On Hungary’s “Black Thursday” and Euro Cup 2012

When Debrecen took out FC Fehérvár 2-1 in the increasingly misnamed Hungarian Super Cup on Thursday, it looked like just another match between just another two hapless teams in just another seemingly hopeless post-commie era football league. And it may very well have been exactly that, a crying shame for another Central Eastern European nation’s game and representative of a worsening of Hungary’s chances to co-host Euro Cup 2012.

The Debrecen/Fehérvár match acted as a coda to a devastating twelve hours in football last week on what local journalists are already pessimistically (artistically pessimistically, in that uniquely Hungarian way) calling “Black Thursday.” Corruption didn’t kill the Magyar cats, but rather rampant incompetence in the front office and on the field.

The notorious, infamous and most celebrated Hungarian club Ferencváros and new championship division squad Vác suffered ignominy of the most lunk-headed kind when the Hungarian appellate licensing committee announced the rejection of their paperwork. The green-and-white, the team most often Hungary’s representative in European tournaments and a championship-division squad for 107 years, was simply defeated by paperwork. The most badly-kept secret in Hungarian football and most assuredly the reason for the application’s rejection is Ferencváros’ financial problems, most definitely not due to corruption of any sort.

The Hungarian FA now has a lose-lose situation on its hands. They can stick to their guns and dump Ferencváros and thereby dump prestige and probably cause the burning of FTC’s entire home district; alternatively, they can overturn the unappealable (yeah, right) decision, thus showing the “malleability” of the “structure” of Hungarian football’s “legal” “organization.”

Meanwhile, on the pitch Black Thursday evening, Ferencváros rival and perhaps Hungary’s no. 2 franchise Újpest marked Skipper Bertalan Bicskei’s inaugural match with a UEFA Cup qualifying round loss to FC Vaduz of Lichtenstein.

In Budapest.

By a score of 4-0.

Via a spokesperson, Bicskei had just enough time to blame his assistant manager (and now Újpest head Valére Billen) before resigning after a run of about three weeks and what local English-language daily The Budapest Sun is calling “one of the worst performances in [Újpest’s] 121-year history.”

Also on the table that day was Fehérvár’s 1-0 “face-saving” in the other Hungarian UEFA Cup match. The white castlers overcame mighty Kairat Almaty of Kazakhstan. Unfortunately, Fehérvár had lost earlier in the week in the game that mattered, 1-0, to Hungarian defending champs Debrecen. Thanks to Thursday’s result, Fehérvár has been bounced.

At this point, the Hungarian fan, if still listening, shakes his weary head. It’s not quite a new low point, as carrion sports media here (and they’re all carrion here, believe me), are rushing to have it – no, no, that honor has to the late-season FTC-Debrecen match of 2003 which had Ferencváros supporters come onto the pitch post-game and attack members of both teams – but recent events reveal just how undeserving of Euro Cup hosting privileges the Hungarian football association may be.

For those of you keeping score at home. In the Euro Cup 2008 race, it’s

• Italy, whose corruption problems are currently well-publicized;

• a joint bid by Hungary and Croatia, the latter of which has not suffered scandal issues yet (yet!); and

• a joint bid by Poland and Ukraine.

Could the latter now be considered front-runner, despite the reported massive top-to-bottom scrubbing going on in Polish football right now? Ukraine was the feel-good story of the World Cup tournament and boasts an up-and-coming program. Perhaps this bid should be no. 1 at present, but one wonders what sort of mouldering skeletons there are in Ukrainian closets…