When Budapest hosts Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain in this weekend’s Champions League final, it will be a watershed moment for Hungarian football – but for former Prime Minister Viktor Orban, it was supposed to be “the icing on the cake”.
Between his ascendance to power in 2010 and his defeat in April’s elections, Orban’s regime spent an estimated €2bn on 25 football stadiums across the country. At €500m, the new Puskas Arena, the Champions League final venue, is one of them.
Orban attracts two prevailing opinions – either seen as Trump’s puppet in Europe, or the original populist who preceded MAGA and realised early on how football could be harnessed for political gain.
“Orban had been working for years to get the final to Budapest,” Gyozo Molnar, Professor of Sociology of Sport and Exercise at the University of Worcester, tells The i Paper. “This was supposed to be the centre-piece of his entire ‘sport as nation-building project’. It was not just about football, it was expressing and extending his political dominance.”
In a country where thousands of ordinary workers commute to Austria and Germany for work because wages are so low, there was “public outcry” at Orban “spending money in such a frivolous way”.
Over a past decade and a half, Hungarian football has become riddled with what Molnar describes as “legalised corruption”. The TAO programme was introduced to allow corporations to make tax deductible donations to particular sporting organisations – sometimes up to 100 per cent, thus encouraging the country’s high earners to pummel money into football clubs.
Money which might otherwise have made its way into the public purse to be spent on Hungary’s ailing roads and healthcare system were given to clubs with links to Orban’s party Fidesz. MTK Budapest was one beneficiary, run by party member Tamas Deutsch. As part of the election campaign MTK’s Sportpark hosted a rally featuring JD Vance.
In Orban’s home village of Felcsut, which houses slightly over 2,000 people, €12m was spent on the 4,000-seater Pancho Arena, built to resemble something between a church and a medieval castle topped with wooden spires.
Two motivations lay behind the obsession, one genuine and one less so. Orban is a football fanatic who regularly plays five-a-side. Yet the game has also become a convenient symbol of national decline. In 1938 and again in 1954 with Hungary’s famous “golden team”, they had reached the World Cup final.
It was never going to last, partly because there was a secret ingredient behind Hungary’s success. Supposedly “amateur” players were being given jobs in the military, police and fire service that were really just a front – they were able to train full-time as footballers, helping them to outdo genuine amateurs from around the world.
As a young man, Orban blamed the communist regime for destroying the glory days of Hungarian football. He gave furious public speeches telling the Soviet Red Army to “go home”. He would later turn his anger towards the EU, earning the nickname “the bane of Brussels”.
That is not the only reason Uefa were forced into awkward conversations when Budapest applied for the Champions League final. At the same time that Uefa was expelling Russia from its competitions, moving the 2022 final from St Petersburg to Paris and cutting ties with Russian state-owned sponsor Gazprom, Orban’s regime was effectively serving as a hotline to the Kremlin.
Leaked calls between ex-foreign minister Peter Szijjarto and Russian minister Sergey Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man, prompted allegations that Russia had been provided with key EU intelligence. The EU was fining Hungary €1m a day for refusing to follow its rules,
“He blamed Brussels bureaucrats for the ills in Hungary,” adds Molnar. “He was going to use the final to indicate towards the EU, well look, Uefa still trusts us with the biggest match. Hosting this particular event would provide an alternative source of international legitimacy for the political regime.”
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Questions surrounding the funding of Hungary’s stadiums were rarely put to Orban directly. Hungary is rated highest on Transparency‘s corruption index for EU countries. It ranks 74th in the world for press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders.
When this spring’s elections finally came around, Orban proved that rarest of breeds – a candidate cheered on from both Moscow and Washington.
His closeness with Trump, the trips to Mar-a-Lago and regular phone calls, had allowed Hungary to escape US sanctions while continuing to import Russian oil and gas. But the relationship was ultimately his undoing. His successor, Peter Magyar, campaigned on an anti-corruption platform and capitalised on Trump’s nosediving ratings amid the war in Iran. Orban’s stadiums cannot be unbuilt but early on in his premiership, there has been some pressure for Magyar to review the would-be proceeds of corporation tax that have washed through Hungarian football.
Budapest has already hosted one major final, the 2023 Europa League showpiece between Sevilla and Roma, but nothing on this scale. Weeks out from Trump’s World Cup, the ultimate symbol of Orban’s power has been delivered to Budapest – except he will no longer be there to see it.
