The story of the gold team

On November 25, 1953 - sixty-five years ago - the Hungarian national football team defeated the English 6:3 in the "match of the century". David Bailey's book begins with this match: the "magical Hungarians" from beyond the Iron Curtain not only impressed the packed Wembley stadium audience with their game, but also with their very modern equipment. It's like the past and the future have met. And many English fans felt at the time that a communist country with such brilliant footballers couldn't be so bad. David Bailey, who lives in Hungary, decided more than ten years ago to write the history of the Golden Team: he wanted to understand how they could appear in this country - which is now his home, and where, as a football fan, he has to put up with today's weak Hungarian football - in the fifties Dozens of amazingly talented soccer players appeared all of a sudden. What is the secret of the Golden Team? David Bailey's book, in the spirit of the best English historiographical traditions, is both precise and readable, and he does not shy away from exploring sensitive issues or strange contradictions. It describes all the horrors of Hungary at the time, the Rákosi dictatorship, and how the members of the Golden Team, many of whom were known to hate the new system, were able to live with it - and achieve enormous success not only for themselves and the Hungarian football fans, but also also for the political leadership. Many great books have been published about the Golden Team, but David Bailey's is the first to tell us this story with all its contradictions and strangeness, examining the intertwining of politics and sports, from beginning to end, in a novelistic way.