Index – Sport – Ferenc Horváth: game over! Budapest Honvéd: is the match over?
Ferenc Horváth is no longer the coach of the Budapest Honvéd football team from Monday. Which team is in 8th place with a 1-0 defeat at home to Gyirmót, the army driver, is three points away from the elimination zone. According to some press reports, they wanted to be sent away at the end of November last year, but then one last chance in the Gyirmót match, which he could not take advantage of.
The Dunakeszi futsal was a springboard
Horváth is a special figure of the Hungarian training society. His attachment to the club in Kispest is an indisputable, precious photo (a historical photograph of our colleague Lajos Kristóf) proves that he was an outstanding player in the youth team. The picture depicts the receipt of the Ferenc Puskás Prize in 1991, in the company of the legendary youth coach István Vági, the 80-year-old coach of the naming Öcsi Puskás and the youth team. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not the Puskás Award for the author of the most beautiful European goal this year, but the trophy that the best young player from Kispest will receive.)
Then, getting older from the youth of Kispest, Horváth joined Videoton in 1991, and during his professional career he visited thirteen clubs, three times with the people of Fehérvár alone. He ended his career in Austria in 2010, but did not stop after that.
He confirmed the NB II football team of the Dunakeszi Kinizsi with Otto Vincze, among others – the team captain of the ensemble was Péter Szijjártó, then Secretary of State for Foreign Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs.
Horváth’s career as a manager is gaining momentum here and there. He started his coaching career at the youth of Ferencváros, in 2010 the Vecsés and then the Szigetszentmiklós TC followed. The breakthrough came in September 2012, when Horváth was contracted by the NB I Kecskemét for three years.
However, it became less than one of the three years, because in June 2013 he signed for Horváth Paks, for two years, but in January 2014 he continued from here. Especially for Csaba Tarsoly’s Győr ETO. On January 9, 2014, his arrival at the then defending champion ETO was announced in place of Attila Pintér, who was promoting as federal captain. The team did not perform poorly, the champion finished second with 62 points, equal to Debrecen.
However, after 12 rounds in the new point hunt, Győr was only in eighth place, and after the then second-class Gyirmó was expelled from the Hungarian Cup, President Csaba Tarsoly fired Horváth on 31 October 2014.
No problem. After a brief retreat (again in Szigetszentmiklós), Horváth was signed by his former team, the champion of the championship Videoton, until the end of the year, which was only in seventh place on October 6, 2015, after a weak start to the season. Vidi recovered with Horváth, and although he was 21 points behind Ferencváros, he still took second place.
But on June 30, 2016, Diósgyőr announced at a press conference that the new coach would be called Ferenc Horváth. Remained in Miskolc until March 2, 2017, the club’s fan website said goodbye to the coach with this two-word message: Game over.
As you can see, the rising Balmazújváros signed Horváth. Unusually, the coach lasted in Hajdúság until the end of this year, although the team was eliminated, and after the elimination the trainer blamed the rules for the failure … Horváth remained the coach of Balmaz in NB II at the end of the season, but only Until the end of September 2018, because then the progress of NB I in last place called him and he went to the other end of the country. The expectation was clear: to keep the team.
He failed, Hali dropped out, and Horváth left on May 19, 2019. There was a relatively long break in work, until on February 15, 2021, it was contracted by its educational association, the Honvéd. The band just stayed in, finishing in 10th place, whether it’s a matter of success or failure, a point of view.
But despite the good player material in Kispest, the ideal material conditions, Horváth’s last coaching role, which lasted for less than a year, was the end of the defeat suffered by Gyirmót at home.
A recurring motif: Győró also ended Horváth’s Győr period earlier.
So far, in less than ten years of training, eleven teams, 284, 113 wins, 64 draws, 107 defeats, 403 points out of a possible 852, 47.3 percent balance.
It’s a shame to cry back to Rossi and Hemingway
What could be wrong in Kispest? What could explain why, since the departure of coach Marco Rossi and then club owner George F. Hemingway, the soaringly increased budget, the fantastic infrastructure, the new stadium, the results have been devastating.
The team won a championship in 2017, and has been 4th, 4th, 5th and 10th since then, an increasingly hopeless game.
A strange picture, a tangled story unfolds from an employee conversation asking us to keep your name. Our subject says that you don’t have to dream in Kispest, Fradi, Mol Fehérvár should not be compared to Puskás Academy and Kisvárda completely. Honvéd represents a potential that should be reflected in the results. There was so much duma already, so many promises that it was finally time to act. This player material has been good for years, a lot of people work a lot, the trouble is that the club is somewhere halfway between the two extremes.
The one-man leadership of the Hemingway era is a thing of the past, but the business-like operation envisioned by the new owners has not yet arrived.
Employees with a sense of Kispest cut from the dagger die every day from the fact that the Honvéd is just wrestling. Many cry back to the Hemingway-Marco Rossi era, but it should be recognized that time is not coming back. Interestingly, Hemingway five or eight years ago, his objectionable decisions will gain meaning after years. The businessman who was alienated in America was ahead of his age.
The current owners invest a lot of money and work in the club, but the trouble is that these business people are now starting to realize that nothing works in Hungarian football like it does in business, here you get every geller.
Honvéd is reminiscent of a factory where hard work is being done in the back workshops, now the shop window is dirty, battered. The showcase is, of course, the first team to score points in NB I, the game shown. It’s time to clean up the showcase because everyone thinks the factory works.
Outside the circle of club legends
Kálmán Kovács, taking the name of the legendary striker from Kispest, was happy to say:
When Pista was Pista and then Tamás Bódog was the coach of the Honvéd, so to speak, I had a bigger experience in the team match and I was a fan – said the 56-year-old legend of Kispest, who played 56 times for the Hungarian national team, scored 19 goals and he was there at the 1986 Mexican World Cup. “I can’t talk about that today.” I write reviews on my Facebook page, although that’s not really a natural state because I pretend to be a narrator. When it came to changing coaches in December, I wrote that until we could find a professional director, the situation was hopeless. Ferit Horváth has just been replaced, there will be a new coach, but who will appoint him?
It is true that the club terminated the contract with István Urbányi, sports director, on February 15 last year, there has been no sports director / professional director for a year, let’s call it that.
“There are other problems here as well,” Kovács, a physical education teacher, continued. – Continuity has been broken at the club, there is no connection between the golden generation of the eighties and nineties and the present. Gray stock lying on the fallow land that was taken was not used. I am convinced that Antal Nagy, Márton Esterházy, László Dajka, Imre Garaba, Lajos Détári could and should be given some role and opportunity. They even represented the Honvéd level … They have enough knowledge to kick the club out of the deadlock. I myself was an additional person in that gold team 35 years ago, now I would love to be an additional person. “
Kovács has a mixed opinion about the Ferenc Horváth era.
“I am convinced that our player base is not as bad as where we are,” he said. – Or, I say worse: than where we stand. Because now we are traveling to Kisvárda, then Mol Fehérvár FC will come to Kispest. We can even slide down. ”
When it comes to playing from majre, these matches are not three-way …
“The team has already played football against Gyirmó without taking any risks, and then it will be somehow grounded. And that leads nowhere. I grew up in the Honvéd that when a visiting team came to us, the majré was their twelfth player, not ours. In the first quarter hour, we put so much pressure on the opponent that it would usually crash. Now the pressure is on us … Now the rivals are not afraid to come to Kispest. ”
Blacksmith’s diagnosis is devastating for the club, not just the players and the coach.
“We want to point out a tiny house, but so that not only the walls but also the foundations are missing. We want to plaster the house, but there is no wall under the plaster. We care about who looks like, you don’t even have adobe for construction. ”
But is there a way out of this plight?
“Look, what’s happening in terms of professional leadership isn’t enough. That should be fixed. The ownership is there, the financial background is there, from the outside there seems to be no problem with that. True, these people are inexperienced, but this could be helped, people in decision-making positions should listen to the opinions of the moon yard.
But they don’t, in fact, completely: they seal the canals to them, they live in an ivory tower. It’s like we old ones don’t even exist.
The supply base is good, maybe we should build better on it. And communicate. I wonder how many youth coaches were out there on Saturday in the match against Gyirmó. I’d be surprised if more than two … That’s why we’re not a club. Connect these levels. When the Gyimesi, Sikesdi, Détári midfielder trio moved the team – it wasn’t even yesterday – there was such a mood in the locker room, with the jokes, the teases, the friendly atmosphere that it was a pleasure to run out on the field. I don’t see a trace of that today. “
Kovács is experiencing the disintegration of the club image.
“We buy players from here, it was important to me at the time that the cleaning aunt, the club buffet, the ceremony would be the same for ten years …”
(Cover image: Ferenc Horváth is the new coach of the Budapest Honvéd and Ivan Lovric played in the 22nd round of the football OTP Bank League after the Ferencváros TC – Budapest Honvéd match at the Groupama Arena on February 20, 2021. Photo: Szilárd Koszticsák / MTI)