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Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen, President Pál Schmitt, Madam Director-General, President Sándor Csányi, Director Emilio Butragueño, Footballing Legends, Dear Family Members, Ladies and Gentlemen,
When we started to rebuild Hungarian football a decade and a half ago, in Hungary the world’s and the Hungarians’ favourite sport was in ruins. It is almost unbelievable that over the course of half a century what was once among the best in the world had almost disappeared from the map. Yet that is what happened. In that half century we almost disappeared, despite the fact that between the two world wars Hungary had built up the Danube School, which had its roots in the Monarchy, despite the high level of footballing culture that led to our finalists’ medals in the 1938 and 1954 World Cups, and despite our status as a great footballing power. Locked behind the Iron Curtain, isolated, forced into amateur status and nationalised, the once thriving professional football scene slowly blended into the monotone world of the communists. In our country the communist regime had a special relationship with football. On the one hand they too were obviously excited by it. On the other hand, it brought success, and was therefore proof of their system’s development. But thirdly, it always aroused the fear of national feeling: “Russkies go home!” “Long live Hungarian freedom!” “Go, Hungary, go, Hungarians!” Everyone knew that if there were no Soviet Union, if there were no internationalist background, then the power of the Communist Party would be finished – as happened in 1956 and 1989. Communism, which clung to the Soviet Union, is essentially internationalist, while football is essentially nationalist. Either football or communism: the two are incompatible.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The communists abandoned the construction of Népstadion [“People’s Stadium”], which had begun after the war amidst national consensus, they stopped construction of the metro line, and they even dismantled the ornate Népstadion metro station, which was already 70 per cent complete. We were left with a torso, a strange half-finished arena as a monumental symbol of Hungarian football’s disgrace. For a long time Hungarian football still gave us great experiences, but every time we looked at the Népstadion, it reminded us of how much greater we could be. From my childhood onwards I always wondered how such a ramshackle, half-finished, wing-clipped building could be standing here. And I thought how good it would be to restore the balance of our unfinished world, to finish it, to finally build the nation’s stadium, the home of the Hungarian national football team, in a manner and to a standard worthy of its role in football history.
This dream of at least a hundred years came true when we opened the rebuilt Népstadion five years ago. In the five years since, the new stadium has grown to match – and in some ways surpass – the legacy of its world-famous predecessor. For the first time ever, Hungary was able to stage European Championship group matches. Moreover, this was the only venue where matches in the 2020 European Championship – postponed until 2021 because of the pandemic – could be played to a full house. This was because of Hungary’s successful pandemic defence measures. Budapest had never hosted a European final before, but we have hosted three in the last five years: the Women’s Champion’s League final, the 2020 Super Cup final, and the 2023 Europa League final. What is more, here in Budapest we have now earned the right to stage the 2026 Champions League final, the most prestigious club match of the year. This has happened only once before in Central Europe: a good half-century ago, with the 1973 European Cup final in Belgrade. We are hardly able to keep track of everyone who has played over the years in our excellent and safe rebuilt stadiums. During the pandemic, Manchester City, Liverpool, Leipzig and Tottenham played matches at the Puskás Aréna, and the Qatar national team prepared for the World Cup in its own country with matches in Debrecen. Nowadays it is common – if not necessarily welcome – for the national teams of Belarus and Israel to play their home games here, and in many cases the same is also true for club teams from those countries. The reason we are not necessarily happy about this is that circumstances have forced them to play here.
I remember the low point of 2002, when on one occasion only a few hundred people showed up for a national team match – and one that was not televised. I also remember a championship match when fans chased and assaulted players from their own team. We have now come to the point at which tickets for national team matches in the 60,000-seater Puskás Aréna sell out in hours. Most recently Belgium brought its national team to Hungary, because there was no need to doubt the flawless organisation and complete security. And in its own colours Hungarian football has recently brought Juventus, Barcelona, Germany, England, Portugal, France, the Netherlands and Serbia to the national stadium, beating some of them. So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have come a long way. Thanks are due to all those who believed that Hungary could do it. Special thanks are also due to the Hungarian Football Association and to its President, Sándor Csányi, who is celebrating with us here today. Thank you, President!
While the old Népstadion was a symbol of decline, the new Puskás Aréna has become a symbol of the rebuilding of Hungarian sport and Hungarian football – through the joint efforts of us all, and to the collective joy of all Hungarians. And also to the joy of those who come here – to the new Puskás Aréna – not for football matches, but for major concerts. And also to the joy of those who come from all over the Carpathian Basin, or the world, to experience an uplifting feeling of togetherness. The chorus of complainers has also quietly dispersed. After all, it is difficult to explain why it is right to spend money on the Opera House and Müpa Budapest, but not on the national football stadium. The Hungarian elite must also accept that the country belongs to those who never go to the opera but very often to football matches.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The reason our horizons have been so wide, the reason we have been able to see so far, is because – to use Newton’s phrase – we stand on the shoulders of giants. The immense legacy of Hungarian football imposes a responsibility on us, and it also gives us strength and ammunition. Legends told while leaning on the railing at a village pitch. Coaching admonitions – sometimes convoluted – delivered in cramped changing rooms out in the sticks. Heroic tales from grounds in outlying areas, tricks passed down by old players. The nostalgic ballads of fathers and grandfathers taking their sons and grandsons to matches. The talent of the Dárdai family, spanning generations, from Bukovina and Baranya to Berlin and Wolfsburg – it is good to see the chieftain back home, welcome home! All this is part of our footballing culture. Because it is a culture. And the continuity of this culture was almost broken. The dictatorship took from this culture role models and craftsmen such as László Kubala, Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, Zoltán Czibor, Béla Guttmann and Jenő Kalmár.
But even so, Hungarian football – which had been totally destroyed in economic, professional, moral and infrastructure terms – still bore the memory of past greatness, and the need and capacity for renewal. I myself grew up in this era, admiring the artistry of these great players. The embodiment of this legend and culture – giants known the world over – are the Hungarian Golden Team and their captain, Ferenc Puskás. He is the eternal role model for Hungarian footballers and every No. 10, the perfect professional with virtuoso technique, an endless tactical repertoire, fearsomely accurate and powerful shots, and the most important thing in football: goals. In a book by György Szöllősi, to whom we are also indebted for keeping the legend alive, Zoltán Czibor said something about him which you can also read on a wall of this museum: “If Öcsi [Puskás’s nickname] kicked the ball once, he scored twice.” It is as simple as that.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For many of us, including me, he was already “Uncle Öcsi”. As a coach and manager of the national team he led the tours of the parliamentary team, on which, together with him, we started to plan the reconstruction of Hungarian football. He toured the country, worried about Hungarian football, and as early as the 1990s told us that he foresaw the crisis in his beloved sport only getting worse. We were serious when we promised him – between two spritzers – between two card sessions, that sooner or later we would get Hungarian football back on its feet. By the way, someone should really write that no one who is Hungarian can get to the top of the world in football unless they can play [the Hungarian card game] ulti.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Hungarian national team never lost a match in which Uncle Öcsi was on the field. After twenty-five years he returned home to score a hat-trick in the 1981 seniors’ game, which the country watched with open mouths, and which I was able to see here in the stadium. As a kind of historical restitution, he was also the Hungarian national team’s coach in 1993. He could see with his own eyes that we wrote his name on the façade, and later his coffin was brought here to the centre circle, when the whole football world came to bid him farewell – from Beckenbauer to Platini, from Blatter to the president of Real Madrid. In that woeful autumn of 2006 I remember László Csurka saying here: “On the field of your victorious battles, now dead, 20th-century valiant, Puskás; now we are embraced by the Carpathians, by Népstadion – and here again Advent, hallowed time of expectation.”
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Many of us believe that there will be a continuation of the legend that was the Golden Team. If the likes of Sárosi and Puskas once came close to the summit, then their successors should be able to do the same. That destination may still be a long way off, but thanks to Uncle Öcsi we never lost sight of it. When we founded a football academy or built a stadium bearing his name, standing on his shoulders, on our horizon we continue to see World Cup and Champions League finals, dazzling goals, victories over England, Germany and Brazil. Sometimes we already see success, and I believe that increasingly we will succeed.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
At the turn of the millennium, the number of registered footballers had fallen below 100,000, and most of them were seniors. Today that figure has trebled, and the majority of these almost 300,000 players are now juniors. We will be unable to catch up with Puskás and his team if we fail to reach one million, and that task is not a modest one. Fortunately the number of women footballers is rising even more steeply, and we have built and renovated around two thousand football pitches for schools and small clubs in villages. We have renovated the grounds of all first and second division professional teams, including clubs of Hungarian communities abroad. We are running a series of Hungarian football academies within and beyond our borders, not to mention the developments in other sports and areas of culture. Once again, Hungarian teams are a constant feature in the main draw of European cup competitions. After almost fifty years, Fradi [Ferencváros] once again reached the final stages of a European competition. After an absence of forty-four years, in 2016 we again qualified for the European Football Championship, and repeatedly ever since. Once again a Hungarian footballer is playing a central role at one of the world’s best and most popular clubs, and his followers and potential successors emerge again and again in one fine foreign or domestic team after another. As fans, we are naturally impatient and dissatisfied. We would like to be even better and catch up even faster, but in fact everyone knows – even if for various reasons they do not say – that overall we are doing well.
But we still had one big unpaid debt. It was not until today that we could declare the Puskás Aréna – the fulfilment of a century-old dream – to be complete. We owed a debt to Hungarian and world football, to the hundreds of thousands of fans, to ourselves – but above all to Uncle Öcsi and his brilliant Hungarian team-mates. We needed to erect a memorial worthy of them here in the stadium named after him, which is now once again world-famous. We have now fulfilled this task with the creation of the Puskás Museum. First and foremost I would like to thank Director-General Mária Schmidt and all those who, under her leadership, have been involved in this enormous task, which has resulted in the creation here in Budapest of a new, world-class Puskás memorial worthy of Ferenc Puskás and the Puskás Aréna. Hungary is thus repaying a long-standing debt – a debt that caused us much distress. The communist leaders once shamefully disowned Ferenc Puskás, declaring him a traitor. Yet as the most famous Hungarian in the world, he probably did more for Hungary’s reputation than anyone else in the 20th century, and was one of those who could give the most to the Hungarian people in the most difficult of times. In a 20th century that we remember for our national tragedies, lost world wars and staggering bloodshed, it was Puskás and the Golden Team who wrote a world-renowned Hungarian success story that became a defining generational experience across the globe. And more than that: from a historical perspective, it is an everlasting, classic, inescapable Hungarian success story of cultural importance. This is the story told to visitors by the Puskás Museum, which it is my great honour to now open.
God above us all, Hungary before all else! Go Hungary, go Hungarians!
