Yesterday’s victory of the French national team over the Croatians has roiled certain segments of Hungarian society. The large number of black players on the French side inevitably became a topic of debate with racist overtones. The ethnically diverse French or, for that matter, German team, was contrasted with the ethnic purity of the Croats. Right-wing journalists began groping for definitions of what constitutes a Hungarian, a Croat, a Frenchman, and most of them came to the conclusion that the French team wasn’t really French.
The debate actually began before the final game, when István Hollik (KDNP), the unsuccessful candidate for Budapest’s electoral district #1, decided to share his brilliant ideas on the impending French-Croatian encounter. For Hollik, who has promulgated xenophobic propaganda for months, the game between the two sides was a struggle between a “migrant country” and “a Christian country proud of its national identity.” He indicated that the outcome of the game would send a message to Europe. Hollik was surely hoping that the proud Christian Croatia would be victorious, which would then send the message that ethnic purity coupled with Christianity is the way to go. It didn’t turn out that way.
After the game was over, with a resounding victory for the French, András Bencsik, one of the organizers of the peace marches, tried to console the Croats by saying that if they had had to face only real Frenchmen, they would have been the winners. These and similar Facebook entries elicited hundreds and thousands of racist comments, which in turn prompted the usual reaction from the liberal side. Several critics called these comments “far-right racist rant,” which ignores the skill and achievement of the individual players and concentrates on the color of their skin. “These are no fans, they are not patriots, but outright racists,” said András Jámbor of Mérce.
This and similar expressions of condemnation didn’t stop a certain László Szilágyi from crying over the inevitable decline of the game in the future. FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) for a number of years has been trying to promote the game in African countries, with little success. Yet, as of 2026, the “African quota” will be enlarged from the present five teams to nine, while Europe will gain only three extra slots. The result will be a general decline in the quality of the game. As Szilágyi put it, “lean years are ahead.” This prognostication is confusing. On the one hand, the Hungarian right resents black players on European teams, indicating that they are the reason these teams win, while on the other, it believes that their participation in the sport will lower its overall quality.
Perhaps the strangest piece of writing on the subject was a long pseudo-scientific “study” by Gergely Szilvay, pictured with sunglasses and a panama hat. His masterpiece is titled “Is the French national team made up of Frenchmen? Was Hungary’s Golden Team made up of migrants?” Szilvay can tolerate a few “other nationalities” on a national team, but if more than half of the 23 men chosen are “comprised of others, then something is not right.” What bothers Szilvay, of course, is not the “other nationalities” but that these players are not white. In his opinion, “questions concerning the composition of the French team can be considered to be racist in the true sense of the word only if it is coupled with holding the black players inferior” to Europeans. He is certainly not, he argues, a racist because he doesn’t hold anything against “those players with non-French-sounding names because they played instead of the French.” In brief, as Szilvay sees is, the French national team wasn’t French because the black players, who with two exceptions were all born in France, didn’t look like Frenchmen. They were not white.
At this point, perhaps because he realized that this is racism pure and simple, he moved on to distinguish between old and newer immigrants. The members of the famous Golden Team, the Mighty Magyars, were Hungarians despite the fact that many of them had German, Slovak, or Serbian names. They were echt Hungarians because their ancestors had arrived in Hungary 200 years earlier. They had time to assimilate and “become” Hungarians. If the blacks from Africa who have recently settled in France stick around for 200 to 300 years, they can then be considered part of indigenous population, claims Szilvay. Two or three generations is just not enough. In his opinion, second-, even third-generation immigrants face “serious identity problems.” They live in a strange transitory state. Of course, Szilvay is talking through his hat. Second- and third-generation immigrants in the United States show no signs of an identity crisis and readily intermarry with others coming from elsewhere. At the end of his piece, Szilvay tries to define the concept of nation and comes down on the side of “ties of blood” being necessary for a nation to exist. If that is the case, these strangers from Africa can never become part of the French nation, not even after 300 years.
The World Cup inspired others to expound on the love of sports in general and, of course, football in particular as a litmus test for political views. “Liberal worms” and “liberal eunuchs” hate sports because they have bad memories of gym classes; they were geeks whom other normal students detested. Now they try to compensate and look down on those patriotic right-wingers who enjoy the normal pleasures of life. This wisdom was in reaction to a couple of Hungarian intellectuals who dared to confess that they are not particularly interested in football.
A lot of people have gone mad in Hungary. Perhaps the combination of the summer heat and all these football games had an ill effect on their brains. Life, thank God, is simpler than that. Some people like the game while others don’t. Fidesz supporters should also get accustomed to the idea that even liberal geeks have the right to exist.
