The Ferenc Puskas diaries
The Hungary icon immortalised his 10 commandments for glory
“Without playmakers, there is no modern football” was the last of 10 commandments that Ferenc Puskas jotted down in his sumptuous Madrid apartment. Football theory wasn’t really his thing but, recognising that a professional lifestyle was essential if he was to resurrect his playing career in Spain, he cut down on smoking, drinking and sausages, and had time on his hands. Reflecting on the game that defined his life – and making several false starts at penning an autobiography – gave him something constructive to do if he wasn’t playing or training.
His many notebooks, letters, journals and memorabilia now live in the Puskas Academy in Felcsut, not far from Budapest, curated by his biographer, Gyorgy Szollosi. The posters and pennants Puskas collected resemble the pageantry of a bygone age, yet it isn’t the pomp and circumstance of souvenirs that’s most moving. It’s his handwriting.
The meticulous care with which he charted his goals and appearances for Real Madrid – year by year, competition by competition – reveals that, as much as the Hungarian liked to take a detached view of his own success, such details mattered to him.
The commandments were documented in handwriting so neat and tidy, it was as if Puskas was doing homework back at school in Kispest, now a suburb of Budapest, where he grew up in the 1930s and ’ 40s. His earliest memories, he once said, were of the roar of the crowd from the nearby stadium coming through the windows on matchdays.
Puskas had always held strong beliefs on the game. As a boy kicking around a ball of rags with Jozsef Bozsik, who would later make history with him playing for Honved and Hungary, Puskas used to grimace as his friend juggled the ball in the air. “Football isn’t a circus,” he scolded. “The ball is always faster than the player.”
As young footballers, the friends had been fascinated – and occasionally bored rigid – by the intricate theorising of Gusztav Sebes, the great Hungarian coach and architect of a ‘ Golden Squad’ which routed England 6- 3 at Wembley and then 7- 1 in Budapest, and which should have won the 1954 World Cup. Yet, if you accept Johan Cruyff’s claim that the Dutch ‘ won’ the 1974 tournament because everyone still talks about that great team, then Hungary also ‘ won’ in 1954. Their dazzling technique, movement and freedom of thought would inspire Rinus Michels to build the great Ajax and Netherlands sides of the early ’ 70s.
Puskas was 31 when Santiago Bernabeu persuaded him to join Real Madrid in 1958. Haunted by the destruction of Honved and the Hungarian Golden Squad, missing his family and friends, and probably fearing that he might never recapture his former glories, he was in a reflective mood.
His first commandment of football was actually a declaration of love. “In my opinion, football is the king of sports,” he declared.
“A good player is a good leader – the person who passionately loves and fantastically respects his sport.” Later he would add, “As long as there are young people in the world, football will be on top. If it’s played well, it can move millions. Football is like wine – there are some years that are vintage, and some that are not.”
His next two commandments concerned both lifestyle and fitness. His conclusion that, “The basis of studying high- level football is being young, and living a healthy life in body and spirit” was followed by, “The source of all power, speed and strength is the physical condition. Without this, modern football does not exist.”
Puskas had learned these truths the hard way. After a lengthy debate with chairman Bernabeu about the wisdom of signing for Los Blancos, he threw up his arms in despair and said, “Listen, this is all very well, but have you looked at me? I’m at least 16 kilos overweight.” The Real supremo responded, “That’s not my problem. It’s yours.”
The Hungarian was paid the equivalent of £ 725,000 in today’s money for a four- year deal, with wages and bonuses on top. As his agent put it, “It wasn’t much to pay for a fit Puskas, but wasn’t bad for a fat one.”
So, out went the sausages and in came the seafood. He retained some indulgences – friends who went to the movies with him noticed he had a seemingly unlimited supply of peanuts in his pockets – and he was never what you might call svelte, but the forward’s self- discipline helped him to win the respect of such a hypercritical judge as Alfredo Di Stefano. Puskas reinvented his game, taking fewer touches for greater impact, and in doing so became the first and only player to score four goals in a European Cup final – in 1960’ s 7- 3 demolition of Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park.
Such self- restraint didn’t come easy. In one letter home, he lamented that, “There is no
“I’M AT LEAST 16 KILOS OVERWEIGHT,” PUSKAS PROTESTED. “THAT’S YOUR PROBLEM,” SAID BERNABEU IN RESPONSE
place I can find gypsy music in Madrid – only Spanish music. If I want to hear gypsy music being played, I have to go to a bar that opens at 11.30pm, and it’s too late. I have to train the next day.”
He once lambasted coaches who turned training sessions into PE lessons, arguing, “Not every player needs this tough physical training.” But he kept sufficiently fit to play his last European Cup game aged 38: a 2- 2 draw with Kilmarnock in November 1965.
Puskas’ fourth commandment harked back to his afternoons spent playing with Bozsik and a rag ball. “Technical skill,” he explained, “should be perfected when you’re very young. You must always practice, because the only players who have self- confidence are those who have power over the ball.”
His own power over the ball – exquisitely exhibited in the dragback that deceived Billy Wright for Hungary’s third goal at Wembley in 1953 – was inspirational. In his foreword to Szollosi’s biography of the maestro, Sir Alex Ferguson remembers, “You have to think of the impact that had on a 12- year- old kid like myself in Glasgow. After the game, I was out in the garden practising that pullback and banging the ball into the net. That was a real revolution in our minds.”
Puskas could – and did – win matches on his own, but the long hours being taught by Sebes had paid dividends. As he said in his fifth commandment, “Tactical preparedness empowers the team to play conscious and intelligent football. Good tactics and playing well are half the victory.”
Yet tactical preparedness wasn’t just about managers. With players such as Puskas and Di Stefano, Luis del Sol in attack and Jose Santamaria in defence, the all- conquering Real Madrid side had no shortage of coaches on the pitch who could make tactical calls when necessary. They were lucky in 1960 that they had a coach, Miguel Munoz, who gave them the freedom to do so – possibly because he had lifted the European Cup three times himself as a Madrid player.
In the 1960 final, Eintracht Frankfurt were befuddled by Di Stefano’s willingness to drop deep while Puskas darted forward. Once Real Madrid had found their footing, the German champions struggled to keep their 3- 2- 2- 3 shape, and their reliance on man- marking left them horribly exposed as Di Stefano, Del Sol, Puskas and winger Paco Gento made the most of their licence to rampage in the final third. Puskas further added to the confusion by regularly letting Del Sol spearhead attacks while he sat back to link up with Gento and Di Stefano. The Hungarian hit a second- half hat- trick to take his evening’s tally to four, as Madrid’s opponents, outnumbered in midfield and frequently at the back, conceded seven goals within 52 minutes.
Playing alongside a genius in Di Stefano, it’s no wonder Puskas would insist that “without playmakers, there is no modern football.” This unforgettable match was the definitive proof of his 10th law.
That European Cup showpiece underlined Puskas’ sixth commandment: “The unity of the players and management is necessary to achieve good results. That’s why the right atmosphere and spiritual preparedness of players is so important.” As a player, Puskas was relatively fortunate with his managers. His quality was soon spotted by Sebes and it was, for the most part, cherished at Madrid, especially by Bernabeu and Munoz.
But he had his run- ins with Luis Carniglia, his first coach at Los Blancos. The Argentine came over to Puskas on the morning of the 1959 European Cup Final and informed him that he wouldn’t be playing because he was injured. Puskas had no idea what Carniglia was on about. However, given the autocratic state of industrial relations in the game at that time, he knew better than to argue. He watched from the stands as Real beat Reims 2- 0 in a dull Stuttgart affair.
Afterwards, Bernabeu asked Puskas why he didn’t play. As he disclosed what the coach had said, the chairman listened in silence. On the first day of training for the new campaign, Bernabeu wrote a note to Carniglia, thanking him for all his hard work but adding that his contract would not be renewed. The players were neither consulted nor notified about his dismissal, finding out days later through the grapevine. The sacking may have appeared rash and unreasonable, but without it, that season might not have ended with Hampden Park hosting perhaps the greatest European Cup final in history.
Puskas returned to the importance of team spirit in his seventh commandment, stating, “The main values of a football team are unity, playing for a goal and having a nice style of play.” That style had let the Golden Squad down just once – in the 1954 World Cup Final, on a soggy pitch at Bern’s Wankdorf Stadium, when they lost 3- 2 to West Germany. While the Mighty Magyars complained that English referee Bill Ling was wrong to disallow Puskas’
late equaliser, goalkeeper Gyula Grosics said the result showed “a deep self- conceit in the team that had never revealed itself before”. Leading 2- 0 after just eight minutes against a side they had annihilated 8- 3 in the group stage a fortnight earlier, Hungary played as if the Jules Rimet trophy was already in the bag.
It could also be true that Hungary’s players were distracted by talk of whether Puskas, still nursing a crocked ankle from the previous clash with West Germany, would be fit. Brian Glanville captured the melodrama well in The
Story of the World Cup. “The great question was whether Puskas would play in the final,” wrote Granville. “He would, said the experts. He wouldn’t. There was no chance; there was a 50- 50 chance; a specialist had said so. The ankle was better; it wouldn’t recover in time. Electrical treatment had failed; the Germans’ underwater massage had been rejected.”
The political recriminations at home which followed that unexpected 3- 2 defeat – with the team effectively condemned as traitors – helped to persuade Puskas to stay in exile, in the west, after Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.
Puskas, technically an officer in the army – hence his Galloping Major nickname – could have been tried, jailed and shot as a deserter if he had returned home. With his mother still living in Budapest, however, and occasionally getting threatening phone calls from officials demanding that she pay rent on her son’s vacant apartment, he took care not to anger the authorities any further. As he explained in a letter to Berci Benyak, his old barber in Budapest, “Don’t be afraid that I’ll write about politics – that’s not my job. I have one politic: that is football.” He added, in a semi- serious postscript, “And how I can get a lot of money. I think there is no more beautiful politics.”
With that in mind, Puskas chose to ignore the Communist regime’s charges that he was a “fat, drunken smuggler”. As Hungarian writer Peter Esterhazy noted in novel Not Art,
“Puskas knew there was a world beyond the pitch, but pretended he didn’t. On the pitch, he understood the meaning of dignity, of infinity, of death. In life he played the starring version of ‘ Ferenc Puskas the legend’ – not the heroic but the human version, the always facetious friend who can be trusted to take care of everyone.”
That cynical detachment served him well in exile. Given the code name ‘ Vandor’ by the Hungarian secret service, he had up to nine agents tracking him. One of them, who was obliged to monitor him at a casino in the German spa resort of Baden- Baden, proved to be such a bad gambler that Puskas felt sorry for him and ended up giving him some cash to help cover his losses. In the secret police dossier on the player, opened after the fall of Communism, is a report from the agent saying, “I received a lot of money from him and found it a bit uncomfortable.”
Such incidents, while farcical in retrospect, encouraged Puskas to focus on football, even if his willingness to sign autographs for any Hungarians he met on his travels indicated how he adored and missed his homeland.
Puskas’ next two commandments concerned a footballer’s education.
Though his dictum that, “We have to study all of the time, and the more we learn from experience, the better the decisions we can make” might sound clichéd and self- evident, his ninth commandment illustrated his point more deeply: “The gaining of knowledge is not a question of talent. You have to decide you are willing to learn; if you have done that, you will be able to prepare yourself properly to play 90 minutes.”
To achieve a “nice style of play”, Puskas said in his final point, you absolutely had to have a playmaker. With that position filled, “You can create a team that works like a machine, scores many goals and wins a lot of games.”
Puskas never quite achieved that goal as a coach. He was at his most sardonic when recalling his globetrotting managerial career. Running Saudi Arabia’s national team from 1975 to 1977 was about “much money and nothing else”, and coaching Al- Masry in Egypt from 1979 to 1982 reinforced his conviction that “it was much easier being a player than a coach.” His greatest success came in 1971, when he led Panathinaikos to the European Cup final at Wembley where, ironically, he lost to the Ajax team that Michels designed after studying the methods of Hungary and Real Madrid. No Greek club has reached the showpiece in the 50 years since.
It’s clear from his journals that in the late 1950s, Puskas had no idea how long he would remain in exile. He couldn’t have envisaged that it would be 35 years before he felt able to visit Hungary. He returned in 1992 to live in Budapest with his wife, Erzebet.
In later years, the sight of him out walking would stop traffic. He had become a national monument. After his death in 2006, aged 79, the Galloping Major was entombed in one – St Stephen’s Basilica, which also houses the right hand of the eponymous king of Hungary.
Talking to Rogan Taylor in his ’ 90s Budapest apartment, Puskas said, “As I look back, I see my life has a single thread.” That thread got tangled in politics, but as his private writings so eloquently revealed, he was, at heart, “just a man who loves football”.
JOHAN CRUYFF CLAIMED THE DUTCH ‘ WON’ IN ’ 74, BECAUSE WE STILL TALK ABOUT THEM. IF SO, THEN HUNGARY ‘ WON’ IN 1954