The European Championship is fantastic for rediscovering forgotten cult heroes and finding new ones.
Xherdan Shaqiri belongs in the former category as the quintessential tournament footballer, a player renowned for scoring wonder goals for Switzerland every couple of summers before fading quietly into obscurity until the next one.
Martin Adam, aka the “Hungarian Viking”, is in the latter group. Previously unknown outside his homeland and South Korea where he plays his club football, the Action Bronson lookalike with a strongman’s physique has become an overnight sensation since appearing in Hungary’s opening game against Switzerland.
Adam has been called an “absolute unit” and described as “someone who looks like they collect debts” by commentators. Numerous “football is healing” comments have done the rounds too, with Adam seen as the poster boy for the return to fashion of the big, burly striker and by association, the death of tiki-taka.
Most comments have been complimentary, but predictably not all of them have. Adam has been a victim of body shaming, which he addressed in a press conference last week.
“Of course one or two get to me, I usually have a laugh about it,” he said.
“I was born this way, I have this body shape. I’m not saying that I was this big when I was born, but I have a basic physique. Genetics, I can’t change that.”
He may look like a typical target man who has been plucked straight from the 1980s and plonked into the 2020s, but looks can be deceiving.
At 6ft 3in and weighing 86kg, Adam can score headers and hold off defenders when the ball is played up to him, but those aren’t necessarily his main strengths.
“He’s a guy that will back into defenders and you can play off him but he’s not going to win you a lot of headers in the air,” Hungarian football expert Tomasz Mortimer explains.
“Actually because of his size, he’s not great at leaping and he’s not great at jumping. He’s a strong boy but because he’s almost too weighty he’s quite easy to push off the ball as he’s not got great balance.
“The problem is because he’s quite a big boy, he’s not particularly dynamic and he’s quite slow which is what lets him down really.
“In Hungary, he was able to get away with that because the league is slower, but I guess at international level he has only scored three goals because he rarely gets in those positions [to score].”
It might not sound as if Adam is of much use at all, but he provides other attributes instead. Indeed, the 29-year-old fits another stereotype: he’s got great feet for a big man.
Initially, Hungary manager Marco Rossi used him as a physical presence after the towering Adam Szalai retired, but he struggled in that role and the emergence of Barnabas Varga saw him drop down to the bench.
Now he is used as an impact option when Hungary are struggling to play through the lines, dropping into pockets between the midfield and attack to try and help link the play.
“There’s a kind of a softness to the brutal exterior,” Mortimer says. “He has really soft, almost delicate feet. He got a couple of nice assists against England [in Hungary’s 4-0 win in 2022] with nice passes that he played forward into the guys running past him.
“And he has an unbelievable shot. Especially when he was playing in Hungary that’s what he was known for, his ability to finish from anywhere.
“He can score any type of goal. He can score chips. He can score thunderbastards. He can score curlers. He has this incredible ability when he has a shot. He’s OK in the air, but what he’s known for is his technical ability.”
Adam may be a better technical footballer than you’d think, but it is difficult to gauge how good a player is at international level when they have only played in Hungary – and for unfashionable clubs rather than traditional powerhouses like serial champions Ferencvaros – and in South Korea.
Recently, he has even struggled to get into K-League champions Ulsan’s starting line-up. He has been an overall success, though, winning back-to-back league titles and scoring some important goals.
But he is still relatively unproven. Even in Hungary, Adam “came from nowhere” to become an international at the age of 27 after hitting a hot streak of goalscoring form with Paks, a club that has a policy of only signing Hungarian players.
With his broad shoulders and thick ginger beard, Adam wouldn’t look out of place in the Tartan Army who will take their kilts and bagpipes to Stuttgart next as they continue their friendly takeover of Germany.
Instead, he will be hoping to knock them out and help Hungary progress from Group A at their expense. It is a must-win game for the pre-tournament dark horses given they have taken zero points from their first two matches.
Adam is already emerging as an unlikely icon in Hungary given the surge of interest in him over the past week.
“In Hungary now because of all the memes and stuff, people are taking him to their hearts a little bit,” Mortimer says.
Score against the Scots and he will become a bonafide national treasure.
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