DAC: the forefront of Hungary’s expanding football empire
In Budapest and Debrecen, Szeged and Kisvarda, Miskolc and Mezokovesd, football-mad Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has built spanking new football stadiums to host domestic matches which invariably attract relatively few paying customers. Average pre-pandemic attendances for the top-flight NBI in 2018-19 was just over 3,000, and even below that modest benchmark the season before. The team in Szeged has never played in the top tier.
His folly is best illustrated by the Pancho Arena, the first and most incongruous of these developments, which is set in the tiny hamlet of Felcsut where Orban spent part of his youth. Even the narrow-gauge railway running to the stadium has been renovated, as if offering the few visitors a journey through Orban’s childhood.
But this phenomenon has not been limited to Hungary. Beyond its borders, the gleaming new MOL Arena stands near the centre of unassuming Dunajska Streda, or Dunaszerdahely to the many
