Miklós Zeidler

English Influences on Modern Sport in Hungary

Part 2

 

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On 22 April 1874, Esterházy started a series of articles under the heading "Athletics" in the hunting and racing paper Vadász- és Versenylap. His by-line for these articles was the eloquent pseudonym "Viator" - wayfarer - which was intended as a reference both to his globe-trotting past and to the term "pedestrians" (i.e. walkers) that the English had used for professional athletes during the early part of the 19th century. In 17 articles published over a sevenmonth period, he wrote about various "popular" forms of physical exercise, i.e., accessible to a wide public. As he wrote in the very first of these:

Undeniably, certain "sports" in our country enjoy a high level of participation - though, alas, only those branches of sport whose doors are open pre-eminently to the upper - or, more accurately, wealthier - classes [...] Everybody knows that racing, the chase, coursing, stalking and bear-hunting, for one thing, are hugely expensive and, for another, tacitly presume the ownership of large estates.

These recreations, therefore, were merely "aristocratic passions", which "lend sport an appearance of not being for the people." That is damaging, however, for "'exclusive' [sic!] sport and 'popular' sport [...] are brothers." Gymnastics, introduced in Hungary in emulation of Prussia, was only made compulsory in academic secondary schools; riding, on the other hand, was costly. Consequently, the wider public was excluded from regular physical exercise: 

What is left is the coffee-house and politics, or at best what is left, with regard to our university youth, are the innocent, albeit sometimes rowdy protests provoked by the 'sport' of torchlight processions and suchlike demonstrations; but then, that is again succeeded by the coffee-house, billiards, the ale house, and we can only thank heavens if we are not subjected, in line with other Parisian innovations, to the tipsy horrors of 'absynthe', the corrupter and curse of French youth, poisoner of its manhood. 

To counter these temptations, and with both moral and national educational intentions, Esterházy set out his program for popularising athletics: 

Here, in Hungary, we have to raise 'athleticism' (my apologies for the long word), have to raise muscularity to a national religion, raising altars to it in our schools, in our academies, among more mature men, in the temple of our national institutions. Such a glorification of muscularity does not mean roguery; does not mean crude outbursts of raw strength at the expense of intellectual vigour; that trusty old adage 'mens sana in corpore sano' still stands true. For one another, not against one another. 

And, with a reference to the dimensions that he was hoping for the movement, he added: "Let us start at the bottom, start early, and let us make athletics training widely popular."2 A fortnight later came a philippic against "our physical apathy". "The 'Hungarian belly' is a truly national 'speciality'," he mocked, and yet it was not the case that Hungarians lacked a talent for sport: "If [a Hungarian] sets about a given physical discipline with heart and soul, whether it be riding, fencing, horse racing or pistol shooting, he will soon take it to a degree of perfection that is not to be sniffed at." Competition was capable of whetting in the lazy population an appetite to set off on the road to splendid results, a thought he developed this thought three weeks later: "'Competition' is a true magic wand that is capable of producing an invigorating spark in even an apathetic lump of wood. Competition is the 'motor' of all healthy public business." What, after all, were the turf, school, commerce, literary careers, the elections of parliamentary representatives, the  contest between a pack of hounds and a fox, but competition? The ancient Greeks and the participants in medieval tournaments had also competed. "We only wish to occupy ourselves with unarmed athletic sports," Esterházy pointed out, "where the flannel shirt and light footwear rule in place of iron and steel."
The next installment surveyed the various events that were considered to fall within the purview of athletics:

What makes up the programme at an athletics contest? In the stricter sense: 1) walking races; 2) running races; 3) steeple chasing; 4) pole vaulting; 5) throwing events; 6) high jump; 7) boxing; 8) swimming; and 9) the type of fencing that is known as 'assaut d'armes'. This last, being an armed form of physical exercise, will only be mentioned by the by in these lines. 

He highlighted the importance of boxing, which he personally considered a sine qua non of both athletics and gymnastics, providing a short summary of its rules and history. He also wrote about English cricket and American baseball, which he felt - given that they were ball games which had value as physical exercise and were played within a framework of rules - would be an easier way of accustoming schoolboys to sport than formal and compulsory gymnastics. He went on, in no less than five articles, to familiarise readers with the ins and outs of organising competitions, from the correct preparations of the ground, to endorsing efforts to ensure that there was a "fair pair of hands" to bestow prizes on the champions at the end of a contest. He gave an account of serious and mock swimming competitions and also the hare and hounds' paperchases that were then in vogue in Britain. He also cast an affectionate smile on the prizes being offered at an athletics meeting in a small town: 

1 Gladstone bag, 1 meerschaum pipe, 1 cricket ball, 1 ditto bat, 1 pair ditto boots, 1 photo album, 1 hunting knife, 1 inkstand, 1 brooch, 1 cigar holder, 1 tobacco pouch, 100 cigars, 2 teacups, 1 golden pencil, 1 set of cufflinks, 1 pair of hairbrushes, etc., etc., ad infinitum! 

In the same article, he also provided a basic guide for future athletes on the sportsmanlike approach to competition: "They should have a desire for glory without false shame. They should want to win and outdo their competitors, but not be ashamed of losing. In athletics it is just as noble to lose as to win." Esterházy stated that the spread of athletics in Great Britain had needed no more than two or three decades, and that crucial role had been played by club competitions. (By then 226 permanent athletics clubs were in operation, fully one third of them in and around London). Hungary, too, therefore needed a "focal point", a "banner", an athletics organisation around which young people might gather:

if there were a centre, an association, a club (either in the capital or in a substantial provincial city), there would be the starting-point for introducing the spirit of athletics in our Hungarian homeland. Let us unite, then - and get to work! [...] So, let us form athletics associations as the alpha and omega of the spirit of athletics. 

The culmination of this train of thought came with an article on 28 October, in which he set out the tasks of such a future association: the organisation of contests, the distribution of prizes, broadening the compass of gymnastics, the introduction of boxing, the organisation of athletics for adults and students, and the sponsorship of student races (e.g., by giving prizes). At the same time, he let it be known that "the 'London Athletics Club' has already, with the most courteous alacrity, promised its co-operation to a future 'Hungarian Athletics Association', and will extend a friendly hand of greeting to our country's first club."
As the articles appeared, a growing band of people began to form an interest in social sport. Esterházy generally sought to make contact with prospective athletics enthusiasts. In the autumn of 1874, he gave a talk to a reading circle at the University of Budapest about his sporting experience and took the opportunity to announce the foundation of the Magyar Athletikai Club; on 9 November, he held a meeting at the National Riding School. Lajos Molnár, a law student, attended as a correspondent for the Reform newspaper. He immediately lent his support and was to become the count's right-hand man, confidant and, in time, a member of the MAC's governing body.10 Molnár, who did not have a sportsman's build - indeed was rather puny by constitution - placed himself at Esterházy's disposal while he was at university and even for a time when he worked as a civil servant in local finances. The main fruit of their joint efforts was to lay the basis for organising and publishing material on athletics in Hungary. After the final piece in Esterházy's series appeared on 18 November, the baton was passed to Molnár, who went on to flood the daily press with popularising articles and lectures on outdoor sports in the capital and the provinces. Esterházy meanwhile tried to drum up support in more élite circles.
It was a sign of their success that members of the nascent club virtually besieged the National Riding School when it reopened its doors on 15 March  1875.11 The youngsters came to an amicable agreement on a way and a timetable for sharing the premises: the arena on the ground floor and the smaller hall on the first floor were to be given over to gymnasts and fencers for 3 days, then to the "pedestrians" (walkers, runners, jumpers) and boxers for the next 3 days. The MAC (Hungarian Athletic Club) used the same venue to hold its inaugural meeting on 8 April, with close to 300 members in attendance.

Though the presence of the aristocrats was considerable, they were by no means dominant. Naturally, Esterházy was elected president, but even though almost one in two of the founding members who paid the largest membership fees were from the upper classes, they only made up one quarter of the club's steering committee.12 The overwhelming majority of ordinary members - those who actually played sports, but paid only the minimum annual membership - were from the traditional middle classes. Even in later years, the MAC did not become any more inclusive than this; up until the Second World War, indeed, it was an unwritten rule that admission to the club was granted only to applicants who were Christian and possessed a schoolleaving certificate. Most of them were of middle- and upper-class background.
The MAC held its first public athletics meet in the presence of many dignitaries on 6 May 1875, between 3.30 and 5.30 p.m., in the courtyard of the Neugebäude, the huge barracks demolished at the end of the 19th century, which Joseph II had built close to what became the site of the Parliament building. The events were run in the following order: 100 yards sprint (heats), shot put, boxing (elimination bouts), 120 yards hurdles (heats), 100 yards sprint (final), long jump, 2 miles run, high jump, 120 yards hurdles (final), boxing (final). As the extant photograph shows, the strip of these early athletes consisted of either street shoes or gym shoes, long-legged white ducks, long-sleeved, high-necked flannel Garibaldi shirt, a gymnast's belt and sash, along with a cap.13 That same year, the MAC worked out rules and regulations for its competitions in eight sports (gymnastics on apparatus, walking, boxing, fencing, throwing, wrestling, ball games, swimming) and thereby tried to keep its members informed about new types of physical exercise and, indirectly, to put in a claim to govern these sports.14 This was a significant stage in an increasingly acrimonious dispute that was developing between the bodies to which gymnasts and athletes belonged, and which the respective associations that organised championships were to wage bitterly at the beginning of the twentieth century. Advocates of athletics argued that "With gymnasts, moving mechanically as they do and unfamiliar with the fire of competition as they are, individuality is relegated to the background." In the eyes of gymnasts, by contrast, athletics was nothing more than

an unhealthy outgrowth of rational gymnastics [...] which is based on human vanity and weakness [...] which is just as much a threat to genuinely instructive gymnastics as when the barbaric boxing contests of the pancratists ousted the pentathlon among the Greeks of old.

Nationwide propagandising started almost as soon as the club was founded. In that first season of competition, long-distance rowing was staged on the Danube, from Budapest to Komárom; long-distance race walking also started with the 85-mile Budapest - Székesfehérvár - Balatonfüred race of 23 - 25 July, in which at the starting line - in accordance with the customs of "bona fide walking" - the entrants pledged their word with a handshake as their guarantee that they would not infringe the rules. One of the competitors had himself transported by cart for part of the way, and was therefore disqualified; he was also expelled by the MAC, and the decision to do so was published in both the domestic and foreign press. Lajos Porzsolt, the winner, was welcomed in Balatonfüred with the sounds of the Rákóczi March and mortar rounds, a triumphal arch and a welcoming speech. That evening the theatre put on a gala performance, and a banquet for 300 was held in his honour. A year later, an ovation, gun salute and laurel wreath greeted István Bendik on his victory in an 81-mile walking race on the Budapest - Hatvan - Parádfürdő route. Recognising the propaganda value of the extraordinary interest that was shown in long-distance races (swimming, walking and, later on, cycling), Esterházy conceived a plan for a demonstration collective walk by MAC members in the autumn of 1880, all the way from Balatonfüred via Klagenfurt and Trieste to Fiume. That plan was eventually dropped, but on 7 August 1881, at the Chain Bridge in Budapest, a club delegation ceremonially welcomed fellow member Iván Zmertych on his completing the 1,530-km (956-mile) walk from Paris to Budapest in four weeks.
From the 1880s on, it was the distance swimmers on the Balaton who came to the fore. Kálmán Szekrényessy swam across the lake covering the distance from Siófok to Balatonfüred in 6 hours 45 minutes on 29 August 1880. Later on, he willingly pitted his strength against foreigners, though he generally lost those contests. Another interesting club initiative was an obstacle swimming race that was staged at Balatonfüred in the summer of 1884.18 As the 1870s turned into the 1880s, there was a growing interest in athletics, with local clubs springing up in the bigger cities, including Kolozsvár, Debrecen, Győr, Sopron, Székesfehérvár and Pécs, no doubt assisted by a pamphlet entitled Útmutató athletikai klubok alakítására (Guidance for the Formation of Athletics Clubs) that the MAC published in 1876. All the while, Esterházy and Molnár continued to popularise athletics through their writings. Already back in 1875, a Gyalogolási kalauz (A Guide to Pedestrianism) appeared in print by Viator, part an explanatory dictionary under 102 headings and part a guide on organising races and suitable clothing. It is here that the first "official" definition of athletics is to be found: "'Pedestrianism': the kinds of athletic events comprising race walking, running, jumping, hurdles and obstacle races, and throwing." 
A good deal more ambitious was the volume Athletika, likewise published in 1875, in which Molnár, who dedicated the work to Esterházy and indeed drew extensively on his mentor's thinking and even his texts, gave a detailed presentation of what had led up to the movement's establishment, its goals, its achievements and its present situation. The author was clearly preoccupied at the time with aspects of the natural philosophy and, to use a modern term, historical sociology of his subject, as it is precisely with passages with those flavours that he goes well beyond the contents of Esterházy's newspaper articles of the previous year. The "Introduction", for which Molnár chose a quotation from Darwin as the epigraph, is a veritable philosophical mini-disquisition on the struggle for life; whereas the chapter headed "Athletics" is a lyrical hymn of praise to the creative striving for the beautiful, the good and the perfect. Molnár goes on to ruminate about national character, painting a somewhat idealised picture of the English and managing to be quite scathing about other nations. In his view, England and the English were characterised by "financial and intellectual greatness", physical strength and skill, a large capacity for work, wholesomeness of character, "quiet manliness", cool-headedness, pluckiness, resolve, progressive attitudes, "easygoing freedom", honesty, love of family, profound intelligence and civility - all attributes that the author would have been more than happy to discern in his fellow countrymen. Molnár was a good deal less charitable in his scoring for other European nations. Admittedly, the French, he suggested, were strong, tenacious, flexible, polite and honest, but "happy-go-lucky, hot-blooded, sarcastic". Germans might not be happy-go-lucky, it was true, but they were "pensive, phlegmatic by temperament", slow, servile, coarse, immoderate, boastful and pushy, whereas Italians were fanciful, hedonistic, passionate, empty-headed, vain and lavish, Russians were downright liars and drunks, and Spaniards were haughty, obstinate, extravagant, lazy, dreamy, capricious and presumptuous. Molnár was of the opinion that the introduction of the British educational system, with its provision for physical exercise, and of athletics could only redound to the good of all "developing" nations, and hence the Hungarians, too. It should be all the easier for a Hungarian to adopt the correct example, since "he is born to be a victorious, virile, self-confident and assertive person":

The Hungarian physique is supremely fitted for training and improvement, being bigboned, strong but lithe. The dominant trait in our nation is virile and dignified; seriousness and good humour are basic traits among Hungarians.

Equally, the Hungarian's "sanguine temperament" demanded regular physical exercise, because in its absence "this sanguineousness can carry him into excess in so many ways."

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The triumphal march of football

Two stories have gained currency about the introduction of football in Hungary. One of these is found in the memoirs of swimmer Alfréd Hajós (gold medallist in the 100 meter and 1,200 meter freestyle at the Athens Olympics in 1896). In this version, the first football was brought to Hungary by Ferenc Ray, an engineering student in Zurich, when he came home for the Christmas holidays in 1896. At the request of Ferenc Stobbe, one of his father's colleagues, he dropped in one evening on the Budapest Gymnastics Club (BTC) in Markó Street, not far from the Parliament building, when they happened to be holding a training session:

In a disciplined fashion, gymnasts, wrestlers and boxers were diligently performing their prescribed exercises. All at once, Ferenc Stobbe appeared in the doorway with his young friend, who without further ado - with no prior announcement - tossed in a football among them. All at once, the discipline and order broke down; everybody was trying to snatch the ball for himself. In the process, the ball dropped onto the floor, at which point the players instinctively passed it on with their feet. That was how Hungarian football was born on the evening of 18 December 1896. The new game became popular in no time at all, yet bit by bit, the kicking and scrimmaging started to attain such dimensions that several of the gymnasium's windows and lights fell to the ground with great crashes. Only a strident yell of "Stop!" from Károly Iszer, the club's manager, cut short the kick-about, which by then had degenerated to brawling. He then ordered the panting players to sit, and Ferenc Ray gave them a talk about the popularity of football abroad, the game's points of interest and beauties, and finished by acquainting them with the rules of the game.

The other version speaks of a Károly Löwenrosen (Lányi), a carpenter, who returned from the United States in 1895, bringing two footballs with him. Löwenrosen put together a football team from the members of a railway workers' male choir, then after three months of training, set up a match for them. As recorded by Löwenrosen himself, later universally known as "Csarli" (Charlie) by those who worked in the factories and attended the grounds around Hungária Boulevard: 

We put a strip together by cutting down the legs of long johns and blue factory overalls and patching our boots. On the day of the match, however, we had terrible luck, because by the morning of 1 November 1896, 25 cm [10 inches] of snow had fallen. Given that, we were very surprised that some 300 spectators were still curious about the game. The players were loath to undress, but after much persuasion they were finally ready to play in overcoats and boots [...] The big match lasted just 20 minutes, because in that time three ankles were fractured and further play had to be abandoned. I was ostracised by all the wives [...] and for six months could not show myself among them because I was a murderer in their eyes. 

It is likely, though, that neither the self-oblivious kick-around by those at the BTC, nor the "battle in the snow" waged close to the present MTK ground, was the first appearance of football in Hungary. As I have already noted, in 1879, Lajos Molnár's book on athletic exercises presented football; in 1886, Kornél Szokolay published two small articles in the Képes Sport-naptár (Illustrated Sporting Calendar) and in a sports weekly entitled Herkules. They may have contained a few inaccuracies but they still provided fairly detailed descriptions of the game. From the early 1890s, the magazine Sport-Világ (Sports World) began to carry news about football matches abroad, and from 1895 it was explicitly advocating the game.31 Salon és Sport was even faster off the mark, for it had already put out an illustrated description of the game in its December 1891 issue. In 1896, a booklet, Az angol rugósdi (English Football), was published, written by Mihály Bély, trainer for the Budapest Gymnastics Club (Budapesti [Budai] Torna Egylet, BTE), though it appears to be about rugby rather than association football. There are also bits of data to suggest that football was already being played in Budapest secondary schools - or to be more specific, variants of it that no doubt also differed from one another - in the early 1890s. At all events, it is a documented fact that the Szabadtéri Játszó Társaság (Outdoor Games Society), run by pupils at the Calvinist grammar school in Lónyay Street, changed its name in 1889 to the Junior Football Game Association (Ifjúsági Labdarúgó-játék Egyesület), and the 1891 - 92 annual bulletin of the Catholic grammar school in Ilona Street mentions something called "foot- and fist-ball" as being one of the pupils' favourite pastimes. The man plainly responsible for the latter was the school's English teacher, Arthur Yolland, who was to play a key role in Hungarian football at a later date. At the state grammar school in Barcsay Street, football cropped up in the academic year 1893 - 94 on the initiative of the gymnastics master, Ferenc Collaud, and József Ottó introduced it at the Catholic grammar school in Markó Street in 1895.32 Indeed, the "presentation of the game of football" figured on the program of the MAC Winter fixture held on 8 December 1895.
Notwithstanding these sundry starting-points, football owed its early popularity largely to its being taken up by the BTC, already a highly prestigious club, with three of its members participants at the 1896 Olympics. The turn of the century in Hungary was still an era of all-round sportsmen, who took pleasure in cultivating quite disparate sports (cycling, tests of strength, events calling for speed and agility, and sometimes ball games), in some cases even becoming champions in them. It is not surprising that sportsmen like them, ever on the search for the new, should see both a challenge and competitive potential in football. They soon took to this new, and initially quite ferocious, game; and news quickly spread that the MAC, the Ludovika Military Academy, the Hungarian Swimming Club (Magyar Úszó Egylet, MÚE) and BTC were all planning football teams. The BTC arranged their first open-air training session, on 8 February 1897, at the Millennial Racetrack alongside the new Horse Racing Course. (Though it was to be demolished when the outdoor season ended in the previous year, sports clubs managed to save it by appealing to the metropolitan authorities, who, after admitting that there was no other racing facility of comparable quality in the city, permitted it to continue.35) Károly Iszer, the BTC president, stepped forward to take on the job of trainer, and for the occasion the players donned the two complete team strips that Stobbe had brought from abroad at his own expense. On 9 May, the two teams played a public match against one another, with the blue-and-whites beating the red-and-whites 5-0 - all the goals being scored by Ray, who was essentially the only person who really understood the game. Despite the driving rain, there were a hundred curious spectators. For the autumn, the whole racetrack was transformed: the football pitch had been put under grass, the areas for the athletics events were renovated, the cycling track was asphalted and given higher bankings on the turns, and new stands were put up. Although at that time it was still cycling that was followed with the greatest interest, a guest appearance in Budapest against BTC by the renowned Vienna Cricket and Football Club promised to be a plum event. The first official match between clubs was eagerly looked forward to. In an article announcing the match, Sport-Világ predicted a win for Vienna, though not without handing out a few compliments to the Hungarian players: alongside the Englishman Yolland, who was comfortable in any position on the field, Ray was "quick and inventive", Hajós "very useful", Ernő Lindner "distinguished by his determination, his tirelessness and a good eye", etc. The publicity had the desired effect, and on 31 October 1897 nearly 2,000 spectators - "experts, ladies, fellow sportsmen and laymen", the more genteel wearing top hats and equipped with field glasses - were present to watch as the players stepped out onto the "sandy, springy turf" of the Millennial Racetrack in the black-and-blue Vienna strip and the blue-and-white of BTC. The match lived up to expectations in every respect. No one was put out by the absence of nets on the goals, or the fact that the sand of the long-jump pit lay within the pitch, or even the fact that the referee for the game was Mr Lowe, the Viennese team's own manager, whose two sons were playing for the side. At three o'clock that afternoon, when "Alfréd Guttmann [...] tossed the ball to Ray, the captain" - football was under way in Hungary. There was never any doubt about the outcome (there were eight Englishmen playing for Vienna, whereas BTC had just Yolland and Thomas Ashton, and the rest had little in the way of skills), but the defeat by only two goals to nil was no disgrace at all. The public had a fine time, though they were hardly very discerning experts, as apart from the goal in each half of the game, they took the greatest pleasure in the wrestling holds applied by the robust Hungarian defence. The match created a stir in the Hungarian sports world, with the defeat not discouraging anyone. By the middle of November, there were footballers from four teams training at the Millennial Racetrack: in addition to BTC, there were players from Hungarian Gymnasts' Circle (Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre, MTK) MÚE and the Technical University Football Team (Muegyetemi Football Csapat, MFC). BTC's footballers were not selfish with their skills, and it became customary for club members to allow youngsters to join in at their training sessions. Over the ensuing months, numerous new football teams were formed, some within existing sports clubs, others apart from them, both in Budapest and in provincial towns. In this early period, players and teams were still learning from one another, and a huge advantage was gained by any club able to call on the services of a British or Austrian player. There could be no question as yet of having foreign trainers or sophisticated tactics; more important were enthusiasm and inter-team competitiveness. On 1 January 1898, BTC, MÚE and MFC welcomed the New Year with home matches; then, in early February, they went ahead with the first domestic inter-club matches. These encounters were played as challenge matches, where refusal would have been tantamount to turning tail and disgracing the club colours. (On the other hand, an individual could be a member of more than one club: Hajós, for example, played both for BTC and also, as an architecture student, for the MFC football team.) When MFC challenged BTC to a match on 6 February 1898, BTC sent their second team into action as a sign of their superiority to domestic rivals; since the university students won 5 - 0, a rematch became all-important to BTC, and their first team duly won that by 3 - 0 a few weeks later. Matches then came in quick succession, drawing also MAC, the Buda Football Team (Budai Football Csapat) and BBTE.
This heroic age was shaped by a spirit of genuine enthusiasm, and it was characterised by a friendly and good-humoured atmosphere. Football, being a team sport, was a powerful agent in creating a sense of community, and it exerted a remarkable influence on younger males. The delights of expending physical energy and the sheer aesthetics of movement were to be found in other sports as well, but football was practically the only one through which a shared experience of exertion, self-sacrifice, success alternating with failure, along with the excitement and liberating power of the game, could be obtained. Given that it was a nascent sport, a skilful player could soon stand out and win honours for himself and his team. All this combined to make football a magnet for young men. Pupils at secondary school were banned from participation in competitive sports organised by outside clubs, but it was not unknown for them to adopt aliases and even disguises to play. One such instance occurred on 16 April 1900, when BTC played host to the formidable Slavia of Prague at the Millennial Racetrack in front of 7,000 spectators. The Hungarian team had an agile goalkeeper, who appeared under the name "Other", wearing a glued-on false beard and moustache that could hardly have helped his performance.
A contemporary newspaper report documented the occasion when, on 31 December 1900, the BTC's players welcomed the new century with their selfabandoned revelling:

They went out to the Millennial ground in good humour on New Year's Eve, and they started playing a few minutes before midnight and carried on playing until the midnight chimes came to an end.

The "match", played on a snow-covered pitch and in a heavy snowfall, could not have lasted a quarter of an hour, but it was enough for them to declare that a Hungarian footballer, Gusztáv Faubel, had scored the first goal of the 20th century.

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Miklós Zeidler
teaches at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest and has published widely on the history of inter-war Hungary. His books include Sporting Spaces (1999, also in other languages), a guide to historic sports grounds in Budapest.