His critics decry his autocratic brand of leadership but when it comes to football, nobody can accuse Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist right-wing prime minister, of being a plastic fan.
Indeed a tale from Orbán’s youth highlights his love of the game – and hints at what it would mean for him to see Hungary reach next year’s World Cup finals in Qatar.
Retold in a recently published book about Orbán, Pál Dániel Rényi’s ‘Must-win – Football and Power in Orbán’s World’, it dates back to 1982 when Orbán, who played for his local club, Székesfehérvári MAV Előre, up to U18 level, was on army service and sneaked out of the barracks to watch the famous Italy-Brazil match in that summer’s World Cup. When his breach of discipline was discovered, he was locked up for three days.
Fast forward to the present and the country which England visit for tomorrow’s opening World Cup Group I qualifier has benefitted from over €2bn worth of investment in football since Orbán embarked on his current spell in office in 2010.
This includes €1bn spent on new stadiums, while at grassroots level more than 1,300 pitches have been built or renovated to replace those that disappeared in the post-Communist chaos of the 1990s.
As for on-field results, György Szöllősi, editor-in-chief of Nemzeti Sport, a daily sports newspaper, is quick to list landmarks such as the national team’s first big-tournament participations since the 1980s (at EURO 2016 and EURO 2020) and last season’s return to the Champions League after 25 years of Ferencváros, Hungary’s most popular club.
Now for the next target. “Since 1986 we’ve not qualified for any World Cup so this is the next big task – and that’s why we need to beat England this week which is obviously not very easy,” laughs Szöllősi, who is also president of the Hungarian Sports Journalists’ Association and a friend of Orbán.
The venue of tomorrow’s match, the €500m, 67,215-capacity Puskás Aréna – where Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur all played European fixtures last term – is significant too in the story of Hungary’s football recovery, according to Szöllősi.
He describes it as a “very strong symbol” of restoration, having risen on the site of the old Népstadion, which was opened by the Communist regime in 1953, the year before Hungary finished as World Cup runners-up, but whose construction was never actually completed as football in the country began a slow decline.
“After the revolution [in 1956] the biggest stars of Hungarian football emigrated – [Ferenc] Puskás, [Sándor] Kocsis, [Zoltán] Czibor – and 12,000 registered football players left Hungary.” In the past decade, by contrast, the number of registered players has risen from 125,000 to 250,000.
“The football restoration project is really close to his [Orbán’s] heart,” says Andy Clark, a British football journalist based in Budapest, who has seen a deep-rooted pessimism start to shift.
With memories still fresh of Hungary’s EURO 2020 efforts – including a 1-1 draw with France at the Puskás Aréna – tickets for this month’s qualifiers against England and Andorra sold out within days. That said, the polarised nature of politics ensures less enthusiasm elsewhere.
“Some non-Orbán fans don’t want Hungary to do well as it would vindicate him,” adds Clark, explaining how when Hungary qualified for EURO 2016, a post on the prime minister’s Facebook page said: “Told you so.”
Orbán’s opponents point to the €2.5bn spent overall on sport by Fidesz, the ruling party, and contrast it with expenditure on hospitals and education (albeit, a cynic might add, just as much has been spent on anti-immigration campaigns or asserting a tighter grip on the media).
To achieve such investment in sport, the government set up a corporate tax-break scheme, TAO, allowing companies to pay 70% of their tax directly to development programmes in football, handball, basketball, ice hockey, volleyball, and water polo.
The level of state control is another concern, with critics highlighting the number of clubs run by politicians or companies close to Fidesz. By way of example, the man behind the rise of top-flight leaders Kisvárda, Miklós Seszták, is a former minister of development.
The owners of Honved, meanwhile, run the company which operates Hungary’s southern border fence. And while the combined income of NB1 clubs has grown to around €135m, around 80% is estimated to come from state sponsorship, begging the question of what happens if another government came in which looked less favourably on football.
There are also questions asked about the productivity of several heavily funded club academies, with one source citing a culture of cronyism impacting on coaching appointments. Puskás Akadémia, the club in Orbán’s home town of Felcsut, produced national-team players Roland Sallai and László Kleinheisler but they hardly came cheap given the €100m received in funding over the past decade.
As it happens, the new star of Hungarian football, Dominik Szoboszlai, was coached by his own father, Zsolt, before completing his schooling in Austria. Still, as Orbán’s supporters would note, the mere presence of a €20m (£17.1m) Hungarian footballer – the fee that RB Leipzig paid Salzburg this summer – can only be another sign of progress after those long decades of decline.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3ytXaaV
Post a Comment