The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Soccer Shaped the Modern Game

Abstract

A well-known British sports journalist and author of several books on the history of British, Catalan, and Latin American soccer, Jonathan Wilson sets out in this book to discuss the mid-twentieth-century history of Hungarian soccer. Wilson’s thesis is straightforward. He argues that the long streak of victories, culminating in the Wembley defeat of the English national team and the silver medal at the 1954 World Championship in Switzerland, that the legendary Aranycsapat [Golden squad] achieved between 1950–54 represented not the isolated peak of Hungarians’ achievements in football (soccer) but the glorious coda to a thirty-year period when Hungarian players and coaches reinvented what they had learned from the English, to reexport their know-how to the rest of the world. An important corollary of this argument is that the Hungarian football diaspora—spreading out from Hungary during the 1920s to play for or coach various major soccer teams during the subsequent decades in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico—planted the seeds of a new kind of football system everywhere it went, which reshaped and turned especially Italian, Brazilian, and Argentinian football into what they became after the 1950s.The so-called Danubian system that Hungarians exported was based on a creative reimagining of the English football that was transplanted to Hungary in the late 1880s. The new sport soon took root in Budapest and a few other cities. By 1901 there was a national league, and both the emerging Budapest football clubs and the Hungarian national side started winning games against their neighboring Austrian counterparts. According to Wilson, the Budapest grunds (the small empty plots between the buildings of bourgeoning Budapest) that youngsters used to play street football with a homemade ball were the settings where many talents of pre-war Hungarian football emerged. Once picked up by teams like Budapesti Torna Club [Budapest Athletic Club] (BTC), Ferencvárosi Torna Club [Ferencváros Athletic Club] (FTC), and Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre [Circle of Hungarian Fitness Activists] (MTK), they benefitted in later years from the coaching skills of English football professionals working in Budapest like John Tait Robertson and Jimmy Hogan, who prior to and during World War I taught the intricacies of the game to many of them. It was, however, only after the war, during the early 1920s that a specifically Hungarian style of playing emerged within the confines of clubs like Ferencváros and, especially, MTK. The latter was a veritable laboratory whose football products would soon be exported to the world at large.Wilson also muses at the beginning of the book on the role that the Budapest coffeehouses had in the emergence of the Danubian football system. He describes how Hungarian football aficionados sat around tables in these places, studiously discussing games and jotting down ideas about football strategy and teams’ setups, which was a practice that distinguished them from British football fans, who celebrated or mourned in pubs next to pints of beer. This more intellectual mindset about the game, which emerged in Budapest, propelled the careers of many former Hungarian players who chose later to become football coaches.Working with both secondary and primary sources in multiple languages, Wilson was able to assemble a very rich source base to prove his points. He elucidates in telling detail, for instance, the long-term formative influence that József (Csibi) Braun, Imre Schlosser, Kálmán Konrád, Dori Kürschner, István Tóth (Potya), Géza Kertész (Lajhár), Márton Bukovi, Béla Guttmann, Ernő Erbstein, Imre Hirschl, György Orth, Alfréd Schaffer (Spéci), and Árpád Weisz (all former MTK, Ferencváros, or Újpest FC players) had on teams that they coached in Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Argentina. For instance, after playing for MTK between 1904–13, Dori Kürschner took over the club’s coaching position in 1919 from Jimmy Hogan. This allowed him, after the team’s first-place finish in the Hungarian league and a spectacular 7–1 away win over Bayern Munich, to advance to a well-paid job as coach at Stuttgarter Kickers. After winning the Württemberg championship with the latter, he moved on to coach FC Nürnberg and then Bayern Munich. In 1923 he moved to Switzerland, where he coached FC Nordstern Basel and was employed as Switzerland’s national coach for the 1924 Olympics in Paris. After a few stints with teams back in Germany, Kürschner became the long-term coach of Grasshoppers Zurich. During the mid-1930s, however, he moved to Brazil, where, according to Wilson, as coach of Flamengo and Botafogo he revolutionized Brazilian football by acquainting it with the W-M system, consisting of a 3–2–2–3 team set-up, with “four midfielders who form a square” (155). His compatriot, Imre Hirschl, who was at the time active as a coach in Argentina, had a similar role in the development of Argentinian football.The author’s narrative strategy from the middle to the last chapters of the book is to follow the life stories of more than a dozen Hungarian coaches, from their early successes as players and coaches at home to their engagements abroad and notable successes as managers of foreign football teams. While doing this, Wilson is embedding the stories that he tells about them in a historical context shaped by different regime changes in Hungary, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, World War II, and the Holocaust, as well as the postwar spread of communism to Eastern Europe, developments that were all extremely impactful on their life trajectories, since many of them were of Jewish origin or participated in the anti-fascist resistance. Thus, after more than a decade playing for and coaching various Italian teams, including Internazionale Milano and Bologna, Árpád Weisz had to leave Bologna in 1938 because of the antisemitic laws implemented in Italy and found refuge in the Netherlands. It was there that, after the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany, he lost his job with a smaller Dutch football team and was later arrested and in 1942 sent to Auschwitz, where he died two years later. Other Hungarian coaches like the former Ferencváros players István Tóth and Géza Kertész, who also managed several Italian teams during the 1930s, spent the war years back at home in Hungary. By the time of the Arrow Cross’s takeover in the fall of 1944, they were active participants in an underground resistance network, which led to their arrest and execution by the Gestapo during the siege of Budapest in the courtyard of the Buda Castle.Unlike Weisz, Tóth, and Kertész, other Hungarian coaches like Bukovi, Guttmann, Erbstein, and Schaffer, who had also been active in Yugoslavia, Italy, and Germany during the interwar period, survived the war and the Holocaust. Schaffer, who was not Jewish and since the mid-1920s had coached Slavia Prague, FC Nürnberg, and AS Roma, had gone in 1944 to live in Munich, briefly coaching Bayern Munich, and died in mysterious circumstances on a train in August 1945. Erbstein, who had worked with many Italian teams, including Torino, in the 1930s and survived the war while working in a labor detachment and then hiding in Budapest, was able to return in 1946 to Italy and retake his former job with Torino. There he further honed the system that had enabled MTK to win several Hungarian league championships in the early 1920s, which resulted in Torino winning the Italian league. However, Erbstein’s time as coach of Torino ended dramatically two years later when on return from a tournament in Portugal, he and his football team perished tragically at Superga, near Torino, in an air crash caused by bad weather.By contrast, Erbstein’s wartime hiding mate in Budapest, Béla Guttmann, went on to have a career that no other Hungarian coach was able to achieve during the postwar period. During the 1950s and 1960s, he successively coached teams such as AC Milan in Italy, São Paulo in Brazil, and Benfica Lisbon in Portugal. With the latter he won two European Cup finals, inscribing his name on the list of twentieth century’s most legendary European coaches. Although due to the defeat of the 1956 Hungarian revolution many members of the Aranycsapat defected abroad, with Ferenc Puskás also later coaching teams in Spain and Greece, it was the influence of the interwar generation of Hungarian footballers that was the most lasting on the evolution of world’s football.What stands out overall in this narrative studded with professional successes, life tragedies, and international achievements is Wilson’s ability to tell gripping stories about the great players and coaches of interwar Hungarian football to a non-specialist anglophone audience, unaware of a number of Hungarian books and articles in sports journals that have been published since the 1960s on their lives and international careers. In addition, he relies on the interwar Hungarian sports press, memoirs published by some of the book’s characters, and oral histories conducted with their descendants, including information taken from a few English-language books dealing with the topic, to weave a chronologically organized narrative of the global influence of Hungarian football. Although, for the trained eye of the historian, the text reveals a number of minor errors in the description of the broader historical context of the time, Wilson does an excellent job in retelling long forgotten, and often dramatic, stories of Hungarian football professionals’ lives and achievements for a contemporary audience unaware of the interwar and immediate postwar antecedents of today’s game.