Siamo una superpotenza sportiva: calcio e politica in Ungheria da Horthy a Kádár (1924-1969)

The principal aim of this thesis, written in collaboration with ELTE University of Budapest and the PhD School of Studi Storici, is to investigate the history of football in Hungary between 1924 and 1969, and especially its usage as propaganda and soft power tool. From the troubled first after-war years to the People’s Republic, the excellence of Hungarian football granted the different successive governments a powerful instrument to improve the state’s image towards the neighbouring countries, encouraging new and deeper relationships. Furthermore, while after the Trianon Treaty (1920), Hungary had become a little country, almost insignificant under the political point of view, thanks to the sport it could retrieve a glorious past, reinforcing the sense of identity and belonging, in particular towards Hungarian minority groups in neighbouring states. The political use of football reaches his peak in the Fifties, when the Prime Minister Imre Nagy could affirm in Parliament that Hungary was a “sport superpower”. Even though the correlation between football and politics culminated in this period, the use of sport was prior to the socialist’s government, and crossed the whole Age of the Extremes. This theory as supported by a long research in various Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Swiss archives, compared also with the coeval press. With these premises, the thesis represents an original approach to the field of studies as the majority of the analyses on Hungarian football is limited to the national perspective, barely mentioning the connection with nearby countries, thus providing a picture limited to the Danube dimension. Starting from the Olympics of Paris (1924), debut of the Hungarian national team after the First World War, the research moves along six diachronic chapters crossing the whole Hungarian twentieth century, until December 1969 when the National team, losing against Czechoslovakia, failed to reach the qualification to World Cup in Mexico (1970)