Here is Orbán’s Christmas interview about his favourite topic: soccer

Hungary’s football is “alive and well”, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in an interview published by the daily Nemzeti Sport on Friday.

In his interview, the prime minister said he had no doubts “even for a moment” concerning the revival of Hungary’s football, but said “still, it was in football that I made the greatest mistake in the past ten years: we built a stadium for 64,000 visitors rather than for 90,000 . we were tight-spirited, and that’s wrong.”

The reason Hungarian football “is good is not that suddenly the system of academic training has become better or we have better trainers . but because the whole country has moved in the same direction: we have started upwards,” he said, adding that he was referring “not only to the economy, but to culture, the arts, and science, too”. He said “a desire for a higher-living is now present in Hungary, in the life of the individual, and in small communities, too”.

Concerning Hungary’s football academies, the prime minister said the system had arrived “at the end of an era” and their operations and financing would change considerably, putting the focus on achievement. “We will not focus on what happens at the academies but on the players that come out of them,” he added.

Orbán said the sports academies would continue to be supervised by the state, but “we will now shift to an output system and if that works we could consider another arrangement.” He also said he was waiting for an era of his childhood to return, in which “there were no academies just clubs.”

Clubs today are “under such financial pressure that if they have to choose they will prefer the first team to succession . they don’t have enough money yet to afford running an academy,” Orbán said. He also added that the academy system was a “guarantee of tomorrow . a great help to sports . unless the clubs are strong enough, we need the state-run academy system.”