Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

only modern sports facility in Budapest, the clubs managed to obtain a temporary permit to keep the building in operation. The athletes returning after a long winter in 1897 already included the first Hungarian enthusiasts of the latest fad - football. By the summer the athletics field had been renewed and in the autumn a 500-metre, asphalt-paved bicycle track was also in place. The track, which met the highest international standards with its 124-metre straight stretch, and curves of 34-metre radii and an elevation of 2.1 metres, attracted the best cyclists of the turn-of-the-century period. Races run by such athletes could be followed by a total of 3,000 spectators occupying the covered grandstand built to replace the old one, much of whose timber had been stolen, and the earthen mound opposite.

Somewhat smaller was the number of the “experts, ladies and laymen” who had the opportunity to see, on the “soft sandy turf” of the Millenary the teams of Vienna and BTC clash in the first official football match ever held in Hungary. The game was strictly regarded as a social event: most of the spectators arrived in top hats with binoculars in their hands. Although the game was rather crudely played, the crowd had a whale of a time and greeted with standing ovation both the goals scored by the Viennese side and the clever wrestling ruses employed by the robust backs on the Hungarian side. And indeed, it would have been impossible not to like these sportsmen brimming with enthusiasm, people who enjoyed their own game thoroughly which they played for nothing but the sheer fun of it. Driven by their sportsmen’s zeal, these footballers of a heroic age seized every opportunity to run out on the field. One challenge game followed the other, in which grammar-school boys, who were strictly banned from competitive sports, played with mock beards and moustaches stuck to their smooth cheeks lest their teachers should catch them at their forbidden sport. These young bohemians greeted the new century on Mew Year’s Eve in 1900 by “going on the Millenary field to begin a game a few minutes before midnight and play until the last peals of the midnight bells died away.” The first goal of the century was very likely scored by a Hungarian football player, Gusztáv Faubel.

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