The government is planning to spend hundreds of billions of forints more on building stadiums while football clubs have received as much as 500 billion forints (EUR 1.6bn) of public money through the system of tax preferences for companies that donate to football teams, the opposition Democratic Coalition (DK) said on Sunday.
Rather than improve the state of Hungarian football with better facilities, the government has dragged the sport down, party board member Judit Földi told a press conference.
The example of Croatia, with a population of just 4 million, has shown that professional footballers can achieve good results even without stadiums built for hundreds of billions, she said.
While for Hungary, even qualifying for the World Cup remains a dream.
Földi insisted that the state should let the clubs operate on a market basis. The money granted to them through tax allowances in the past eight years would have been enough to reform the entire education sector, she said.
While there is no expectation from clubs to be successful and operate in a sustainable way, some players are paid extraordinary sums, she said. The result is that the Hungarian national team stands lower in the global rankings than at any point during the Gyurcsány government, she added.
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Source: MTI
