Jonathan Wilson Football and politics remain inseparable
Viktor Orban decided against going to Munich. Instead the Hungarian prime minister went to dinner in Brussels with Giorgia Meloni, leader of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party. But everybody knew the reason he hadn’t gone to watch his country’s final group game: the prospect of protests against legislation recently passed in Hungary banning the representation of LGBT lifestyles in schools or on TV shows aimed at under-18s. In the end, he missed what was very nearly Hungary’s greatest result for half a century: how many rainbow flags would have been worth
(the Miracle of Munich)?
That Orban loves football is not in doubt. When he first became prime minister in 1998, his first overseas trip was to the World Cup final and he has been a regular at major games ever since. Having been on Videoton’s books in his teens, he has played consistently since, and many of his cabinet played for the same five-a-side team. But he has also used football – and Euro 2020 was part of the programme.
Orban lost the election in 2002, but his comeback began in October 2006 with a speech at a march to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising against Soviet control. It was as a result of the Uprising that a number of senior
That Viktor Orban loves football is not in doubt… But he has also used football – and Euro 2020 was part of the programme
players, including Ferenc Puskas and the entire national Under-21 squad, defected to the west, bringing to an end the golden age of Hungarian football. A week before Orban’s speech, Hungary lost to Malta. The following month, Puskas died. On April 1 the following year, the 80th anniversary of Puskas’ birth, Orban co-founded the Puskas Academy in his home village of Felcsut.
The academy has grown and grown. In 2014, its new stadium, a remarkable structure of vaulted roofs and copper domes, opened, its capacity almost double the population of the village. Last season, Puskas Akademia finished second in the first division. Orban, who was re-elected in 2010, attends regularly, as do other politicians and business leaders; the stadium has become a vital centre for networking.
Orban used his re-election as a mandate for a series of authoritarian reforms. The freedom of the press has been severely restricted. Fidesz, Orban’s party, has taken hold of swathes of public life. Football has become a means of restoring national pride. Of the 12 top-flight clubs, 11 are now effectively affiliated to Fidesz. A much-criticised initiative offered tax breaks to companies who invest in football clubs, leading to more than two dozen new stadiums being built over the past decade. The grandest of them is the new Ferenc Puskas Arena, built on the site of the old Nepstadion near the centre of Budapest.
It is central to Orban’s vision. He knows there is almost no chance of Hungarian football returning to the levels of the early 1950s. The financial structures of football are stacked against it. Young talent is inevitably drawn to Austria and Germany and changing that will
be a long, perhaps impossible, task even if the success of Roland Sallai, who came through the Puskas Akademia, is now at Freiburg and set up the opener against Germany, hints at what may be possible.
But what Hungary can do now is host sport. It has recently staged the world judo, wrestling and aquatics championships and, when the 2020 UEFA Super Cup was shifted from Porto’s Estadio do Dragao, the Puskas Arena stepped in. It was also the venue for both legs of both Manchester City against Borussia Monchengladbach and Liverpool against RB Leipzig in the last 16 of the 2020-21 Champions League season, when COVID regulations made playing the games in England and Germany impossible. And the centre-piece of that was the European Championship. Orban has brought the circuses to town.
That’s why he was desperate for full stadiums from the off (particularly given the probability of Hungary being eliminated in the group stage). Hungary has had the second-highest death rate in the world from COVID, behind only Peru, but with cases under 200 per week and five million people having received a first dose of the vaccination (almost half the total population), he lifted restrictions at the end of May. Whether or not that was the right decision epidemiologically is debatable, but it guaranteed packed houses and an atmosphere that drew praise from across Europe from fans and pundits tired of games being played out before swatches of empty seats.
But look a little closer, and there is an unsavoury side. Many of those fans in black T-shirts who pack the end behind the goal to the left from the main camera angle belong to the Carpathian Brigade, a far-right ultra group that is proudly racist and homophobic that represents the extreme wing of Orban’s base.
And yet he opposed lighting the Allianz Arena in rainbow colours on the grounds that football and politics shouldn’t mix. They always have, and they always will.