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”.
