The first thing that strikes you about the Pancho Arena, 40 km west of Budapest, the Hungarian capital, is its elegance.
On a huge roof there is slate where there deserves to be metal and looking inside, through views that look like mailboxes, you see a lot of beautiful pine beams that cover everything like a forest.
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One excellent organization after another, each fanned out and soaring into the seats of heaven with a capacity of just over 3,800 fans at full capacity. It’s a design that could turn the stadium into a cathedral.
It’s called “Hungarian Biological Architecture” and has been quietly preserved for nine years in the rural village of Felcsut.
These are the Puskas Academy and Puskas Akademia FC, a top-level Hungarian club founded in 2005. Around them are lush educational fields, as well as the academy building, a hotel and a restaurant that have the same design as the stadium.
There’s also a notable neighbor who explains why it’s all here.
Hungary’s autocratic right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, owns a rural hideout next to the Pancho Arena and spent part of his formative years near this secluded spot.
He also played semi-professional football here, including in his first term as head of the Hungarian government. A framed photograph inside the stadium dates back to the 2001-02 season and shows Orban, then in his 30s, posing with his Felcsut FC teammates at a time when he was also running the country.
Orban, who is passionate about football, is still a normal here. In addition to having a private parking lot in front of the VIP entrance, he has been known to conduct political business with his allies at the stadium before matches.
The Pancho Arena – named after the nickname of Hungary’s greatest footballer, Ferenc Puskas – was Orban’s puppy commission when he finished it nine years ago and today is a sumptuous symbol of the huge investment he made in football.
Over the past decade, around £2 billion ($2. 5 billion) has been spent on renovating and building stadiums in a country that is home to around 10 million people.
So far, two of Hungary’s 12 top-flight clubs play their matches in stadiums built since Orban’s Fidesz came into effect in 2010 and at Budapest’s 67,000-capacity Puskas Arena, which hosted the European Championship three years ago and then last season. It is estimated to have collected more than £500 million when completed in 2019.
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At the center of all this is Orban’s debatable pursuit of populism and comfortable power.
According to him, football is what made Hungary wonderful before and after World War II. They lost two World Cup finals (1938 and 1954) in this era and the romance surrounding the ‘Magnificent Magyars’, the Puskas-led team that beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953, does not. It’s never about the story it offers. Array
Orban will undoubtedly benefit from next week’s events.
Six years after losing to Minnowa Minnows in a World Cup qualifier, Hungary proved its position at next summer’s European Championship in Germany with a 2-2 draw against Bulgaria. A 3-1 victory over Montenegro on Sunday capped an unbeaten crusade and secured them. the most sensible place in Group G.
Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai, who leads the team and scored two goals in that win, celebrated by sipping a glass of palinka, a type of Hungarian brandy, among the fans.
– Liverpool Anything (@AnythingLFC_) November 19, 2023
This is a bright new era for the Hungarian national team, but the footprints Orban left on the rebuilt infrastructure leave a lot of discomfort.
“One of the few things that can unite other people: the Hungarian flag is football,” says Professor Zoltan Balazs of the political science branch at Corvinus University in Budapest. “Nothing can fit with that. There is no denying that football is the country’s glory and needs to shine: this is its deepest political approach.
“In his view, the country’s good luck is strongly related to the impressive good luck it is experiencing. »
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This open nationalism is the key.
“One example is the two Hungarian scientists who won the Nobel Prize, Katalin Kariko and Ferenc Krausz,” Balazs adds. “Orban saw an opportunity to connect, so he invited Professor Krausz to an assembly and gave him a budget to set up an institute here in Budapest. That’s how he approaches things.
“He’s a football fan, but he also connects the two things: the good luck of the country and the glories he can attribute to it.
Meanwhile, Hungary remains one of the European countries with the highest poverty rates and, tellingly, is moving away from democracy. Last year, the European Parliament said Hungary had a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” and questions were raised about the distribution of EU revenues. central funds. In other words, Orbán has managed to create a national point of strength that is rarely questioned.
“A lot of public money is spent on those things when we see the distress and poverty in the country,” Balazs says. “Maybe we can tolerate a certain degree of poverty if the spending goes to people’s well-being, so they can be proud of something. It’s very cynical, but it’s still a component of politics.
“Once there are no doctors or the public education formula suffers and other people live in extreme poverty, then it becomes very difficult to justify. »
In Pancho Arena there are no signs of poverty. Quite the opposite. There are polished floors in the hallways leading under exposed beams and VIPs are greeted through one of the Real Madrid jerseys worn by Puskas, hanging from the chevrons.
It floats above a reproduction of the stadium’s style, a commission dreamed up by Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz in the years before his death in 2011. “The completed construction is Makovecz’s spiritual legacy,” said Tamas Dobrosi, who reworked the designs The originals that required more than 1,000 tons of wood were used and included this slate roof that took seven months to complete.
Not that all of this belongs to little Felcsut.
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A UEFA-accredited stadium with a capacity of about 4,000 more people has been built in a village with fewer than 2,000 people and no major train station. The limited bus connections to nearby Bicske are as smart as they can be in terms of public transport.
There’s the Val Valley Light Rail if all else fails. This was built as a tourist attraction for Felcsut on an EU budget after the Hungarian government claimed that another 2,500 people would use the 7 km (just over 4 miles) line to Alcsutdoboz. He reported that in its first month of operation in 2016, only 30 passengers used the service that connects the villages well from Orban’s two years of formation.
“The stadium is one of the symbols of this insane spending,” Balazs said. “He is not ashamed of these things. He also built a small exercise in Felcsut to get anywhere, usually for tourist purposes, but only a few more people there. It was simply his favorite concept: he can do it, so he does it.
“As happens in politics in Hungary, if someone addresses the government, they say their objections are selfish. And since they oppose it, they do so by redoubling their efforts.
The citizens of the Puskas Akademia stadium finished fourth in the season of the Hungarian first department.
There is no remarkable history for a club founded 18 years ago. They are slightly the age of their younger players, but they can count on that of Lorinc Meszaros, Hungary’s richest man, former mayor of Felcsut and a friend of Orban’s during his formative years.
Meszaros, whose value Forbes estimated last year at £1. 6 billion (£1. 3 billion), once asked about the secrets of his rise from his youth in installing fuel and water pipes. “Oh my God, good luck and Viktor Orban,” he said.
The Pancho Arena, however, has been a decadent cog in Orban’s grand football plans.
Ferencvaros, Hungary’s most decorated club, now plays at the 24,000-seat Groupama Arena on the outskirts of Budapest, while Debrecen may move to a 20,000-seat stadium completed in 2014. Impressive venues have also been built for Fehervar, MTK and Honved, whose stadiums are named after Jozsef Bozsik, a wonderful Hungarian footballer of the 50s.
Most of Hungary’s shiny new stadiums have not been financed directly from the national budget, but through a corporate tax formula introduced by Orban in 2011. Hungarian corporations can make contributions to sports organizations and clubs, adding handball, basketball, water polo, and ice hockey. teams, instead of paying taxes on their profits. Up to 70 percent of corporate taxes can be canceled.
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Orban’s critics – and they are criticised in a country where the state de facto controls 80% of the media – believe that the mission only takes money away from the government in the spaces that are most convenient for the prime minister.
A 2021 investigation conducted through 24. HU, an independent Hungarian news site, estimated that £2. 17 billion had been paid to the tax policy of sports bodies over the past decade.
More than 1,000 football clubs have benefited, but none more so than Orban’s favourite, the Puskas Akademia. It said they had made £86 million in investments over the past 10 years. The next club in the race? Mezokovesd Zsory, whose chairman is Andras Tallai, Hungarian State Secretary for Parliamentary Affairs and Taxation.
“People may be disappointed by the spending we see on these projects,” Balazs adds. “It may not come from the core budget and it looks like personal patronage, but it’s really just personal money that hasn’t been paid in the form of taxes. It’s a way of redirecting corporate money to sponsorship. “
The huge investment brought with it the desired adjustments to suit the days in Hungary.
Attendance has not skyrocketed against a domestic league in which UEFA, European football’s governing body, ranks 25th in terms of coefficients (behind Cyprus and Serbia) and the Pancho Arena rarely reaches 4 figures, regardless of the number of European viewers. releases. -hoppers that may simply attract you.
A further 2,024 people officially attended the Euro 2024 qualifier between Israel and Switzerland last week, Orban added, wasting no time in turning the occasion into a political victory. “Hungary is an island of peace,” he said, praising one Israeli. Lately, the team has not been able to play its home games in Tel Aviv due to security concerns.
But there is also the underlying darkness of the Hungarian that Orban has not questioned.
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The Carpathian Brigade, an organization of black-clad ultras who attend Hungarian national team matches with government approval, were the homophobic and racist chants at Euro 2020 matches in Budapest that led UEFA to order the Hungarian FA to play two home games. Closed doors.
Monkey chants were also heard in England’s 4-0 win at the Puskas Arena at the end of 2021, mainly directed at Raheem Sterling and Jude Bellingham, before the second leg a few weeks later, in which Hungarian enthusiasts were involved in clashes with police at Wembley. FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, imposed its own fine of more than £150,000 and ordered Hungary to play matches without fans present.
These movements are never condemned by the Hungarian government, and sometimes it is Orban’s policies (anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ) that serve as the banner for his ultranationalists.
Next summer will most likely be a headache for the German government after Hungary staged an impressive qualifying crusade on Sunday night. They consider Captain Szoboszlai as their national hero, but they can also call on Milos Kerkez of Bournemouth and Attila Szalai of German Hoffenheim in a squadron.
Then there’s Zsolt Nagy, a 30-year-old midfielder who performs every week at the Puskas Akademia against Orban, a regular in those sumptuous stands that his policies have helped finance.
The Pancho Arena is a legacy, but for all its beauty, it’s the one that earns Orban’s universal approval in Hungary.
(Top photo: Ben McShane – Sportsfile/UEFA Getty Images)