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When a decade and a half ago we got down to rebuilding Hungarian football, the world and the Hungarians’ well-liked sport was in ruins in Hungary. It is almost unbelievable that in a discipline that we were once among the very best of the world, in less than half a century we almost disappeared from the map, he recalled, adding that Hungary qualified as a football great power in vain, Hungary’s formerly flourishing professional football life locked behind the Iron Curtain – forcefully reduced to the level of amateurs and nationalised – slowly adopted the grey shade of the communists’ dull world. “Russians, go home, Long live Hungarian freedom, Come on Hungary, Come on Hungarians,” he recalled the old slogans, highlighting that as regards its essence, communism is internationalist, while football is national.
He also recalled that the communists had abandoned the works on the People’s Stadium – the construction of which started in national agreement after the war – and an asymmetrical, unfinished arena had been left as a monumental symbol of the disgraced status of Hungarian football.
The dream of a hundred years came true when five years ago the rebuilt People’s Stadium was finally opened. In the five years since, the new stadium has risen to the legacy of its world-famous ancestors, and has in some respects even surpassed it, he observed.
This is the first time they managed to achieve that the Hungarian team play European Championship group matches here at home. Budapest could never before host European cup finals, while in the past five years alone we have hosted as many as three, and we have even earned and deserved the 2026 Champions League final. In our region, we only had something like this once, a good half a century ago, he listed.
He also added that during the pandemic Manchester City, Liverpool, Leipzig and Tottenham chose the Puskás Arena as their home, and today it’s an everyday occurrence that the teams of Belarus and Israel play their home matches in Budapest, while in many cases their club teams, too, opt for the Hungarian capital.
He recalled that while in 2022 there were instances that a mere few hundred supporters turned up at a national football event, today, tickets for the matches of the Hungarian team in the Puskás Arena of 60,000 sell out within hours.
Hungarian football has recently brought here Juventus, Barcelona, the German, English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Serbian national teams in its own right, and has even defeated some of them. He said they are grateful to everyone who believed that Hungary could do this, and he especially thanked the Hungarian Football Federation and its president Sándor Csányi. Mr Orbán stressed that the state of the old People’s Stadium had been a symbol of decline, while the new Puskás Arena had become a symbol of the rebuilding of Hungarian sport, Hungarian football.
“Our horizon could be this broad, we could look this far because […] we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. The incredible legacy of Hungarian football obliges us, and gives us strength and munitions at the same time,” he said.
The Hungarian Golden team and its captain Ferenc Puskás are the embodiment, giants known around the world of this legend and culture, “eternal models of Hungarian footballers and all teenagers,” he observed, adding that the myth of the Golden Team will continue.
“The goal may as yet be far off, but we have Uncle Öcsi to thank for the fact that we never lost sight of it. When we established a football academy or built a stadium bearing his name, standing on his shoulders, we continued to see World Cup and Champions League finals, brilliant goals, the beating of England, Germany and Brazil. We now sometimes even succeed, and I do believe we will succeed ever more frequently,” he said.
He highlighted that while at the turn of the millennium, the number of registered footballers had fallen to below 100,000, this number had now tripled, and meanwhile, some 2,000 village school and local club football pitches had been built or refurbished. The homes of all professional first- and second-division teams have been refurbished, including the clubs of Hungarian communities beyond the borders. There are a number of Hungarian football academies within and beyond the borders, and the presence of Hungarian teams in the play-off rounds is now permanent.
In 2016, we qualified for the European Championship after a hiatus of 44 years, and since then we have qualified every time. There is again a star Hungarian footballer in one of the world’s best clubs, and his followers keep emerging one after the other, he said in summary.
He spoke about one long-standing debt, however. The Puskás Arena as the realisation of a dream of a hundred years could not be declared completed until today.
We had a debt to Hungarian and world football, to the hundreds of thousands visiting here, to ourselves, but primarily to Uncle Öcsi and his genius Hungarian teammates: paying befitting tribute to them in the – now once again – world-famous stadium named after him. With the creation of the Puskás Museum, we have now completed this task, repaid this debt, Mr Orbán said, thanking senior curator Mária Schmidt and her colleagues for the exhibition opened in the tower building of the Puskás Arena.
