#Hungary

In the 1950s, Hungary was a complete duality.

Their football was meticulously packaged behind the Iron Curtain and was dispatched spectacularly around the world, wowing European audiences at the Olympic Games, the FIFA World Cup and at Wembley as well as in South America on tours.

Yet the beautiful football of Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Zoltan Czibor hid a very ugly truth back home.

As Puskas dazzled the world with a brilliant dragback at Wembley, the Stalinist regime back home killed more of its own people than any Soviet satellite state.

As Sandor Kocsis top scored and lit up the 1954 FIFA World Cup, the Hungarian Revolution was brewing back on the streets of Budapest.

And as Nandor Hidegkuti revolutionised the sport of football in his false nine position, Hungary crumbled under the brutal Soviet rule.

Pertinent as it has been for a while, football is one of the greatest escapes the world has to offer. For Hungary in the 1950s that has perhaps rung truer than any other nation in any other period in history.

They boasted some of the best players in world football, a talented, well-educated crop of coaches and delivered space age digital football of incisive, fluid attacking movements in a weathered analogue world.

They won Olympic Gold at the Helsinki Games in 1952 and, two years later, reached their second World Cup final.

How did they get there? How did it all come to a gruesome end?

00:00 Introduction
02:25 Magical
04:40 Jimmy Hogan
06:15 Dori Kurschner
07:55 Hugo Meisl
09:10 1938 FIFA World Cup
11:45 Gusztav Sebes
13:40 Dynamo Moscow
15:35 Bela Guttman
17:25 Erno Erbstein
20:45 Honved
23:10 Marton Bukovi
26:20 Helsinki
28:30 England
31:50 1954
37:50 Aftermath
41:35 Legacy

Voice: Jake Doyle
Words: Jake Doyle
Edit: Jake Doyle

What If Football is a form of footballing storytelling that takes the audience down a different path to our current reality.

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