In the 1950s, the world—and therefore football—was rediscovering the state it had left behind before the war. Economies were booming, but the evolution of all intellectual pursuits, football included, required time for a necessary redefinition of the new realities upon which their massive postwar development would be built during the three “golden” decades that followed.
In England, football had remained more or less in the same position since 1925—the year the offside rule was changed, reducing from three to two the number of defending players required to be between the receiver and the goal line for the attacking pass to be legal. This change brought about a revolution, with Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman being considered its father, as he shifted from the 2-3-5 to a 3-2-5 formation to include more defenders tasked with “supervising” the advanced and now freer attackers. This in turn led to the creation of the so-called WM system: a 3-2-2-3 setup in which the two “inside” forwards dropped slightly deeper to form the two letters of the Latin alphabet when the formation was viewed diagrammatically.
In continental Europe, political changes were undoubtedly more abrupt than footballing ones. Still, football was affected by the redrawing of borders and the geopolitical chaos of the interwar period, while the new political map following the Second World War surprisingly facilitated the exchange of ideas in a particular region: so-called Central Europe and the Danube countries.
In that geographical area, at the beginning of the 20th century, the footballing power that emerged was Austria, where football became the subject of a rich intellectual dialogue held in the cafés of Vienna. From that school emerged great coaches who transformed the sport in neighboring countries, with many of them achieving success in Italy and even in South America. After the Second World War, the center of this Danubian School shifted to the (now Socialist) Republic of Hungary, which continued this tradition of intellectual engagement with the sport.
Even before the Second World War, the Hungarians were striving to understand the English game, which was considered the most advanced of the era—even though England’s national team rarely played opponents from continental Europe. In 1937, Chelsea lost to Bologna in the final of the International Exhibition Cup in Paris, with the Italian side led by the Hungarian Árpád Weisz. Tellingly, in 1940, Arthur Rowe—a Tottenham veteran who would later manage both Tottenham and Crystal Palace—was invited to give a seminar on the development of the WM and the emphasis on physical play, which formed the cornerstone of the British approach to football.
However, in Hungary, they were not content with simply adopting the English pattern, which had remained unchanged through the postwar decade. They began experimenting with more flexible formations, effectively paving the way for a more complex form of football, with changes in the subtler aspects of a system that is often defined by the number of players in each line.
A pioneer in this evolution was Márton Bukovi, head coach of MTK from 1947 to 1954, who later managed other teams and ended his coaching career at Olympiacos in 1967. Bukovi began experimenting with the role of centre forward at MTK, not so much by choice but out of necessity. In 1948, Norbert Höfling—his team’s classic, physically imposing striker, in line with the English model—transferred to Lazio. Bukovi was left without a like-for-like replacement and had to deploy Péter Pelotás, a player with more creative attributes, in the center of the attack. To capitalize on Pelotás’ strengths, Bukovi had him drop deeper, closer to the midfield, which also gave more space to the other four attackers and enabled a highly flexible offensive unit with a larger area to cover.
This dropping back of the centre forward, who now evolved into a kind of deep-lying playmaker, left no target man leading the line and made Hungarian football far more fluid. This tactical development carried over to the national team, coached by Gusztáv Sebes—a communist ideologue who had led labor strikes before the war as a trade unionist in a French automobile factory where he worked. Sebes, having seen the results of this tactical adaptation at MTK, brought Pelotás into the national team in the same role, and the results were phenomenal. Hungary, also boasting a generation of great virtuosos, went from being a strong national side to becoming the “Golden Team,” the Aranycsapat, undefeated anywhere and against anyone in the early 1950s, winning gold at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952.
But Sebes continued to experiment with MTK’s players. From September 1952 onward, he began to use Nándor Hidegkuti, who played on the right side of MTK’s midfield, as a substitute for Pelotás. At first, he made this change in friendlies against Italy and Yugoslavia, with radio commentator György Szepesi remarking that Sebes wanted to see how the 30-year-old Hidegkuti would perform in that role. The major breakthrough, however, came in the match against Switzerland: Hungary was down 2–0 when Hidegkuti came on and completely changed the nature of the game, which ended 4–2 in favor of Hungary. From that point on, he became the central figure in Hungary’s attacking formation.
Hidegkuti’s introduction reshaped the entire way the Hungarian national team played. He was usually positioned just ahead of József Zakariás, the left half who would drop back, while the right half, József Bozsik, played slightly higher up, creating a triangle that connected the defensive midfield to the attacking midfield. In the forward line, the two most frequent scorers, Puskás and Kocsis, played furthest forward, with the wingers Czibor and Budai slightly deeper, effectively transforming the WM into an MM.
This tactical progression made Hungary even more formidable, and in 1953, with an unbeaten run of three years, a match was organized at Wembley that was billed as “The Match of the Century,” between the dominant force in European football and the sport’s country of origin, England. The date was November 25, and more than 100,000 spectators packed the stands of Empire Stadium (as Wembley was then called) to witness this monumental clash.
England had only recently begun playing against non-British national teams and had already suffered a shock defeat to the United States at the 1950 World Cup. Their only historical loss until then on home soil had come against Ireland at Goodison Park in 1949—a match where the weather conditions may have played a bigger role in the result than the teams’ relative strength. Given also that the English didn’t yet hold the World Cup in high regard, this match against Hungary was essentially the first real opportunity to see where English football stood in comparison with the rest of the world.
The English persisted with their emphasis on physical strength and a near-rigid formation, followed with almost religious devotion. The clubs’ failure to defeat teams from other nations—most notably during Dynamo Moscow’s tour under Boris Arkadiev in 1949—was generally attributed to the relatively modest quality of the English sides involved. Thus, on November 25, 1953, when the match against Hungary began, the visitors’ strange formation caused shock. In fact, match commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme had to repeatedly refer to the “bizarre” positioning of the Hungarian players on the pitch, which defied the expectations set by their jersey numbers.
The English lined up in a classic WM formation. Goalkeeper was Gil Merrick of Birmingham City. At the center of defense stood Harry Johnston from Blackpool. On the left was Alf Ramsey of Tottenham (later to become national team manager), and on the right was Bill Eckersley from Blackburn. The midfield duo consisted of Billy Wright from Wolves and Jimmy Dickinson of Portsmouth. In attack, outside right was Stanley Matthews of Blackpool, inside right was Ernie Taylor—also of Blackpool, center forward was Stan Mortensen, again from Blackpool, inside left was Jackie Sewell of Sheffield Wednesday, and outside left was George Robb of Tottenham.
Hungary took the field with Gyula Grosics of Honvéd in goal; Gyula Lóránt of Honvéd, later manager of PAOK—who drew his last breath on the bench of Toumba stadium—played as a sweeper, in a style reminiscent of Karl Rappan’s verrouiller system. On the right of defense was Jenő Buzánszky of Dorogi, and on the left Mihály Lantos of Vörös Lobogó. In the left half position in defense was József Zakariás of Vörös, and just ahead of him, also on the left but in a more advanced midfield role, was József Bozsik of Honvéd. In the free space ahead, as a deep-lying playmaker, was Nándor Hidegkuti from Vörös. On the right wing was László Budai of Honvéd, and on the left wing Zoltán Czibor, also of Honvéd. The striking pair consisted of Sándor Kocsis on the right and Ferenc Puskás on the left—both of Honvéd.
The element of the match that caused the greatest stir was the performance of Hidegkuti. The English central defender, Harry Johnston, who had been tasked with man-marking him, had no idea how to deal with him. When he pushed higher up to get closer to him, he left a gaping hole at the heart of the defense. When he stayed back to plug that gap, Hidegkuti had immense freedom to create on the pitch. This became evident from the very first moment, as Hidegkuti scored his first goal in the very 1st minute of the match. In the 13th minute, Sewell equalized, but Hidegkuti scored again in the 20th minute, and Puskás followed with two goals in the 24th and 27th minutes to make the score 1–4! Mortensen pulled one back in the 38th, setting the halftime score at 2–4. In the 50th minute, however, Bozsik extended Hungary’s lead once more, before Hidegkuti completed his hat-trick in the 53rd. In the 57th minute, Ramsey scored from the penalty spot to make it 3–6, which, of course, was a defeat of biblical proportions for the English.
The English didn’t know what had hit them. They believed that through physical play they could cope with the Hungarians’ technique. This is evident from Frank Coles’ column in the Daily Telegraph, where he wrote that “the Hungarian jugglers can be stopped with a few hard tackles.”
However, after the match, the confrontation with reality shifted the tone of the discussion. The Match of the Century was a clash of different formations and, as is usually the case, the newer, the more advanced one, is the one that triumphs. Brian Glanville, the long-time chronicler of English football for The Times, wrote that this defeat “gave eyes to the blind.”
More detailed was Geoffrey Green in The Times, who, in the tone of a eulogy, wrote the next day: “The English found themselves as strangers in a strange world—a world where red ghosts floated by, for such was the appearance of the Hungarians as they moved with unmatched rhythm, technical mastery, and clinical finishing, clad in their glistening cherry-colored shirts. One could speak of a new conception of football as it is evolving among the Europeans and South Americans. The main criticism of this style had always been its lack of end product. One might also begin to think that perhaps footballing perfection ought to be sought elsewhere, beyond the rigid, open British method and its obsession with directness. Yesterday, the Hungarians, with perfect teamwork, showed that middle road to perfection.”
In Hungary, on the other hand, the victory of the collective excellence of the Aranycsapat was interpreted as a triumph of Socialism over the individualism of the English—a view that was strongly emphasized by Sebes himself. Yet what Sebes achieved with this team was not a tactical innovation per se—indeed, he had mostly adopted rather than conceived it. Sebes’ genius lay in the fact that he analyzed every detail of this footballing development in a manner that would become much more commonplace in modern football in the decades to follow. It is telling that he chose to train the team using the heaviest English balls, on a pitch with the exact dimensions of Wembley. He also kept a notebook with detailed descriptions of every aspect of the team’s tactical buildup. What Sebes presented—a system requiring coordinated movement of creative players, mutual coverage, and defensive discipline, effectively transforming a 3-2-5 into something resembling a 4-2-4—paved the way for European football in the years to come.
But was this the first time something like this had happened? As mentioned above, the English had not yet learned their lesson. The first to make this transformation was another Eastern European: Boris Arkadiev, who with Dinamo Moscow had dismantled the competition against smaller English sides in 1949, right up to the 3–3 draw at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea. Arkadiev used a 4-2-4 system, and in fact, in 1946 he had written a book, Tactics in Football, which became a “Bible” for coaches in Eastern Europe. Sebes had undoubtedly learned much from Arkadiev’s experiences—but he had better material to work with, allowing him to write an even more brilliant chapter in history. After all, it was Sebes’ tactical adjustments that created space for the technical brilliance of that golden Hungarian generation—so that, in turn, they could leave an indelible mark on the global history of football!
