or perhaps to the determination of fans—that they rarely achieve their goal. Supporters of the club Ferenc-varos wrap the banners around their bodies and conceal them beneath their clothes. Before games, they unfurl the sheets so that they extend over entire rows.
One begins, “The trains are leaving. . . .” The second concludes, “. . . for Auschwitz.”
This slogan is pretty much all you need to know about the atmosphere in the arena. But what makes Ferencvaros so impressive isn’t just the depth of their hatred; it’s the breadth of it. They have an unending array of Dr. Mengele–inspired songs and chants. Lyrics typical of the genre include, “Dirty Jews, dirty Jews, gas chambers, gas chambers.” Another set repeats the mantra, “Soap, bones.” As if the death camp imagery wasn’t clear enough, Ferencvaros fans press their tongues into their palates to produce a hissing that mimics the release of Zyklon B. For a time in the nineties, they would punctuate the celebration of goals with an extension of the arm into a Nürnberg-style salute.
Ferencvaros aren’t especially careful about whom they tar as “Dirty Jews.” Most all their Hungarian opponents get smeared this way. But they reserve their most hateful behavior for one longtime archenemy, another Budapest club called MTK Hungaria. In fairness, Ferencvaros are far from alone in smearing MTK.
At a glance, this disdain looks like resentment.
MTK has a long record of success. The team has won twenty-one national championships and finished second eighteen times. With a deep-pocketed owner, they have ushered in a recent renaissance, taking three of the last five Hungarian Cups to the victory stand. Usually, a winning streak like this builds a sturdy band-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
wagon that runs roughshod over the resenters. Eight-year-old boys can’t resist attaching themselves to a jug-gernaut. Adult fans, who remain closeted when their team muddles along, proudly announce their allegiance by hanging an emblem from their car’s rearview mirror. But the strange fact about MTK is that their success has brought no such increase in their following. Even during championship seasons, it’s lucky if it can attract more than a thousand of its own supporters to home games. Followers of the visiting team frequently out-number them.
The management of MTK won’t oªcially admit it, but its supporters will: The reason it has so few fans and so many enemies is because it is a Jewish club.
That is to say, MTK was founded by downtown Jewish businessmen in 1888, and in the early twentieth century the team consisted largely of Jewish players. Before the end of World War I, this wasn’t such a terrible stigma. Jews had been early and fiery promoters of Hungarian nationalism. Unlike Hakoah, MTK had no Zionist agenda. In fact, the M in MTK stood for Mag-yar, explicitly tethering the club’s Jews to the cause of Hungarian nationalism. The team even self-consciously placed its stadium on the Hungaria Road. In return for their fidelity to the cause, the Jews won acceptance in Budapest society. The city’s accommodating atmosphere swelled the community into one of the most massive aggregations of Jews on the planet, so much so that James Joyce, among others, dubbed it “Judapest.”
After the breakdown of the Hapsburg Empire and Hungary’s disastrous experiment with communist revolution in 1919, this comfortable coexistence ended. Jews emerged as the nationalist politicians’ scapegoat of choice. These politicians, and their newspapers, homed in on MTK as a potent symbol of the pernicious-ness of the Jew. They ascribed the crudest anti-Semitic stereotypes to the club—money grubbing, rootless mercenaries, dirty players. In the forties, these nationalists came to power and aligned themselves with the Nazis. They shuttered MTK entirely because of its ethnic aªliation. After World War II swept out these Iron Cross fascists, the communists reopened MTK for business. The party handed control of the club to a succession of patrons from the trade unions and secret police.
But no matter the patron, the club’s identity has never changed. Despite the many e¤orts of supporters and management, the perception of Jewishness could never be scrubbed from MTK. Even now, in the democratic era, as Hungary enters the European Union, very few gentiles support MTK. It still means crossing a social barrier that even the most liberal, open-minded Hungarians don’t often traverse. To them, wearing an MTK jersey is akin to wearing a yarmulke. The result is that one of the two best teams in Hungary has become a ghetto in the oldest European sense of the word, a dis-tillation of the European Jewish condition, the bitter-sweet mingling of the greatest success and lonely misery. u
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e S e n t i m e n t a l H o o l i g a n
I.
To my knowledge, there is only one example of the converse of Tottenham’s Yid Army: a Jewish soccer fan who proudly taunts opposing teams with anti-Semitic insults. I know him by his nom de guerre, Alan Garrison.
His surname is an alias that he adopted almost thirty years ago to complicate dealings with the police. Since the age of five, Alan has supported Tottenham’s West London rivals, Chelsea. He deserves his own page in the history book, and not just as an oddity. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, he was a commander in one of the first organized crews of English soccer hooligans. He practi-cally invented the genre. Under his leadership—that is until he spent much of the seventies and eighties in prison—Chelsea began to emerge as the most storied band of soccer thugs on the planet, the group with the greatest capacity for hate and destruction.
But before describing this contribution to European civilization, I must qualify my characterization of Alan as a Jew. And I admit that this is not a small qualification. Alan Garrison’s German father served as a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. The Allies charged him
