DOWN a quiet one-way street, on the Pest side of Budapest, the 6:3 bar is showing football on its solitary small television. Or at least it was until the barmaid switched channels to
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Hungarian style. OK, so it was only Norway versus Spain, but isn’t this a football pub? Are those not photos of Ferenc Puskas on the wall? Is this not the bar once run by Nandor Hidegkuti? Might Hungary against Estonia not be on in a moment?
For the mood in the bar, it was probably as well that we did not get to see Hungary-Estonia. Not many did. And those who troubled themselves to attend the friendly in the Ferençvaros stadium last Wednesday must have wished they had not. Hungary lost 1-0 in front of fewer than 1,000 people, the smallest crowd in the national team’s history, although the exact number depends on whether you take the Hungarian football federation (MLSZ) figure of 926 tickets sold or news reports of 457 who showed up.
Six days before the 50th anniversary of the most memorable triumph in Hungarian sporting history, the domestic game is at an all-time low. Who cares about Hungary? Visitors to the 6:3 bar, albeit no more than a couple of dozen, sit through 90 minutes of Holland v Scotland. At the end of the evening, a Scot, with suitable gallows humour, wondered whether it might be worth opening a 0:6 bar in Glasgow.
For most of the past 25 years, the drinking house here that took its name from the score that afternoon at Wembley, when the Mighty Magyars put England to the sword, has been run by Maria Humpf Klaus. She is planning a celebration of the anniversary tomorrow by taking 25 per cent off the price of beer, plus a display of memorabilia. In other words, she is planning the kind of occasion that the authorities seem not to have thought of.
Hungarian football, at national and club level, may have sunk to a standard that would have been unimaginably low 50 years ago, but that is no excuse, Humpf Klaus insisted, for the failure of the Government and the City of Budapest to mark the golden anniversary of its so-called Golden Team. “They should all be ashamed of themselves,” Humpf Klaus said. “I cannot understand why they do not give the three surviving members (Puskas, Jeno Buzanszky and Gyula Grosics) the respect they deserve.”
The MLSZ is putting on a private dinner and the national bank is issuing a commemorative coin, but there is no public celebration. In the latest edition of The Budapest Sun, Zoltan Pava, a socialist MP who organised a 45th anniversary match between Hungarian and English MPs, admitted: “I am afraid the Government has forgotten all about this.” And Tibor Bakonyi, the city’s deputy mayor, confirmed the sorry state of affairs. “The city is not doing anything,” he said.
At the MLSZ, Gyorgy Szollosi, its spokesman, said: “Unfortunately, we are not going to have a large-scale event, like a gala match, that the occasion deserves.” So the 6:3 bar, small as it is — barely seven metres by seven — will be the ordinary supporter’s only option tomorrow. In addition to the permanent wall mountings depicting memories of November 25, 1953, Humpf Klaus is to put on show other reminders of the historic afternoon, although she would need a magician to restore the football she displays behind the bar to collectors’ item status.
The ball rests on a shelf next to a photograph of Hidegkuti, Hungary’s hat-trick hero at Wembley. It was used in an all-stars match to commemorate the return of Puskas to his homeland from Spain in 1981. Several of the 1953 team had signed it but, with the arrival of a new barmaid some years later, the autographs were lost. Eager to impress, she scrubbed the ball clean, thinking she was doing her boss a service.
Marianna Toth was the barmaid on duty last Wednesday. She is 18, which means that she was born in the year that a Hungarian club last made any impact on European football, Videoton losing in the 1985 Uefa Cup final to Real Madrid, and a year before the national team last reached the World Cup finals. So accustomed has she become to Hungarian failure that she can barely believe the glorious past: the 1952 Olympic gold medal, the 1953 win at Wembley, the unbeaten run of 33 matches until the 3-2 defeat by West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final.
“It is extraordinary and remarkable that Hungary was once able to do that, but it is a pity we have not been able to repeat the feat,” Toth said. All her energies as a supporter are channelled into Manchester United and Real Madrid, the latter having nothing to do with David Beckham’s move. “I was supporting Real before Beckham moved,” she insisted. “The reason I am not so keen on Hungarian football is that it is of poor quality.”
In 2001, the Conservative Government began to try to raise standards, investing more than €3 million (about £2.1 million) a year in a children’s development programme named after one of the 1953 heroes, Jozsef Bozsik, but a change to a Socialist Government has interrupted it, according to the MLSZ. “The previous Government had a set agenda for increasing football, launching the Bozsik programme and a stadium reconstruction programme, but all this ended when there was a change in government,” Szollosi said.
“They keep saying we must continue, but they do not provide the money and we have had to cancel contracts with over 1,300 coaches. It was a nice gesture when the Nepstadion, or People’s Stadium, was renamed after Puskas but, when you look at the stadium, it takes away from the gesture.” Once it held 100,000 but it is in such disrepair that it can now take only 28,000.
At the entrance to the federation offices is a giant photograph of the Hungary team that defeated England 7-1 in Budapest in May 1954, six months after the Wembley victory. “I have one customer who, when I pick up the phone and say 6:3, always answers 7:1,” Humpf Klauss said. Two years after the 7-1 match, the Hungary team was broken up when 200,000 troops invaded to suppress a revolt against communist rule.
The bitter feelings spilt into the Olympics that year and, in what came to be known as the “bloodbath match” in which the water literally turned red, Hungary defeated Russia on their way to the water polo gold medal. Hungary’s fortunes in that sport fell into decline in the 1980s and 1990s, but now they are back on top — world champions. “Water polo has come back in a way that football shows no sign of, ” Robin Marshall, editor of The Budapest Sun, said. “When you talk to people, you do not get the sense of engagement with football that you get with water polo.”
In football, Hungary reached seven out of nine World Cup tournaments between 1954 and 1986 but have not been back since. They failed to qualify for the 2004 European Championship and participation levels are falling. “We provided figures to Uefa that the number of registered players is declining and they were so surprised they came back and asked if these were the real figures, because we are the only country where this is the trend,” Szollosi said.
Ferenc Gyurcsany, the Sports Minister, acknowledged that the 6-3 victory was the greatest moment in Hungarian sporting history, but said that little had been done to preserve its memory. “We have to admit that we failed to set up a programme to inform people that it is part of our heritage,” Gyurcsany said. This from a minister who remembers playing football on the streets and pretending to be players from the team of ’53.
Gyurcsany said that the surviving players from the Golden Team would be among the 12 Hungarian sporting legends soon to receive a monthly income of €2,000 in recognition of their achievements. Of Puskas, who is suffering ill health and living in a hospital suite paid for by the state, he said: “He is a unique story, not just because he is the most famous player, but because he was appreciated by the people for having the courage to give his opinions to politicians.”
Bakonyi paints a bleak picture. “Young people tend not to want to become footballers any more,” he said. “There are many alternative emerging sports which have become more popular, including BMX, skateboarding and wall- climbing. Football has become a showcase sport that requires a lot of money and neither the Government nor the city has the sums needed to bring it up to world levels.” It seems the only quick fix might be for somebody to volunteer, on behalf of football, to play Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
