Amid the rhetoric and rabble rousing of JD Vance's promotional tour of Budapest in support of the "fantastic" Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the significance of one of the venues may have been lost on many.
The US vice president addressed thousands at a at a pre-election rally on Tuesday at the Groupama Arena, the home of Hungary's most successful football club, Ferencvaros. The 24,000 capacity stadium, complete with 24 executive boxes, was opened in 2014, three years after Fidesz MP, Gabor Kubatov became the club's president.
Vance targets EU while campaigning for Orban in Hungary
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"I don't think that is accidental staging," Gyozo Molnar, a professor of sociology of sport and exercise at the University of Worcester, and originally from Hungary, told DW.
"The stadium is Orban's preferred arena, quite literally. More broadly, the vast network of football clubs, academies, and infrastructure projects across the country represents a material patronage network that ties local communities and local elites to Fidesz. That has electoral consequences, particularly in rural constituencies."
Heavy state influence in Hungarian clubs
Ferencvaros are far from alone in having strong ties to the state. Though not necessarily directly controlled by Fidesz, every club in the top division is somehow influenced by the party, either by politicians appointed to executive roles, by arms of the state with stakes in the club or by provision of funds.
The most important revenue stream has been the TAO corporate income tax program. Introduced in 2011, this allows corporations to write off donations to clubs in selected sports as a tax deduction, sometimes up to 100%. This has seen billions funneled to government-backed clubs and contracts for construction reportedly handed to those close to Orban and his government. Hungary is consistently ranked as the most corrupt nation in the 27-member EU, with which it has a strained relationship, and is also ranked among the poorest in the bloc.
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Orban defended TAO in a 2020 interview with Hungarian sports daily Nemzeti Sport.
"Until the introduction of the TAO, the world of entrepreneurs and sports did not maintain any relationship with each other," he said. "I don't think it's a normal attitude to regret spending money on sports fields or for children to play sports."
Nevertheless, Fidesz have also developed interests in clubs in several surrounding countries, including Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Ukraine. Molnar says this combines Orban's loves of football with maintaining political power – and is another vote winner.
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"Ethnic Hungarians in neighboring countries have been able to vote in Hungarian elections since Fidesz introduced simplified naturalization and extended the franchise in 2010. The diaspora vote has historically overwhelmingly favored Fidesz," he said.
"Investing in football infrastructure in these communities, such as stadiums, academies and youth programs is a tangible, visible form of patronage that reinforces the message that Orban's government cares about Hungarians beyond the country's borders."
While some clubs' ownership structures, both in Hungary and abroad, are opaque, last season's runners-up, Puskas Akademia, have been built, funded and controlled by Orban from their foundation in 2007.
Named after Ferenc Puskas, Hungary's greatest-ever footballer and member of the Mighty Magyars side that lost to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final, Puskas Akademia are Orban's pet project. He built them a stadium too. The Pancho Arena, named after the nickname given to Puskas while he played for Real Madrid, is a 3,800-capacity arena, holding double the population of the town of Felcsut, where Orban has a property.
David Goldblatt, now a visiting professor at Pitzer College, Los Angeles, went to the stadium, on the outskirts of Budapest, in 2017. After handing a copy of a book he'd written on football a decade earlier to Orban through an intermediary, he became the first foreign journalist for more than a decade to interview the prime minister, who was first elected to the post in 1998.
Goldblatt say that, although it has clearly been weaponized politically, Orban's love of the game shone through.
"He really is obsessed with football — playing it, watching it, thinking about it. He really, really, really loves football," Goldblatt told DW, adding that Orban played in Hungary's fourth tier and formed the basis of his party's central control from a Fidesz five-a-side game.
As well as his grip on the club game, Goldblatt said that Orban's funding and promotion of the national team has enabled him to tell a useful story.
"It's a great and powerful narrative for an ultranationalist with victimhood tendencies that the Hungary national football team offers. Once the absolute pinnacle of global football, then a terrible shadow of its former self. This has, in Orban and Fidesz's hands, turned into a narrative about how great Hungary once was before the communists crushed the great football tradition.
"'Make Hungarian football great again' is what he said to me. I think he actually had baseball caps with that on."
Champions League final a crowning moment or bitter pill
As well as their involvement in Hungary's national team and all of the country's top clubs, Orban and Fidesz have built more than 25 stadiums around the country, the biggest of which — the Puskas Arena in Budapest — is to host the Champions League final, European club football's biggest game, on May 30.
Molnar said Orban sees this "an enormous validation of his entire sport-as-nation-building strategy" and would find not being in power for the final a bitter pill to swallow.
"If he were to lose on April 12, the Champions League final would arrive under a new government, and that would be a bitterly symbolic loss for him, someone else cutting the ribbon on his legacy project," he said.
Orban has been a regular attendee at major football finals for decades and may well be at one of the stadiums he built on May 30 whatever happens in the coming days. He has made himself the key figure in Hungarian football, as well as society, and the stakes are high for the sport.
"If Orban wins, that event becomes a coronation of his football legacy. If he loses, it becomes an awkward inheritance for a new government that will have to decide what to do with the infrastructure, the networks, and the political economy of sport that Orban has spent a decade and a half constructing," Molnar added.
"Either way, Hungarian football after April 12 will tell us a great deal not just about sport, but about whether populist nationalist projects can be unwound through democratic means."
