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Mr Orbán highlighted that before every championship season, the Puskás Academy must bear its own goals in mind and it is the most important for the first team to not drop out of NB1, Hungary’s first division. In the meantime, they would also like to have as many self-raised players on the team as possible; however, combining the two goals, it is very difficult to remain in the first division.
Due to the twelve teams in the race, the Hungarian championship is such that there are at times only 3-6-9 points between the team at the bottom of the league and the teams ranked fifth or third, meaning the results of just two to three matches. It is very easy to drop out of NBI, whilst one was thinking one was in the race for one of the top three positions, Mr Orbán said.
To integrate young people into the team under such circumstances requires a lot of courage and bravado on the part of the coach; this is why Zsolt Hornyák has been in that position for a long time because he is able to combine these two goals best, he said.
He stressed that the Academy’s slogan continued to hold value; we raise people, decent people who are also good footballers.
The Prime Minister also spoke about the fact that one of the greatest professional challenges of Hungarian football is to train young footballers up to the ages of 12 to 13 years because according to football literature, up to the age of 12 years a number of skills develop which cannot be developed later on. The association must deal with this and the national teams most, he stated, observing that it is the responsibility of academies to bring the best out of those whom they admit.
Mr Orbán said Hungarian football is not part of the entertainment industry, football is a part of the Hungarian people’s lives, it is a part of our national identity. We want not entertainment and to applaud on the stands, rejoicing at the playing of all sorts of clever players blown over here from distant countries; we want to see our own children. If we give this up, Hungarian football has no meaning, he pointed out.
Therefore, also at the Puskás Academy, the goal is to have very good foreign players that young people can look up to, but the other half of the team must be comprised of self-raised children, Mr Orbán said. He recalled that last year there had been 4 to 5 self-raised youths in the starting lineup of the Academy’s first team, one or two had come on the pitch as substitutes, meaning that every week one had been able to see minimum six self-raised players on the field. We could go up to seven or eight, he added, repeatedly drawing attention to the great risk that “you lose two or three matches, and all of a sudden, from any of the top three positions you may find yourself among the candidates for being knocked out of the first division.”
He also said a further difficulty for the Academy is when self-raised talents are taken abroad. If they were here at home, the team of the Puskás Academy could compete with Fradi (Ferencváros) for the champion’s title, Mr Orbán stated. In his opinion, this is not a problem, however, as Hungarian football needs for the best to be given a chance in the top championships and to thereby serve the national team. At the same time, the Academy is continuously compelled to integrate ever further 17-18-19-year-old hopefuls into the team.
Mr Orbán said the Puskás Academy had been split into two, including a professional staff responsible for the operation of priority national academies. The latter has moved to Budapest with a new management, including State Secretary for Sports Ádám Schmidt, former player on the national team Ádám Szalai and the former director of the Academy Dezső Liszkai. The Prime Minister described this as a difficult decision, but he said the many tasks they were facing “were slowly crushing the life out of the Academy.”
The Prime Minister also said in the new lineup, Balázs Tóth, the club’s professional manager took over the Academy’s professional oversight.
Regarding Ferencváros’s defeat in the Champions League, Mr Orbán observed that it had underlined one of the great problems of Hungarian football. “It is a huge lesson because in football inexplicable things happen all the time,” and it is not good when there is only a single internationally reputed team because if that falls, we are left without a serious major team. This is why we need another one or two teams with a budget, players and international ranking similar to those of Fradi, he laid down.
He added, however, that the Puskás Academy was unable to take this role on. This requires historical roots, great traditions and great clubs.
The mission of the Puskás Academy is to send as many talented children with excellent schooling and professional backgrounds – providing the best possible knowledge for them with the assistance of great former footballers, spiced with individual training – to NB1, to the gates of the national team and great international championships.
He said from time to time, there may be a year with three to four extremely talented young people who can be successfully integrated into the team and can constitute a good mix with the foreign players on the team, in which case the team can even complete a round or two in the international cups.
However, in the longer run, we should count on Puskás not as an internationally recognised club, but more as a place which is able to provide reliable and well-trained players with a strong mentality and fortitude who are able to continue the best traditions of Hungarian football, Mr Orbán said in the interview.
