have to cook with what we have.’

  Football has become something of a battleground in Hungarian politics in recent years. The country’s prime minister is Viktor Orbán, leader of the Fidesz party, who has been criticised by the European Union for his overly dictatorial style in altering the country’s constitution. He is also a huge football fan who has invested billions of dollars of public funds into the game, including a massive stadium-rebuilding programme. Critics have mocked him for funding the building of a brand new stadium in the village where he grew up and where his summer house can be found. And last year the government assumed all the debt of Budapest’s six football clubs, while agreeing to subsidise their operation for the next seven years. Both MTK and Ferencváros, two of Hungary’s biggest teams, had been promised huge amounts of money to renovate their stadiums. That included $160 million alone for Ferencváros. The presidents of both clubs are high-ranking members of Fidesz. But why is Fidesz investing so heavily in football? For Gyöngyösi, the answer is simple: votes. Football, it seems, is Fidesz and Jobbik’s natural constituency. ‘If you go to any Hungarian football match you find patriotic people there. It is not a group of people you have to give a boost to,’ Gyöngyösi explains. ‘They are by nature open to these patriotic and nationalistic feelings. They are groups of people generally closer to patriotic and nationalistic sentiments than liberal and left-wing sentiments.’

  Like most countries under communism in Eastern Europe, in fact like most countries under any form of dictatorship, football has developed a deeper political identity in Hungary. In many countries – be they Yugoslavia, Romania or Hungary itself – the terraces provided a rare outlet for views impossible to air in civil society. Each team assumes a distinct political personality. ‘Football under communism was one of those areas where some kind of statement about the regime could be made in a different way,’ Gyöngyösi says. ‘It was not explicit. But if you supported Ferencváros, that was 99 per cent sure you were patriotic, nationalistic and 100 per cent anti-communist. It is very rare I hear of a liberal left-winger supporting Ferencváros.’ Many in Hungary believe that Orbán and Fidesz are investing in football to shore up voters ahead of the 2014 elections, including Gyöngyösi. ‘Under pressure from Jobbik, Mr Orbán has been taking on a very patriotic and nationalist approach, at least in rhetoric,’ he says. ‘There’s a battle for right-wing votes in the country. Mr Orbán has been wanting to pick up some voters from Jobbik. The double citizenship laws ... that was our idea.’ The government’s huge investment in football – at a time when the country is experiencing economic austerity, when the average crowds at Hungarian league games has slipped below 3,000 and when the game has been continually marred by high-profile cases of racism and anti-Semitism – has not been popular with everyone. But Orbán hasn’t turned back. After the first Hungary–Romania World Cup qualifier earlier in the year Orbán was asked his opinion on FIFA’s decision to ban fans from attending because of the anti-Semitic chants. ‘It is better if I keep my opinion to myself,’ he replied cryptically. Gyöngyösi is also angry that FIFA intervened. ‘There has always been some kind of double standards in the world,’ he says. ‘Go to a Tottenham or Ajax or Livorno match [teams with either a traditional Jewish or left-wing identity] and see what is chanted there. I am sure it is not extraordinary to what is happening in Hungary. Romanians write out texts [banners] that are just as nasty. I think it was a very unjust and crazy ruling by FIFA.’

  With the money pouring in, Hungary now has its best chance of qualifying for a World Cup finals in a quarter of a century, made all the sweeter if it can beat its arch-rival along the way. ‘It is not just a World Cup qualifier because beating Romania in this match is more important than reaching the World Cup finals,’ Gyöngyösi admits. He won’t be at the game. Jobbik is hosting a three-day retreat in eastern Hungary to finalise its legislative plan before the next session of parliament. But on the final day all of its members will gather in a log cabin to watch the match. ‘I am sure there will be a lot of Jobbik fans at this match,’ he says. Will there be any trouble at the game, I ask him. Will the Hungarian ‘invasion’ of Bucharest be a peaceful one? ‘If anyone expects the Romanian and Hungarian supporters to sit with their popcorn and their Coca-Cola and watch the match in silence then they don’t know what football matches are all about,’ he laughs. ‘This is the nature of football matches, we should be more tolerant when it comes to expressing opinions in football matches.’ He says this without a hint of irony.

  **

  Bucharest, Romania, match day.

  As the
upper echelons of Jobbik settle down in front of a television at their retreat somewhere in eastern Hungary, 3,000 Hungarian fans turn their backs on the pitch, raise the middle fingers of both hands and boo the Romanian national anthem. The Arena Naţională is a riot of red, yellow and blue as ‘Deşteaptă-te, române!’ (Wake up, Romanian!) is sung by seemingly every Romania fan in the stadium. The anthem is seen as particularly offensive to Hungarians as it is thought the first verse refers directly to the Hungarians who used to rule so harshly over them until the mid-1800s:

  Wake up, Romanian, from the sleep of death

  Into which you have been sunk by barbaric tyrants

  Now, or never, make a new fate for yourself

  To which even your cruel enemies will bow.

  The Hungarian anthem has already been given the same treatment. Thousands of Romanian fans hold banners with the year 1918 on them, the year the First World War ended and when Transylvania declared its union with the Kingdom of Romania. The Treaty of Trianon two years later sealed the deal. Some supporters chant ‘afara, afara, cu ungurii din tara’. Out, out, with the Hungarians from our country. It had been a frightening experience entering the stadium. I had kept my mouth shut and camera hidden as we inched towards the gate, hustled and harassed by the police along the way. Yet when I get to the entrance I am turned away. My ticket is, in fact, with the Romanian supporters. A panicked policeman bundles me away from the crowd in case the combustible atmosphere is set alight by a suspected Romanian in their midst. The Hungarian fans view me suspiciously as I am ushered into the next stand. My seat is in the middle of a completely empty square of stadium, left as a firebreak between the two sets of fans. I am now in no-man’s land.