The first thing that strikes you about the Pancho Arena, 25 miles west of Hungary’s capital city Budapest, is its implausible elegance.
Across a sweeping roof, there is slate where there ought to be steel and peering within, through letterbox-like vantage points, you see the hundreds of beautiful pine beams that hold everything up like a forest canopy.
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One perfect cluster after another, each fanning out and reaching skyward behind seating that can accommodate just over 3,800 supporters at capacity. It is a design that could see the stadium make friends with a cathedral.
They call it “organic Hungarian architecture” and it has stood quietly for the past nine years in the rural village of Felcsut.
This is the Puskas Academy and home to Puskas Akademia FC, a Hungarian top-flight club only formed in 2005. All around are lush training pitches, as well as an academy building, hotel and restaurant that have the same design as the stadium.
There is also a notable neighbour to help explain why all this is here.
Hungary’s autocratic right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orban, has a countryside bolthole that backs onto the grounds of the Pancho Arena and he spent part of his childhood close to this secluded spot.
He played semi-professional football here, too. Even during his first stint as Hungary’s head of government. One framed picture inside the stadium dates from the 2001-02 season and shows Orban, then in his late thirties, posing with his Felcsut FC team-mates at a time he was also leading the country.
Orban, a football obsessive, remains a regular here. As well as retaining a personal parking space outside the VIP entrance, he is known to conduct political business with his allies in the stadium before games.
The Pancho Arena — its title derived from the nickname of Hungary’s greatest footballer, Ferenc Puskas — was Orban’s pet project when completed nine years ago and is now a lavish symbol of the enormous investment into football he has driven.
The past decade has seen an estimated £2billion ($2.5bn) spent renovating and constructing stadiums around a country which is home to roughly 10 million people.
All but two of Hungary’s 12 top-flight clubs now play their home matches in stadiums built since Orban’s Fidesz party regained power in 2010 and the 67,000-capacity Puskas Arena in Budapest, a host venue during the European Championship three years ago and then last season’s Europa League final, was said to have cost more than £500million when completed in 2019.
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Running through it all is Orban’s controversial pursuit of populism and soft power.
Football, he believes, is what made Hungary great before and after the Second World War. They lost two World Cup finals (1938 and 1954) in those days and the romanticism that surrounds the “Magnificent Magyars”, the team led by Puskas that beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953, is never far away from the narrative he pushes.
Orban will no doubt have watched events of the last week with approval.
Six years after losing to minnows Andorra in a World Cup qualifier, Hungary confirmed their place at next summer’s Euros in Germany with a 2-2 away draw against Bulgaria. A 3-1 win over Montenegro on Sunday rounded off an unbeaten campaign and secured them top spot in Group G.
Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai, who captains the team and scored twice in that victory, celebrated by taking a shot of palinka, a type of Hungarian brandy, in among the supporters.
Dominik Szoboszlai taking a shot of Hungarian traditional drink, pálinka as he celebrates with the Hungarian team and fans after qualifying for the 2024 European championship.pic.twitter.com/6zW1ZPeJfG
— Anything Liverpool (@AnythingLFC_) November 19, 2023
This is a bright new era for Hungary’s national side, but Orban’s fingerprints left on the rebuilt infrastructure behind them leave plenty uncomfortable.
“One of the few things that can unite the people behind the Hungarian flag is a football match,” says Professor Zoltan Balazs, from the department of political science at the Corvinus University of Budapest. “Nothing can match that. It is undeniable that football is the biggest sport in Hungary. And he wants the glory of the country to shine forth. That’s the deeper political approach he has.
“In his mind, the success of the country is so intimately tied to the spectacular successes within it.”
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That overt nationalism is key.
“One example is the two Hungarian scientists who very recently gained the Nobel Prize, Katalin Kariko and Ferenc Krausz,” adds Balazs. “Orban saw the possibility to connect himself, so he invited Professor Krausz to a meeting and gave him funds to establish an institute here in Budapest. That’s the way he approaches things.
“He’s a football fan but he also connects the two things; the country’s success and the glories he can attach to it.”
Hungary, all the while, remains among the European countries with the highest rates of poverty and one, tellingly, drifting away from democracy. The European Parliament last year said Hungary had become a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”, with questions raised over the distribution of central EU funds. Or, put another way, Orban has been able to create a level of domestic power that is seldom challenged.
“So much public money is being spent on these things while we see misery and poverty in the country,” says Balazs. “You can maybe tolerate a certain degree of poverty if the spending belongs to the wellbeing of people, that they can be proud of something. That’s very cynical but it’s still part of politics.
“Once you have no doctors or the public education system suffers and you’ve got people living in extreme poverty, then it becomes very difficult to justify.”
There are no signs of poverty at the Pancho Arena. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are polished floors in the corridors that lead you beneath exposed wooden beams and VIPs are greeted by one of Puskas’ match-worn Real Madrid shirts hanging from the rafters.
It floats above a model replica of the stadium, a project imagined by the Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz in the years before his 2011 death. “The entire building is the spiritual legacy of Makovecz,” said Tamas Dobrosi, who reworked original designs which required more than 1,000 tonnes of timber and included that slate roof which alone took seven months to complete.
Not that any of this belongs in little Felcsut.
A UEFA-accredited stadium that can host almost 4,000 people has been built in a village that is home to fewer than 2,000 people and is without a mainline train station. Limited bus links to nearby Bicske are as good as it gets in terms of public transport.
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There is the Val Valley Light Railway if all else fails. That was built as a tourist attraction for Felcsut with funds from the EU after the Hungarian government claimed 2,500 people would use the 7km (just over four miles) line to Alcsutdoboz. It was said that, in its first month of operation in 2016, just 30 passengers were using the service that effectively links Orban’s two childhood villages.
“The stadium there is one of the symbols of this insane spending,” says Balazs. “He’s not ashamed of these things. He also built a small train in Felcsut to wherever, mainly for tourist purposes but only a few people travel on it. It was just his pet idea — he can do it, so he does.
“The way politics has become in Hungary, if someone objects to the government, then it is said those objections are self-serving. And because they object, they do it with double the effort.”
The stadium’s residents, Puskas Akademia, finished fourth in Hungary’s top division last season.
There is no history of note for a club founded 18 years ago. They are only as old as their youngest players but can draw on the support of Lorinc Meszaros, Hungary’s richest man, a former mayor of Felcsut and a childhood friend of Orban.
Meszaros, who Forbes estimated last year was worth $1.6billion (£1.3bn), was once asked for the secrets of his rise from an early life fitting gas and water pipes. “God, good luck and Viktor Orban,” he said.
The Pancho Arena, though, has always been a decadent cog in Orban’s bigger plans for football.
Ferencvaros, Hungary’s most decorated club, now play at the 24,000-capacity Groupama Arena on the outskirts of Budapest, while Debrecen can call a 20,000-capacity stadium finished in 2014 home. There have also been impressive venues built for Fehervar, MTK and Honved, whose stylish stadium is named after Jozsef Bozsik, another Hungarian footballing great of the 1950s.
The majority of Hungary’s shiny new stadiums have not been funded directly from the national purse but instead through a corporate tax scheme introduced by Orban in 2011. Hungarian companies can make contributions to sporting bodies and clubs, including teams in handball, basketball, water polo and ice hockey, in lieu of paying tax on their profits. Up to 70 per cent of corporate taxes can be written off.
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Critics of Orban — and they get often shouted down in a country where the state is said to have de facto control of 80 per cent of the media — believe the scheme merely takes money away from the government into areas that best suit the prime minister.
Analysis in 2021 from 24.HU, an independent news website in Hungary, estimated that £2.17billion had gone to sporting bodies via the tax policy across the previous decade.
More than 1,000 football clubs benefited but none more so than Orban’s favourites, Puskas Akademia. It was said they have received £86million of funding in the past 10 years. The next club in line? Mezokovesd Zsory, whose president is Andras Tallai, Hungary’s secretary of state for parliamentary affairs and taxation.
“People can get really upset about the spending we see on these projects,” adds Balazs. “It might not come from the central budget and it looks like a private sponsorship, but in fact, it is just private money that has not been paid as tax. It is a way of redirecting corporate money through sponsorship.”
The enormous investment has not brought the desired changes to matchdays in Hungary.
Attendances have not boomed to watch a domestic league that UEFA, European football’s governing body, ranks as the 25th best in its coefficients (behind those in Cyprus and Serbia) and the Pancho Arena rarely sees crowds climb into four figures no matter how many European ground-hoppers it might attract.
An official attendance of 2,024 was recorded for Israel’s Euro 2024 qualifier against Switzerland there last week, including Orban, who wasted little time in making the event a political victory. “Hungary is an island of peace,” he said, welcoming an Israeli team currently unable to play its home games in Tel Aviv for security reasons.
Yet there is also the underlying darkness to Hungarian football that Orban has allowed to go unchallenged.
The Carpathian Brigade, a group of black-shirted ultras who follow Hungary’s national team games with government approval, were behind the homophobic and racist chanting during Euro 2020 games in Budapest that resulted in UEFA ordering the Hungarian FA to play two home matches behind closed doors.
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Monkey chants were also heard during England’s 4-0 win in the Puskas Arena later in 2021, primarily aimed at Raheem Sterling and Jude Bellingham, before the return fixture a few weeks afterwards saw Hungary fans involved in clashes against police inside Wembley. World football governing body FIFA gave out its own fine of more than £150,000 and again ordered Hungary to play games without supporters present.
Such actions are never condemned by the Hungarian government and it is typically the policies of Orban — hardline anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ — that present a banner for its nationalist ultras to march behind.
Next summer will likely pose headaches for the German authorities after Hungary completed an impressive qualification campaign on Sunday night. They hold skipper Szoboszlai as their national hero but can also call upon Bournemouth’s Milos Kerkez and Attila Szalai of German club Hoffenheim in an improving team.
Then there is Zsolt Nagy, a 30-year-old midfielder who turns out weekly for Puskas Akademia in front of Orban, a regular in those sumptuous stands his policies helped fund.
The Pancho Arena is a legacy of sorts but, for all its beauty, it’s not one that wins Orban universal approval in Hungary.
(Top photo: Ben McShane – Sportsfile/UEFA via Getty Images)