Hungary Mighty Magyars: The Team That Schooled England

For four years in the early 1950s, the Hungary national team lost one match in fifty, won Olympic gold, and beat England twice by a combined 13-4. Ferenc Puskas, Nandor Hidegkuti, Sandor Kocsis and the rest of the Mighty Magyars played a football so advanced that their victims spent years studying the wreckage. They remain the greatest team never to win the World Cup, and perhaps the most influential side ever assembled.

The tragedy and the fascination is the single defeat that defines them: the 1954 World Cup final, lost 3-2 to a West Germany they had beaten 8-3 a week earlier.

The Golden Team takes shape

Coach Gusztav Sebes, a former trade union organiser with a theorist's mind, built the side around Honved, the army club that housed Puskas, Kocsis, Jozsef Bozsik and Zoltan Czibor. His tactical leap was simple and devastating: Hidegkuti, nominally the centre-forward, dropped deep into midfield, dragging the opposing centre-half out of position and leaving Puskas and Kocsis to attack the space.

From May 1950 the team did not lose for 31 matches. The 1952 Olympics in Helsinki ended with gold, Yugoslavia beaten 2-0 in the final with Puskas and Czibor scoring. In 1953 they added the Central European International Cup, a forerunner of the European Championship, ahead of Italy, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

• 31 matches unbeaten between May 1950 and the 1954 World Cup final.
• Olympic champions, Helsinki 1952, scoring 20 goals in six matches.
• Kocsis scored 75 goals in 68 internationals; Puskas 84 in 85.
• The side's core came from Honved and MTK Budapest, a club core like later Barcelona or Bayern models.

Wembley 1953: the 6-3 that changed everything

On 25 November 1953, England invited the Olympic champions to Wembley expecting a lesson in the virtues of the English game. They received the opposite. Hidegkuti scored after 90 seconds and completed a hat-trick; Puskas scored twice, including the famous drag-back that left Billy Wright tackling thin air; Bozsik added a sixth. England's three goals flattered them.

It was England's first home defeat by continental opposition, 6-3, in front of 105,000 people, and the rematch in Budapest six months later was worse: 7-1, still England's heaviest defeat. English football, forced to look in the mirror, began the long tactical re-education that eventually produced coaching courses, the WM system's abandonment, and, indirectly, the 1966 triumph.

Bern 1954: the one that got away

Hungary arrived at the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland as the strongest favourites the tournament had known. They put nine past South Korea, eight past a German reserve side in the group, four past Brazil in a violent quarter-final known as the Battle of Berne, and four past holders Uruguay in the semi, in what many call the greatest match of the decade, 4-2 after extra time.

The final against West Germany is told elsewhere in the vault; here it matters as the wound. Hungary led 2-0 after eight minutes, lost 3-2, and the unbeaten run died on the wettest afternoon in football history. Puskas played on one leg, carrying an injury from the group match, and had a late equaliser disallowed for offside. The players were branded failures at home; two years later, after the Soviet invasion crushed the 1956 uprising, Puskas, Kocsis and Czibor stayed in the West and the Golden Team was gone.

The debt modern football owes them

Every false nine, from Hidegkuti to Totti to Messi, descends from Sebes' idea. The deep-lying forward, the striker who creates, the team built from a single club core, the full-back pushing on: the Magyars ran the beta version of modern football on leather balls and mud pitches.

The individuals kept breaking records after the team broke apart. Kocsis averaged more than a goal a game for his country, 75 in 68, a strike rate no elite international has sustained since. Puskas scored 514 goals in 530 Hungarian league matches before his exile, and Spain gave him a second career: 242 goals for Real Madrid and three more European Cup finals. Budapest's national stadium was renamed for him in 2002, and when he died in 2006, Hungary buried him with full state honours, the footballer as founding father.

The vault keeps them in the front row, unbeaten in 31 straight matches and undone only by the rain of Bern. Great teams are usually defined by the trophies they lifted; the Mighty Magyars are defined by the football everyone copied afterwards, which may be the greater prize.

The record books deny them a World Cup, and history has learned to correct the books. When England finally won in 1966, their manager Alf Ramsey built the side partly on lessons from that Wembley afternoon. The Mighty Magyars lost one match in six years. It happened to be the final. The game remembers everything else they won.