It was known as “the match of the century” although it was not a World Cup match nor was an Olympic medal at stake.
On paper, that match between England and Hungary on November 25, 1953 at Wembley Stadium was simply a friendly.
The final result was 6-3 in favor of the visiting team, which disappointed the more than 100,000 English fans who paid their ticket. Nándor Hidegkuti, playing as a sort of ‘false 9’, scored three goals and Hungary’s top star Ferenc Puskás two.
But beyond the result, the game displayed by the Hungarians at Wembley Stadium showed the world that, although the English had invented football, the visitors played “total football”, a denomination that Johan Cruyff’s Dutch patented 20 years later.
The Hungarians were already winning in the first minute of the game and from that moment everyone on the field saw how the visitors, led by Gustav Sebes, left their markers standing like light poles and created spaces out of nowhere to attack their rival thanks to the total disorientation of the English defenders.
One of the reasons for this disorientation was that the locals they were used to the fact that the number on the player’s jersey corresponded to a certain position on the field of playa preconception that the Hungarians destroyed by constantly changing places.
Although the local tie came 15 minutes into the first half, the result at halftime was already 4-2 for Hungary.
By the time the game ended, the statistics showed that for every England shot against the goal guarded by Gyula Grosics (5 in total) Hungary had fired seven against the goal guarded, with great difficulty, by Gil Merrick (35 in total).
The local team, led by Walter Winterbottom, had received a real refresher in the 90 minutes of play, showing the world that the English tactic was anchored in the past and the Hungarian technique looked to the future.
olympic champions
Before the match, all the bets favored the locals, who had never lost at Wembley. Its captain, Billy Wright, was considered one of the best defenders in the world.
But the visitors were not just any guest: they brought 24 unbeaten matches and two years before they had won the gold medal at the Helsinsky Olympics:
“We were already a great team, but it was during the Olympic Games that our football began to flow with real joy. It was a prototype of the ‘total football’ that the Dutch practiced. We had freedom of position and when we attacked, we all attacked, from the defenders even the forwards”, Puskás would tell some time later.
Bobby Robson, the English player and coach, was 20 years old in 1953 and although his debut in the English team was still four years away, he was one of the many spectators of the Hungarian superiority that day.
“We saw a style of play, a game system that we had never seen before. None of these players meant anything to us. We didn’t know about Puskás. All these fantastic players they came from Mars as far as we’re concerned.”
“We thought we would bring this team down: England at Wembley, we are the teachers, they are the students. It was absolutely backwards“.
This is how Robson summed up the feeling of the English that November 1953, and acknowledged that what was seen on the field of play changed the way of thinking of all those who were linked to English football.
The British press, for their part, highlighted the coordination of the Hungarians, achieved from playing together so often, the better physical condition of the visitors and their absolute understanding of the game. Of the locals, journalists said they had been good “by British standards” but that it had become clear that these standards were far behind what was happening on the Continent.
disparate futures
Six months after that football demonstration, the English traveled with revenge spirits to Budapest to play another friendly against Hungary. The result was even worse: 7 to 1 in favor of Gustav Sebes’s men.
In the World Cup in Switzerland that year, the Hungarians were the great favorites to win their first World Cup. When they won the first game with a resounding 9-0 against South Korea, this favoritism was consolidated.
The second match was 8-3 against West Germany, the team they would face again in the final.
But before the final game, Hungary had to dispatch to two Latin American giantsBrazil and Uruguay, whom they got rid of in the quarterfinals and semifinals respectively by the same result: 4-2 (Uruguay had also eliminated the English 4-2 in the quarterfinals).
But in the final the Germans surprised the Hungarians – and the world – as they would 20 years later with the other architects of “total football”, the Netherlands of the “clockwork orange”.
The match played on July 4, 1954 ended 3-2 for the Germans.
Two years later, Hungary would receive another blow, this time on its territory.
A student protest led to an uprising against Soviet power, which ended crushing militarilythe hungarian revolution months later. Puskás, who was in Spain playing with the Budapest Honved club when everything happened, defected with some of his teammates and stayed in the Iberian Peninsula.
In the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Hungary would finish third in their group and would not go beyond the first round. The same fate would befall England.
Meanwhile, Puskás would sign for those years with Real Madrid and joint to the Argentine Alfredo di Stefano they would form a lethal duo that would give the team from the Spanish capital five straight league championships and three European Cups.
After becoming a Spanish national in 1961, the Hungarian player represented Spain in the 1962 World Cup in Chile, but failed to score any goal in four games.
In that World Cup, Hungary and England met again and the victory was for those from Eastern Europe by 2-1, but both teams fell in the quarterfinals.
In the 1966 World Cup in England, the locals would consolidate the evolution that had begun after the Hungarian beatings in the previous decade, while their former executioner would fall again in the quarterfinals.
In that decade, English teams like Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham they adopted the tactics of that selection of Hungary and other clubs such as Manchester United began to play in European competitions for the first time, something that had not been welcomed before by the English soccer federation.
After his retirement as a player, Puskás had a mixed and varied performance as a coach (a career that led him to lead Paraguay, among other countries) and returned to Hungary, to stay, in 1993. He died in Budapest on November 17, 2006. .
The Hungarian team has not qualified for a World Cup since Mexico 86, where they did not go beyond the first round and fell 6-0 against the Soviet Union.
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