„Ha majd az ellenségek kibékülnek, otthon találkozni fogunk.”
“When the enemies will make peace with each other, we will meet at home.”

Zoltán Czibor and the state security service

Summary/Abstract: After the communist takeover, those in power quickly realized the risks and the possibilities inherent in Hungarian sports life. Parallel with the establishment of the dictatorship, the top leadership of the party signed several party resolutions, which led to the complete reorganization of the institutional framework of Hungarian sports life. With only slight alterations, the results of this essentially survived until the change of regime, despite the fact that the Kádár regime later split with the Stalinist traditions of the Rákosi era. In my paper, I describe the relationship between the communist power and football through the analysis of an actual state security operation, which–apart from getting us closer to understanding the operational mechanism of the political police of the era– provides interesting additions to the biography of one of the greatest geniuses of Hungarian football history, Zoltán Czibor. The Olympic gold medalist, world cup silver medalist left winger's first encounter and cooperation with the State Protection Authority (ÁVH) is a typical example of the communist internal affairs authorities' incompetent and ill-advised decisions, which, to use soccer terminology, “went offside”. In practice, Czibor's network activity failed to– and as we will see, it simply could not– yield the expected results, and the action plan the secret police developed after the crushing of the revolution and Czibor's emigration was doomed to failure from the start. Even though, during the dictatorship, the communist secret police failed to construct the psychological profile of the ideal informer, the scanty archival sources we have on Czibor, and which sometimes need to be treated critically, clearly prove that the footballer was very much unfit for working in the network of informers.

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