A well-known British sports journalist and author of several books on the history of British, Catalan, and Latin American soccer, Jonathan Wilson sets out in this book to discuss the mid-twentieth-century history of Hungarian soccer. Wilson’s thesis is straightforward. He argues that the long streak of victories, culminating in the Wembley defeat of the English national team and the silver medal at the 1954 World Championship in Switzerland, that the legendary Aranycsapat [Golden squad] achieved between 1950–54 represented not the isolated peak of Hungarians’ achievements in football (soccer) but the glorious coda to a thirty-year period when Hungarian players and coaches reinvented what they had learned from the English, to reexport their know-how to the rest of the world. An important corollary of this argument is that the Hungarian football diaspora—spreading out from Hungary during the 1920s to play for or coach various major soccer teams during the subsequent decades...
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