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Juventus will play Ferencvaros in Budapest tonight on matchday three of the UEFA Champions League group stage. He will play in the new Puskas Arena, a facility with more than 67,000 seats inaugurated last November and recently used by UEFA to test the presence of the public during the coronavirus pandemic. The Puskas Arena, however, is not the real Ferencvaros stadium, which normally plays a few kilometers away, in the district of Budapest from which it takes its name, in the equally new Groupama Arena, one of five stadiums built in the capital. from the Football entered the agenda of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In the last ten years, Hungary has been the European country where the most stadiums have been built. To date, there are twenty-eight finished and under construction, and unlike other countries, none of these have been carried out taking advantage of the organization of an international tournament as happened for example in Poland and Ukraine for the 2012 European Championships. It has been completely renovated. At the urging of Orban, authoritarian prime minister of the nationalist Fidesz party in office for ten years, whose project to revitalize the great but neglected Hungarian tradition in football found the most suitable team in Ferencvaros, a former club of the Budapest bourgeoisie to represent their ambitions in Europe.
In the first half of the 20th century, Hungary was the vanguard of European football: its players were the best and the most popular coaches, many of whom were hired by Italian teams. The team trained by Gusztav Sebes and made up of champions such as Ferenc Puskas, Laszlo Kubala and Nandor Hidegkuti revolutionized the way of playing, remained undefeated for more than three years, achieved an Olympic gold and was close to victory in the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland That formidable football movement, however, began to crumble with the Soviet repression that followed the 1956 revolution and in the decades that followed it progressively lost competitiveness until it disappeared from the great events.
As a former player and soccer fan, Orban personally supported the revitalization of the Hungarian soccer movement with public investments that, on the one hand, significantly improved the poor sports facilities inherited from the past, but on the other also attracted criticism for the use of funds. public in the construction of non-essential and less frequented structures. In 2014, the Hungarian government allocated € 68 million for the construction of stadiums and sports centers over three years, which was then increased to € 81 million in 2018. Over time, incentives and deductions for private investments have also been introduced. According to the opposition, behind this aid Orban and his party are trying to reinforce and renew their consensus, including with propaganda methods such as the mythologization of the figure of Ferenc Puskas.
Hungary-Uruguay, opening match at the Puskas Arena in Budapest (Laszlo Balogh / Getty Images)
All this has favored the construction of some thirty new stadiums, from the national stadium with 67,000 seats to the smallest stadiums in the province. In and around Budapest alone, five have been built in ten years, four of them for first division teams (Ferencvaros, MTK, Vasas and Fehervar) and a sixth is on the way. Average viewership, however, is still just over 3,000 tickets per season. In some cases, moreover, the capacity of the new stadiums exceeds the number of inhabitants of the centers in which they were built, such as the stadium in Felcsut, Orban’s hometown, which can accommodate 3,500 spectators compared to just 1,500 inhabitants.
If the infrastructure project is nearing completion, the same cannot be said for the purely sports sector. The national championship remains economically fragile and is among the least competitive in the Danube and Balkan area. In recent years, various teams have followed one another as symbolic guides for the movement in search of encouraging results at the European Cups. It was originally Debrecen, who however fell to the point of relegation to the second division. After Debrecen it was the turn of Videoton, a team from the city of Szekesfehervar which Orban supports and in which he played as a young man. However, none of these clubs managed to live up to expectations: they needed a team from the capital, with more tradition and a large number of guaranteed fans.
Thus it was that in 2010 the British investor Kevin McCabe, who two years earlier had bought the degraded Ferencvaros and returned from bankruptcy, in turn ceded ownership of the club to the state. Gabor Kubatov, Fidesz deputy and close friend of Orban (like many other club owners and Sandor Csanyi, the richest man in the country, federal president and at the same time owner of the bank sponsoring the championship) was appointed president. With Kubatov, Ferencvaros received a significant boost: the club’s old and decaying stadium was replaced with a 24,000-seat facility and the club’s sports area was constantly upgraded until German coach and former Lazio player Thomas Doll was hired. that in 2015 he got the club to win the championship again after twelve years of waiting. Since then the team has become increasingly competitive, especially with the signing of foreign professionals, such as the current Norwegian top scorer Tokmac Nguen and the Ukrainian coach Sergiy Rebrov, who has managed to bring them back to the Champions League after twenty-five years of waiting. .
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