In black and white: this is where Hungarian football is at today

Vg.hu’s article reports about the current status of football and future perspectives. As the sports economics expert says, it is very unlikely that progress will be made in the near future, either regarding the national football team or clubs.

We have already written about Hungarian success stories, such as that of Zsolt Lőw, the recently hired assistant coach of Paris Saint-German, but as other news suggest, Hungarian football does not frequently succeed to make a hit.

Although more people visited and watched matches than last season, Mihály Muszbek sports economics expert says that radical changes are needed for future development and more efficient work. Hungarian football performance was, in fact, less successful and efficient than it could have been expected based on the teams’ position on the FIFA World Ranking Table.

As a consequence of this, the country’s UEFA-coefficient has decreased.

According to the sports economist, only successful training of younger generations can result in a long-term country – and Europe – wide success. As a comparison, France’s younger teams performed extraordinarily well in the U17 and U19 classes, while Hungarians could only make it to the best four once, in 2009.

The lack of success in this season is well-reflected in the national team’s total market value, which has decreased from EUR 51.7 million to EUR 35.65 million.

The top 3 most valuable and expensive Hungarian players are Péter Gulácsi (~EUR 8 million), Balázs Dzsudzsák (~EUR 3.5 million) and Ádám Szalai (~EUR 3 million).

As the sport economist claims, only 42 pc result was reached by refill national teams in the 2017/18 season, while this indicator has always been over 50 pc in the last three years. The decrease in the UEFA-coefficient from 1.875 to 1.625 resulted in a worse, 36th place at the European Ranking table.

Nevertheless, the drop in performance did not seem to affect spectators: on average, 18,000 fans visited the matches. The most visited was the Hungary-Portugal match with more than 800,000 viewers. 320,000 people were there at the Videoton-Ferencváros match this spring, which makes it the second most visited match this year.

The total deficit of the Hungarian league was HUF 100 million (~EUR 310,000). Seven clubs could finish with a positive bookkeeping result, while 6 clubs had to book deficit. The average gross income of the total number of employees was HUF 12,422 million (~EUR 38,000).

However, those 200 with the highest incomes can earn up to a yearly average of HUF 52.8 million (~EUR 160,000) – this is just as high as in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Belgium.

Source: Vg.hu