Hungary, one of the most influential and revolutionary football sides in the 20th century, winners of three Olympic Gold Medals (1952, 1964, & 1968), and twice FIFA World Cup runners-up (1938 & 1954), betray the mind of the modern football fan and seems an unlikely candidate for such silverware. Surely, the annals of time should reflect that England, Spain, France or Italy would be the spiritual home for the development of football tactics and have the proprietary rights to soccer fandom. However, innovative men like Gusztáv Sebes, the mind behind “Socialist Football” (a precursor to Total Football) and Bela Gúttmann, a Hungarian Jew, who survived Nazi Concentration Camp only to become one of the most prolific coaches of the mid-20th century, speaks to the legacy of Hungarian soccer. Additionally, men like Ferenc Puskás, 514 goals in 530 professional caps and a member of the “Mighty Magyars”, the winners of 1952’s Olympics and the 1954 World Cup, show us there is definitely a lineage of success. Hungary was not devoid of football support in its domestic leagues either; it was, to use a more modern term, a football mad nation – but how did it get there?

In his book The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Football Shaped the Game, Jonathan Wilson tells us that soccer in Hungary pre-dates all of those above-mentioned names; it predates the famous Irish footballing pioneer Jimmy Hogan, who, during the Great War, left Austria as an Enemy Alien, and ended up coaching MTK, “But the true beginning, perhaps, was even earlier than that, in 1894, when an ambitious 17-year-old clerk called Edward Shires abandoned his job at a typewriter factory in Manchester and set off to make his fortune – and, as it turns out, shape the club whose players, more than any other, carried the Hungarian game around the world: MTK.” Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre, are 23-time winners of the Hungarian soccer league, twice winners of the Hungarian Super League, are easily one of the oldest, most successful, and influential clubs in all of football history.

Magyar Testgyakorlók Köre, MTK Budapest FC, fans pack the house at the the Hidegkuti Nándor Stadion, 1947 (Photo: Magyarfutball.hu)

MTK, which translates to Circle of Hungarian Fitness Activists, was established in 1888 as an athletic club focused on fencing and gymnastics, they wouldn’t add a football side for nearly two decades – the aforementioned Edward Shires has a great deal to do with their initial success. Shires, who left England in 1894 for Vienna, helped to establish an influential football club there and visited Prague, as well as Budapest while traveling with his Viennese club. In 1904 Edward moved to Budapest permanently for business, rather than sport, and joined MTK as a player that year. While the soccer team was added before Shires arrived, they didn’t win their first division league title until the year he showed up. Eventually, he took over an administrative role, leading to another league title and sought out top-notch coaching from Scotland at a time when Scottish passing was renown for its innovative nature and being quite exciting for fans to watch as well.

In addition to the growth of MTK, there was an explosion of interest in playing football, developing tactics for football, and finding the side which best represented your neighborhood, city, or region. The infectious nature of football even reached the far-flung cities of Romania, starting in Arad and according to David Goldblatt in his book The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer, “Romania began to acquire a footballing infrastructure further east, in the capital city of Bucharest and in the oil fields of Ploieşti, where substantial British, American, and German communities had arrived.” Football was catching on, all over the region, and was very likely supported by every young man growing up in the Austro-Hungarian and Romanian region at the turn of the century.

Bela Lugosi stared on stage and in films in Hungary, Austria & Germany before emigrating to the United States – where he took his love for Soccer with him as well.

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó was born October 20, 1882 – he was the youngest of four children born to parents István Blaskó and Paula de Vojnich. The town of Lugoj, then in what was considered Hungary, but is now within the borders of Romania, was only a few hours east from Budapest and another few hours away from Bucharest – and by the time he ran away at 12, in 1894, the football bug was just starting to infect the region. There’s no doubt that young Béla was at least familiar with the sport, and possibly even learned to play it for fun. It’s very likely as well, that he followed the results of MTK or other clubs like Ferencvárosi in Budapest, while he was studying at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts; he made his stage debut at just 19.

From 1913 to 1919 he managed to be a member of the National Theater as well as serve as an infantryman in the Austo-Hungarian army during the Great War. Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó earned the rank of Lieutenant but was discharged in 1916 for a wound he suffered while serving on the Russian Front and he returned to Budapest to film Az Ezredes (The Colonel) in 1917. Under the pseudonym Arisztid Olt, he made twelve more films and help to found the Hungarian Actor’s Guild. Post World War I Hungary hung in the balance, and when the Austro-Hungarian monarch politically collapsed, a reactionary group brought about the Aster Revolution and the Hungarian People’s Republic. The politics of the era brought about more immediate change as leftists and trade unionist were in peril, Béla left his homeland at age 37, first for Vienna, then for Germany.

While in Weimar Republic Germany, Béla made a few films but eventually life became unsafe for him there as well, so he left for the United States and entered the country through New Orleans in winter of 1920. By the spring of 1921, he was living in New York and Béla found refuge within an immigrant community of Hungarians – through this group he was able to identify enough Hungarian ex-patriots to form a Hungarian repertory theatre. It was likely this time in his life when Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó became more well-known for a shortened version of his name, Bela Lugosi. His full family name, too complicated for American theatre-goers to remember, and it didn’t exactly roll off the tongue, was reduced to his proper first name and an alteration of his home town of Lugoj. Despite not appropriating the English language immediately, Lugosi was able to land film roles in American movies - all New York area productions. It was a career altering role, however, in a Broadway production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, which literally introduced America to Bela Lugosi.

After a successful run of 261 shows on Broadway, through 1928 and 29, the production of Dracula took a tour of the country. When the show stopped in Los Angeles, producers at Fox Film were impressed enough to offer Lugosi a role or two in upcoming films; The Veiled Woman and Prisoners, both completed in 1929. He stayed in LA and even reprised the Role of Count Dracula in a West Coast only production of the play. Universal Pictures acquired the rights to the screenplay and characterization, then in 1930 began casting and pre-production. Surprisingly, Béla was not immediately given the role, but he was eventually cast to once again don the cape as Count Dracula and the film was a hit when it was released in February, 1931. Bela was meant for the role; his hometown in Hungary/Romania was only five hours from Poenari Citadel– the Transylvanian home of real-life Vlad The Impaler, the non-fiction persona on which the character of Count Dracula is loosely based.

Lugosi made Los Angeles his home and through the 1930’s until his death, he was heavily involved with organizing soccer with the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League.

By 1932, Bela Lugosi was 50 years old, three-times divorced, typecast as a brooding, swarthy villainous character and rarely as the top-billing – regularly taking second to his contemporaneous Hollywood rival Boris Karloff. However, as he had shown his entire life, from his hand in the organizing and activism as a member of the Actor’s Union in Hungary, to assembling the Hungarian Stock Company (repertory theatre) in New York, Lugosi had a knack for organizing groups and finding common ground. By 1935, Lugosi had formed Los Angeles Magyar AC, a soccer team in LA which served as a social hub for fellow Hungarian immigrants – the name, an homage to the influence of MTK and of his homeland. According to Sean McGeever, in his seminal SFSFL Centenary history booklet, “Lugosi was an extremely cultured man and saw soccer as a means of promoting the vibrant Hungarian community in Los Angeles. He gave financial support to the Los Angeles Magyar team, acted as honorary president of the Los Angeles Soccer League for many years, and never lost an opportunity to encourage interest in the sport.”

Soccer in post-depression Los Angeles boomed; in addition to the Los Angeles Soccer League, two other leagues formed - The Metropolitan, and the Inter-Urban. They were founded around a handful of well-sponsored clubs; some, industry based, like Douglas Aircraft and others were maintained by the railroad or small businesses. More, still, were ethnic-based clubs: Latino, Italian, Russian, and Lugosi’s Hungarian Magyars. LA Magyars AC won the top league title in Los Angeles three times by 1935, beating teams like the Hollywood Sheiks, Fox Studio, and The Lighthorsemen. When the revered commissioner of soccer in California, William Campbell died later that year, Bela Lugosi founded a trophy in his honor. In an era when there were no true national leagues, city and regional leagues were king, and the leagues of both San Francisco and Los Angeles were top-billing in California – so the new trophy would pit the champions of those two league-systems against each other.

Bela Lugosi, founder of the California Soccer Association’s top award, the William Campbell Memorial Trophy, presents the prize to fellow soccer enthusiast, Victor McLaglen.

Prior to Lugosi’s investment of time and resources, soccer in Los Angeles was played wherever it could find a home. In 1935, he helped Academy Award winning actor Victor McLaglen build a “State of the Art” facility on Riverside Drive, just north of Hyperion – it was home, of course to soccer, but also to an additional wide variety of events. Unfortunately, McLaglen Stadium was home to LA soccer only until the 1938 flood of the Los Angeles River irreparably damaged the grandstand. League matches were moved to Gilmore Field, built in 1934, but not intended for soccer – it was, however, home to the Loyola collegiate American football team, and had dimensions which would suffice for soccer – the building was eventually razed to make way for CBS’ Television City in 1950. Occasionally soccer was played at the home of the Angels, a local baseball team, Wrigley Field (not to be confused with the baseball field in Chicago) on 41st and Avalon, in South Central Los Angeles.

Bela Lugosi’s support for soccer, as well as his film career continued on into his 70s – in 1952, he had just returned from a trip to England, where he again portrayed Dracula in one sense or another, and was working on a film called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla when his home country of Hungary won the gold medal for soccer in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. In 1954, Hungary were runners-up in the FIFA World Cup, and Bela must have been elated to see that his Mighty Magyars were challenging the world’s elite nations for footballing dominance. The “Golden Team” consisted of players who had learned to ply their trade for Budapest-based teams; names familiar to Lugosi, like MTK and Ferencvárosi. The coaches were familiar names too; players all those years ago when he was just starting out as a young stage actor. On November 25th, 1953, Hungary visited England to play, in what has been called “The Match of the Century.” The Magyars put on a show, defeating England 6 to 3 and causing the English to completely rethink their methodology. Surely a delight for Bela. ”

McLaglen Stadium in Los Angeles, home of Lugosi’s Los Angeles Soccer League, collapsed after the Los Angeles River flooded in 1938.

In 1956, Bela Lugosi died of a heart attack and was buried in his infamous Dracula’s cloak at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver, California. His homeland of Hungary would go on to win gold in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. From early 20th Century Budapest, was born, arguably, the most influential and innovative players and coaches of all time. Amongst those Hungarian influencers, we should include Count Dracula himself – Bela Lugosi, who through inspiration and hard work, coordinated one of the largest organized city league systems to become stable and competitive. Decades before his passing, Lugosi’s Magyars won the initial William Campbell Trophy in 1935, they were also the last to be awarded in the 1947-48 season. The California Soccer Association had been broken up into two entities, CSA-North and CSA-South, and the trophy was left in the offices of the Greater Los Angeles League to collect dust… or was it? Sean McGeever, of SFSFL, tells us, “When the Magyars defeated San Francisco Viking SC to win the State Cup, a newspaper report of the game noted that the Los Angeles side ‘Headed back to Dracula’s Castle with the State Cup.”

- Joshua Duder