Amid the spectacle of JD Vance’s recent visit to Budapest to back Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one detail of the staging drew particular significance: the venue. The US politician spoke at the MTK Sportpark, a facility used by MTK Budapest’s sports departments. MTK’s football team is among Hungary’s most decorated clubs, and its president, Tamás Deutsch, is an MEP and a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party.
“That stadium is Orbán’s preferred arena, quite literally,” said Győző Molnár, a sport sociology professor originally from Hungary. Molnár argued the network of clubs, academies and stadium projects creates a material patronage system tying local communities and elites to Fidesz, with clear electoral consequences, especially in rural areas.
State influence on Hungary’s clubs runs deep. Although not all teams are formally controlled by Fidesz, top-division clubs are often affected by party-aligned politicians in executive roles, state bodies holding stakes, or direct funding. A major source of finance has been the TAO corporate tax scheme, introduced in 2011, which lets companies offset donations to selected sports clubs against tax liabilities, in some cases up to 100%. Billions have flowed to clubs favored by the government, and construction contracts for sporting infrastructure have reportedly gone to those close to Orbán.
Hungary ranks as the most corrupt country in the EU and among the bloc’s poorer members, a context that amplifies concerns about the intertwining of public money, politics and sport.
Orbán has defended TAO, saying it created relationships between entrepreneurs and sport and that investing in sports facilities and children’s sport activities is not something to regret. Beyond domestic clubs, Fidesz-linked interests extend into neighboring countries — Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Ukraine — where investments in stadiums and youth programs serve both cultural and political aims.
Molnár notes this cross-border football spending helps secure votes from ethnic Hungarians abroad. Since simplified naturalization and franchise extensions in 2010, many diaspora Hungarians have voted in Hungarian elections and have tended to support Fidesz. Visible investments in local football infrastructure act as a form of patronage reinforcing the message that Orbán’s government cares for Hungarians beyond the state’s borders.
Some ownership structures are opaque, but certain projects are openly linked to Orbán. Puskás Akadémia, last season’s runners-up, was founded and controlled by Orbán and features a stadium he commissioned: the Pancho Arena in Felcsút — a 3,800-seat venue serving a village of about half that size and near a property Orbán owns. Named after Ferenc Puskás, Hungary’s greatest footballer, the stadium underlines Orbán’s hands-on investment in the sport.
David Goldblatt, a football scholar who interviewed Orbán after visiting the Pancho Arena, said the prime minister’s affection for the game is genuine. “He really, really, really loves football,” Goldblatt told DW, noting Orbán once played in Hungary’s fourth tier and that informal football ties helped knit together his party’s inner circle. Yet Goldblatt also stressed how Orbán has weaponized that love to build a political narrative: the national team, once a global powerhouse and later diminished, becomes a symbol of national decline and potential revival under Orbán’s leadership. “Make Hungarian football great again,” Goldblatt said Orbán told him — a slogan that neatly fuses sporting ambition with nationalist rhetoric.
Fidesz’s investment in stadiums is extensive: more than 25 venues around the country, including the Puskás Aréna in Budapest, which is set to host the Champions League final on May 30. For Orbán, such events validate his “sport-as-nation-building” strategy. Molnár argues the timing creates high stakes: a victory at the polls would let Orbán claim the Champions League final as a crowning achievement of his legacy; a defeat would leave the new government to inherit and decide the fate of the infrastructure and the political economy of sport he built.
The symbolism matters. If Orbán retains power, major football events and venues become part of his public coronation. If he loses, those same assets become a test for whether a successor administration can disentangle sport’s patronage networks from a populist-nationalist political project. Molnár concludes that developments in Hungarian football after the election will reveal not just the sport’s future but whether populist-nationalist systems can be reversed through democratic means.
Edited by: Chuck Penfold
This article was originally published on April 9, 2026. It was amended later the same day to reflect that JD Vance spoke at the MTK Sportpark in Budapest and not the Groupama Arena as previously reported.