Partidele dintre naționalele de fotbal ale României și Ungariei în perioada interbelică
National Football Matches between Romania and Hungary, in the Interwar Period

Summary/Abstract: Since public messages in football should be “politically correct”, FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, has always promoted international matches as being events aimed at making the world a better place. FIFA advocates that inter-country games encourage peace, and fight against racism, nationalism and discrimination. The reality of the matches played between the Romanian and Hungarian national teams during the interwar period, and even after that, approaches George Orwell’s vision, who described international sport as “war minus the shooting”. Romanian football is partly rooted in the Hungarian one, thanks to the clubs from Transylvania, Banat and Crisana, which first started playing in the Hungarian Championship, during the Austro-Hungarian period. Based on these common “genetic” traits, their rivalry, but also moments of friendship, as well as all the other thousands of obvious or invisible links, we could compare the Romanian-Hungarian football relations to the ones unfolding between stepbrothers. However, the interactions of the two national teams experienced difficulties, because the federations from Bucharest and Budapest expanded “the cold war” generated by the Treaty of Trianon into the realm of football. The goal of this paper is to analyse the first four matches between the national teams of Romania and Hungary, which took place throughout the interwar period. It further aims to explain why the two countries avoided meeting each other on the football pitch during that time. The low number of games between the two national teams was influenced by the competitive circumstances of the time, the heated, albeit quite developed relationship between the club teams, as well as the sport’s politics of the two countries.

• Details
• Contents