Football

The whole continent is burning with football fever, and if there’s one thing every Hungarian is good at, it’s football, so the mood is lively in the Carpathian Basin. In our family too, we have our own ritual: father, mother, child put on the national jersey when our team plays, we cuddle up in front of the TV, go Hungary! There’s usually a little debate about our son’s jersey, because he has three: his own, and of course, Szoboszlai’s, even a Liverpool one, friends brought it specially for his seventh birthday, he even slept in it. He’s an average seven-year-old Hungarian child who wakes up with Dibusz, goes to bed with Szoboszlai, can recite the national team roster, and calls one of his teddy bears Ádám Martin.

And I very much approve of this.

My wife understands the offside rule and curses the referee when necessary; during match-watching there’s complete family harmony. Well, this isn’t always true, in the case of the Champions League there’s a little break in this harmony. The kid is a Real Madrid fan due to peer pressure and as a die-hard Barca supporter this is hard for me to digest, but I handle it with the wisdom of the elders, this is the order of things, I say to myself, sons rebel against their fathers.

The kid’s screen socialization is also linked to football. During the World Cup, at five years’ old, he realized that there are moving pictures that can’t be paused if he needs to run out to take care of some urgently important thing immediately. The world of five-year-olds is full of such things to be done immediately, and well, the players on the field can’t stop the game for this. That’s when he first saw a live TV broadcast, so for him, football is the game of special time. Not a game happening anytime, it has an appointed time, immediately urgent things must and can be postponed. The fan is the 12th player, they can’t go out during match time to fix the shield of the knight’s castle soldier that slipped askew the day before yesterday, because there’s work to be done, we have to push for the team.

And I approve of this too.

The difference between an average football match and the European Championship can be measured by what the child learned from it. From the former, he learned that on the field you need to tackle, pass, and spit. From the EC, he learned that the National Anthem can be sung with a hand on the heart. And somewhere beneath the surface, around my visceral love for football, this is what I love most about football: your shoes can be rainbow-colored, your jersey can be purple-pink, at the start they sing the national anthems, during the match they wave national flags, after the final whistle we cry or laugh as a nation. The European Championship – and the World Cup and other continental tournaments too – are living proof that, despite the madness of identity politics, national communities are living, experienceable communities for billions of people.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

As for our boys, let me quote János Hrutka, our many capped national team player, Hungarian and German champion, we have such footballers, they formulate the essence for us too: “Let’s be proud that after long decades and countless third and fourth places, we’ve reached a major tournament as group winners. For the third time in a row. Let’s see our path, our results, our opportunities and our achievable goals clearly. The fact that a defeat against Germany and Switzerland hurts so much, and that in our imagination we’ve put ourselves in front of or alongside these teams in terms of qualifying, means that we’ve achieved such successes in the recent past that allowed our thoughts to soar to this level. Let’s be glad that we can have such thoughts at all, let’s be glad that there are now once again Hungarian role models, let’s be happy and excited that we can buy tickets again and again for our national team’s matches at some major tournament. Meanwhile, let’s accept that we can even lose to Scotland. Even if we do everything, if we give it our all. We have a good team, we have an excellent strategist. This is also much more than what’s missing!”

Notes:

Hungarian football players mentioned:

Szoboszlai: Dominik Szoboszlai, a prominent Hungarian footballer playing for Liverpool FC.

Dibusz: Dénes Dibusz, goalkeeper for Ferencvárosi TC and the Hungarian national team.

Ádám Martin: A Hungarian striker playing for Ulsаn Hyundai FC.

János Hrutka: A former professional footballer mentioned in the text, who played for the Hungarian national team and in the German Bundesliga.

Football clubs mentioned:

Real Madrid and Barcelona (Barca) are mentioned, highlighting the global influence of Spanish football on (Hungarian) fans.

The phrase “after long decades” alludes to Hungary’s past glory in football (especially in the 1950s) and the subsequent period of relative underperformance.

Linguistic notes:

“Quod erat demonstrandum” is a Latin phrase meaning “which was to be demonstrated,” used here to emphasize the author’s point about national communities.