The Magical Magyars

The Hungarian national team that played between 1950 and 1956 is widely regarded as one of the most influential sides of its era. Most of its players came from two Budapest clubs — Honvéd, the army club that had absorbed several of the leading Hungarian players in the late 1940s, and MTK, the older rivals. The combination produced a national team that played together in club football as well as for Hungary, with an unusual degree of cohesion and shared understanding.

The team's nickname in the English-speaking press was the "Magical Magyars". In Hungary, it was usually called the Golden Team. Its tactical contribution outlived its results, and the ideas it introduced — particularly the use of a deep-lying centre forward to break man-marking defences — would feed directly into total football and beyond.

The W-M formation, common in European football in the early 1950s, used a stopper centre back whose job was to mark the opposition centre forward. The Hungarian side broke that arrangement by playing its centre forward, Nándor Hidegkuti, much deeper than usual — well behind Puskás and Sándor Kocsis, the two inside forwards. The opposition centre back was left with a difficult choice. If he followed Hidegkuti into midfield, he opened space behind for the inside forwards to attack. If he stayed in defence, Hidegkuti had time and space in midfield to dictate play.

The principle was wider than one player. The Hungarian side moved fluidly across the pitch, with players exchanging positions and dragging opponents out of their assigned marks. József Bozsik, nominally a half-back, often pushed forward into the spaces vacated by Hidegkuti. The wingers tucked in to support the inside forwards. The whole team played a more flexible game than the W-M sides they faced, and the contrast was clearest when they came up against teams still playing strict man-to-man marking.

The Hungarian side's unbeaten run lasted from May 1950 until the 1954 World Cup final — over four years and thirty matches without defeat. The run included Olympic football gold at the Helsinki Games in 1952, where Hungary beat Yugoslavia 2-0 in the final, and several heavy wins over leading European sides. During the run, Hungary scored more than three goals per match on average and conceded fewer than one.

The team's strength was based on its players' shared club background, the unusually long time most of the squad had been playing together, and the freedom Sebes gave them to vary their positions. In an era when most national teams trained briefly before each match and played in rigid formations, Hungary's approach was unusual and effective in equal measure.

On 25 November 1953, Hungary played England at Wembley. England had never been beaten at home by a continental European side, and most English commentators expected another comfortable win against an unfamiliar opponent. Instead, Hungary won 6-3, in a result that became known as the Match of the Century. Hidegkuti scored a hat-trick from his deep-lying centre forward role; Puskás added a famous goal in which he dragged the ball back from England defender Billy Wright with the sole of his foot before scoring.

The match was a tactical lesson as well as a result. English football had not faced a team that moved its players out of position so deliberately, and the W-M structures that had served English clubs well for nearly thirty years had no answer to the Hungarian movement. The return match in Budapest the following May was even more one-sided — Hungary won 7-1, which remains England's heaviest international defeat. English football's response to the two matches shaped a generation of tactical thinking.

Hungary were the strong favourites for the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland. They beat South Korea 9-0 and West Germany 8-3 in the group stage, then beat Brazil 4-2 and Uruguay 4-2 in the knockout rounds. The semi-final against Uruguay was Uruguay's first defeat in a World Cup match. By the final, Hungary had scored twenty-five goals in five matches.

The final paired Hungary with West Germany again. Hungary went 2-0 ahead within eight minutes through Puskás and Zoltán Czibor. West Germany pulled the score back to 2-2 by half-time, then won the match 3-2 with a late goal from Helmut Rahn. The result, known in Germany as the Miracle of Bern, ended Hungary's unbeaten run and denied them the World Cup that most observers had expected them to win.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution broke the team apart. Several of the leading players, including Puskás, Kocsis and Czibor, were on tour with Honvéd when the uprising began. They did not return to Hungary, and FIFA initially banned them from playing for foreign clubs. After the suspensions were lifted, Puskás joined Real Madrid, where he won three European Cups; Kocsis and Czibor joined Barcelona. Most of the rest of the Hungarian squad either stayed in Hungary in declining form or moved to lower-profile clubs in western Europe.

The team's tactical legacy was longer-lasting than its results. Hidegkuti's role as a deep-lying centre forward fed directly into later forms of attacking play, including the false-nine role used by various European sides from the 1960s onwards. The Hungarian principle of moving players out of fixed positions to disrupt opposition shape became one of the central ideas of total football twenty years later. The Dutch sides of the 1970s, and the Spanish sides that followed them, were both indebted to ideas the Hungarian team had introduced in the early 1950s.