When US politician JD Vance visited Budapest to publicly back Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, one detail stood out: the venue. Vance spoke at the MTK Sportpark, home to MTK Budapest’s sporting departments — a club long associated with the ruling Fidesz party through its president, MEP Tamás Deutsch. The choice of stadium was not incidental but emblematic of a wider strategy tying football to politics.
Győző Molnár, a sport sociology professor originally from Hungary, calls that strategy a material patronage system. A dense network of clubs, academies and new stadia creates economic and social links between local communities and elites and the Fidesz party, Molnár says — links that translate into votes, especially outside major cities.
State influence over Hungarian football is extensive. Top-division clubs may not all be formally owned by the party, but many are run by figures aligned with Fidesz, have state bodies among their shareholders, or receive direct government support. A major channel for that support is the TAO corporate tax scheme, introduced in 2011, which allows companies to offset donations to approved sports clubs against their tax bills — in some cases up to 100 percent. Billions of forints have flowed to clubs favored by the government, and lucrative construction contracts for sporting infrastructure have reportedly gone to firms close to Orbán’s circle.
Those financial ties take on extra weight in a country that ranks as the most corrupt in the EU and among its poorer members. Critics argue that public money, partisan politics and sport have become tightly intertwined.
Orbán defends the policy, arguing TAO has fostered relationships between entrepreneurs and sport and that investing in facilities and children’s sports programs is a positive legacy. Beyond domestic projects, the pattern of investment extends into neighboring countries — Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and Ukraine — where stadium-building and youth programs carry cultural and political significance.
Molnár notes that such cross-border spending also helps secure votes from ethnic Hungarians abroad. Since simplified naturalization and extensions of voting rights in 2010, many diasporic Hungarians have registered and tended to back Fidesz. Visible investments in local football infrastructure act as tangible proof that Budapest cares for Hungarian communities beyond its borders, reinforcing a patronage message.
Some ownership and funding arrangements remain opaque, but certain projects openly bear Orbán’s imprint. The Puskás Akadémia, last season’s runners-up, was founded and is controlled by Orbán and plays in a stadium he commissioned: the Pancho Arena in Felcsút. The 3,800-seat venue serves a village of roughly half that size and sits near property owned by the prime minister. Named for Hungary’s legendary Ferenc Puskás, the arena symbolizes Orbán’s personal and political investment in the sport.
Football scholar David Goldblatt, who interviewed Orbán after visiting the Pancho Arena, says the prime minister’s affection for football is sincere. Orbán once played in Hungary’s fourth tier, Goldblatt notes, and his informal football networks helped cement his inner political circle. Yet Goldblatt also warns that Orbán has used that affection as political capital: by casting national football’s past glory and later decline as a metaphor for the nation’s fortunes, Orbán promises revival under his leadership. “Make Hungarian football great again,” Goldblatt recalls Orbán telling him — a slogan that blends sporting ambition with nationalist rhetoric.
Fidesz’s infrastructural push is broad: more than 25 venues around the country have been upgraded or built, including the Puskás Aréna in Budapest, which is scheduled to host the Champions League final on May 30. For Orbán, staging high-profile events and inaugurating major stadiums are tangible confirmations of a “sport-as-nation-building” strategy.
That linkage raises high electoral stakes. A reelection victory would allow Orbán to present such events and venues as crowning achievements of his term; a defeat would hand those assets to a successor government, which would face the complex task of disentangling sport’s patronage networks from a populist-nationalist political project. Molnár believes the trajectory of Hungarian football after the election will reveal whether those systems can be rolled back by democratic means or remain embedded in the country’s political economy.
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.