THE HUNGARIAN CONNECTION
Facts, Fictions and the Tactics of Deception
“The truth is in the mystery.”
— Akira Kurosawa
“Art is the most beautiful deception.”
— Giorgio De Chirico
1. Budapest Reversal
On the 29th of December 2023 a tweet appeared on the official Twitter account of the Hungarian Football Association. The tweet read as follows:
‘Perhaps few would think so, but our men’s A national team, the Brazilian national team and the Fluminense team in the finals of the Club World Cup have something in common! This also stems from the common past of Brazilian and Hungarian football.’
An image accompanied the text. The picture showed seven Hungarian players grouped together in a tight cluster around the ball on the left side of the pitch. The networks of connections between the players were marked in red.
The tweet linked to an article. The text, entitled ‘The national team returned to tradition’, opens by explaining how the tactical configuration of Marco Rossi’s Hungarian National Team had undergone a quite radical alteration.
‘While in terms of results, our men’s A national team can have an extremely successful period behind them, the development is also clearly noticeable from a tactical point of view. The team led by Marco Rossi tactically returned to the previous traditions of Hungarian football, and thanks to this, it is characterised by a style of play that is characteristic of only a few teams around the world.’
The article’s author, national team analyst and coach Istvan Beregi, proceeds to walk us through Hungary’s switch from a more ‘positional’ team organisation to an alternative style which organises around the ball rather than the space.
‘While the basic principle of positional play is organised order (everyone holds a specific position/all predetermined positions must be filled), the game organisation positioned for the ball is also often referred to as organised chaos, in which unexpected, combinative solutions come to the fore. The latter is not characteristic of positional play, since the essence of that system is predictability, so the different game solutions are developed accordingly, as opposed to the organisation positioned for the ball.’
Beregi informs us of the cultural significance of this ball-oriented style for the Hungarian game.
‘To recall the past, the game of the Golden Team was characterised by a similar game organisation, in which the players could leave their positions more freely, often unexpected players appeared in unexpected positions…”
It’s well documented throughout various tactical histories how this looser, more flexible ‘Danubian’ interpretation of the great 1954 Hungarian team played a pivotal role in the development of the Brazilian football. It informed the style which propelled the South Americans to a trio of spectacular World Cup triumphs in 1958, 1962 and 1970.
‘It’s no secret: the Hungarian and Brazilian game organisations were closely linked in the past, both nations have a similar folk spirit (put simply and in a good sense: we like inventive solutions), and a close connection can also be observed in football, which originates from the 1940s (Kürschner Izidor was the Hungarian head coach of the Brazilian Flamengo and Botafogo in the 1930s).’
It’s difficult to overstate how unusual a text like this is. A national federation publicly explaining how and why its Men’s National Team is changing its tactical identity, and only six months ahead of competing in the 2024 European Championships.
But why now? Why, 70 years on from Puskas, Hidekguti and Czibor, do the Hungarians once more believe in the power of a non-positional style of play? What was the catalyst for this most mysterious of tactical transformations?
To answer these questions we must be prepared to see beyond the elaborate matrix of facts, quantitative data and objective truths presented to us by football’s prevailing coaching and tactical industries. In a world where clarity and efficiency of information are of maximum value we must look to more obscure sources from outside the established paradigm to incite change.
Afterall, if no one perspective is ever wholly correct then what is ‘truth’ if not an assembled collection of partial truths? Everything is always incomplete.
So, the question then becomes: if not through adherence to some objective criteria, by what means are you bringing together and organising these various fictions, interpretations and deceptions? By what logics are you connecting the dots and constructing your own version of football’s tactical truth?
2. Hungaro
In early September of 2022 I published an article about Fluminense coach, Fernando Diniz. That’s when I started to receive the messages. All of a sudden my inbox was flooded. Followers of a Brazilian football movement known as ‘Jogo Funcional’ or ‘the functional game’ enthusiastically informed me the strange style of play practiced by Diniz was in fact the ball-oriented Jogo Funcional.
In amongst the confusion of those messages one name kept appearing, a signal piercing through the noise: Hungaro (The Hungarian). Who was Hungaro? I quickly learned that Hungaro published writings on Medium under the pseudonym Jozsef Bozsik. I found the texts. They were in Portuguese but with the aid of Google Translate I was able to read them.
Jozsef Bozsik was a deep lying playmaker in the Hungarian Golden Team of the 1950s, Hungaro’s online avatar was a black and white photograph of Bozsik. Jozsef Bozsik. Hungaro. Two separate aliases for the same anonymous writer. Hungaro’s identity was hidden beneath a double encryption. But what had the elusive Hungaro said in these apparently seminal blog articles that warranted such levels of mystique and reverence?
I believe Jozsef ‘Hungaro’ Bozsik to be the most important tactical analyst in the world today. Hungaro is the one who made the break-through. In hindsight Hungaro’s key contribution is very simple, yet it is seismic in significance. Some six years after its initial articulation the repercussions are only just beginning to be felt by the football world.
Hungaro had noticed a glaring blindspot in football’s tactical theory. It’s hard to believe the rest of the world could have missed it, but they had.
3. Zones of Interest
Football’s traditional game theory splits a team’s organisational make-up into two distinct phases: In-Possession (attacking) and Out-of-Possession (defending). How can the team achieve coherence with and without the ball?
Our understanding of defensive (out of possession) organisations is characterised by making another conceptual split. A team’s behaviour in the defensive phase can be described as being more zonal or non-zonal in orientation. This distinction comes from the way in which the players organise. What references (ball, opponent, teammate) do players use to orient themselves when defending?
In the zonal defending made famous by Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan the players would take their positions by maintaining certain distances and angles from their teammates in relation to the position of the ball. If Evani was playing left-midfield he would position himself at a particular distance and angle from central midfielder Albertini to his right. When all the players successfully arrange themselves in this manner a zonal-block is formed. Sacchi’s innovation was like a late 20th century reboot of the classical Roman military phalanx.
In contrast, non-zonal defending does not use this mode of organisation. Instead of looking first to the positions of teammates, players use the opponents and the ball as their primary organisational reference points.
In the 2024 Europa League Final, Gianpiero Gasperini’s Atalanta used an aggressive non-zonal man-to-man defensive system to destroy Bayer Leverkusen’s more zonally oriented build-up play. Despite the well-documented rotations and movements of Xabi Alonso’s team, their patterns were too easily predicted and read by Atalanta’s press.
In this mode of defensive organisation the players are not so concerned about maintaining regulated distances and angles between themselves and teammates, instead it is by locking-on to individual opponents that their movements are coordinated.
The important point to grasp here is that both zonal and non-zonal defensive strategies — and the differences between them — are well documented across tactical and coaching theory. There are pros and cons to each approach but both are deemed viable.
Sacchi’s Milan and Gasperini’s Atalanata may lie at opposite ends of this spectrum but it’s absolutely normal for systems to incorporate aspects of both zonal and non-zonal defending into an integrated or ‘mixed’ approach. The Zona-Mista of Giovanni Trappatoni’s Juventus and the Hybrid-Pressing of Mikel Arteta are both examples of such fusions.
If we now switch our analysis to the In-Possession or ‘attacking’ phase of team play we will be able to locate the theoretical void Hungaro identified. Like with defending, attacking organisations can be considered from zonal and non-zonal perspectives.
The zonal or ‘positional’ attack needs no introduction at this point. From Cruyff to Guardiola the characteristics of Positional Play and Juego de Posicion have been broken down into the most granular detail by swathes of analysts and tactical theorists.
Just like in zonal defending, players in Positional Play’s zonal attack regulate distances and angles between themselves and teammates to achieve organisation. This means that players are often required to wait in positions away from the ball until the play arrives in their sector of the field.
“Most people believe that the zone is just defensive, but that is not correct: there is also a zone attack. When your attackers are away from the ball, waiting for it to arrive after a series of plays and actions, this is a zone attack. We call it a positional attack, but in reality it is a zone attack. The point is not to look for the ball to attack, but to wait for it to reach a certain area”
— Pep Guardiola
The problem was that while there was a rapidly expanding corpus of Positional theory, appraisals of non-zonal attacking seemed to be completely absent from the discourse. There was simply nothing there. It was as if non-zonal attacking didn’t exist.
4. Functional Play
Functional Play or Jogo Funcional is Hungaro’s great contribution to tactical theory. By giving a name to a mode of non-zonal attacking organisation and contrasting it with zonal styles, Hungaro was able to draw the distinctions that had been missing. The differences between organisational references that had been so well established in the defensive phase were now present in the attacking moments.
“Functional attacks range from time to space, and have always been organized collectively, but with other premises, basically unknown in the English or Dutch world”.
“What is a functional game? The first reference of offensive organization comes from the ball and its movement. The team is not organized first through spaces, but through the movement of the ball. This allows more players in the ball sector, more positional freedom and adequate interpretation, and adequate movement so that spaces are not lost”.
Rather than using distances and angles between teammates to achieve organisation, Functional attacks use the ball as the primary reference.
This alternative paradigm represented obvious progress, a space for new ways to understand in-possession tactics, but not everyone welcomed this radical departure from the established framework.
Hungaro introduced Functional Play in a series of articles from 2017–18. Hungaro’s thesis was developed from a distinctly Brazilian perspective with much of the analysis addressing then Brazil coach Tite’s apparent switch from the non-zonal functional game to a more Europeanised zonal game of positional attacks. In an article posted during the 2018 World Cup in Russia, Hungaro problematizes Tite’s organisational switch.
“Trips to [Manchester] City, conversation with Guardiola, observations, and the first test in a different system took place against Russia, a friendly that we won 3–0…Playing positionally, having to dominate their space, Brazilian players felt extremely trapped, especially because this type of system is not part of our culture”.
Hungaro’s claim that the Brazilian player’s problems with Tite’s new zonal system were exacerbated by their cultural heritage has proved to be a divisive one. Hungaro aligned the zonal attack with European lineages running through England, Holland and Spain. Functional Play’s timeline was different. It emerged in the Danubian states of Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia before arriving in Brazil with the migration of Eastern European coaches.
“Culture is the most important element of football because it coordinates everything else. Tite neglected the cultural aspect of the game. When making the decision about the offensive system, about the players used, about the level of confrontation, about the nature of what a World Cup would be, Tite adopted a misleading concept of efficiency”.
As news of the anonymous blogger’s ideas spread out virally into mainstream Brazilian football media, Hungaro’s assertion of the link between culture and tactics became the lightning rod for fierce criticism from the journalistic and coaching establishment.
So many of football’s opinion leaders reject the proposal that meaningful correlations can be made between tactics and culture. For these industry stalwarts tactics are a domain to be understood via statistical breakdowns and verifiable information chunks. This data-centric mode is wholly uncomfortable with the prospect of incorporating such uncertain variables as socio-historical and anthropological lineages into its matrix of equations.
Hungaro was branded as a kook, an internet crackpot with a worryingly obsessive sect of online followers. Hungaro’s anonymity made it easy to be dismissed as a fake. Just imagine the reactions of mainstream coaches, analysts and pundits when faced with the prospect of having to take seriously a series of esoteric online blogs published by an unknown figure known only by their Jozsif Bozsik avatar.
It was never going to happen. Despite loyal support from a small pocket of advocates, Hungaro’s theories were publicly trashed and endlessly mischaracterized. Functional Play was cast as a wild fantasy that had no relevance to material reality. Hungaro switched to a private Twitter account and retreated into the shadows.
5. Enter Dinizismo
Some four years after Hungaro’s initial articulation of Functional Play and its significance to Brazilian culture a very strange situation began to emerge. There was a lot of online noise about an obscure Brazilian coach called Fernando Diniz. Diniz was viewed in Brazil as something of a hopeless romantic, a coach who’s short passing game was often pretty to watch but ultimately incapable of delivering trophies.
But news had spread to Europe of Diniz’s current team Fluminense and their increasingly impressive and unusual performances. Clips and screenshots of a highly unorthodox playing style full of asymmetries and strange patterns were circulating on Twitter. Before long Diniz’s jarring method was gathering significant interest from coaches and analysts all over the world.
Diniz talked about how his football — which was full of asymmetries, pass-and-move, one-twos and diagonal arrangements — was fundamentally different to the positional play of coaches like Guardiola. The Fluminense players would often group together in clusters around the ball, their extreme proximity violating the rationalised logic of zonal attacking organisation. Diniz described his football as ‘a-positional’.
Hungaro’s initial proposal of Functional Play had not only been ridiculed for its links to art, literature and philosophy. Professional coaches and analysts also harboured a deep scepticism regarding the validity of Functional Play as a tactical concept in the first place. Many were unable to understand the distinctions Hungaro had made. Devotees to the Barca-inspired Juego de Posicion argued there was no need for the Functional/Positional conceptual split.
Their reasoning was that Functional Play’s key tenet (players organising non-zonally around the ball) already existed as an aspect of Positional systems. But Hungaro’s argument was not that Functional and Positional couldn’t mix together in the same system.
As we already discussed with reference to zonal and man-to-man defending, hybrid approaches are commonplace — there are many moments when a defender in a zonal system will move to mark their direct opponent. The mistake is to assume that coherent mixture somehow denies each element’s original distinguishing features.
The rise of Dinizismo landed a double-blow for the validity of Hungaro’s theories of difference. Not only did Fluminense’s playing style obviously fall outside any reasonable definition of Positional Play (Guardiola himself said Fluminense were ‘not positional’), but Diniz also spoke about how his team’s game was rooted in an authentically Brazilian cultural tradition. Diniz adored Tele Santana’s 1982 Seleçao and was explicit about his feelings that Brazil should not try to solve its football problems by ‘drinking from a European fountain’.
Suddenly Hungaro’s ideas weren’t so crazy after all. Respected coaches, professional analysts and intrigued fans from all over the world began to learn about an alternative vision of possession-based attacking football. Hungaro’s public Twitter account reappeared, and at the tail-end of 2022 the long-form article The Most Beautiful Football on Earth: what we are, why we destroy ourselves was released.
6. Danubian Tacticology
“A nation is not a metaphysical reality, which is born under the imprint of an essence transmitted to all citizens. A nation is also not a genetic code installed in each of its children. Nor is the nation a mere arbitrariness, a pile of farces, just a speech by the powerful to control its population. The question persists: after all, what is a nation? It is a collective construction for several generations. A common life around the same symbols, culture, institutions, language, habits. Nation is recognition. The sign at the doctor’s office indicates silence in Zurich and Brasília. However, in Zurich, order is followed to the letter, with no chance for negotiations or hesitation. In Brasília, a TV is on near the silence sign, people speak in low tones, without major disturbances because people recognize the nature of the order, but negotiate with its implications. Order comes into play only if the noise reaches the level of nuisance. By noticing these differences between people, we recognize the diversity of human life and, at the same time, its universality. We recognize ourselves as Brazilians, noticing these differences between culture, symbols, customs, languages in relation to other peoples”.
In this above excerpt, Hungaro articulates how different national identities can emerge to encapsulate different systems of value. Hungaro’s premise is that the Brazilian cultural attitude develops from an idea of order which is always negotiated and flexible. For Hungaro, this flexibility, which can be seen in the swaying movements of capoeira and liberal attitudes towards rules and regulations, is at the heart of the Brazilian interpretation of Functional Play.
The flexibility inherent in Functional Play manifests in a variety of ways and at various scales. At the macro-level, Functional teams tend to overload the side of the pitch where the ball is rather than keeping spaces evenly occupied throughout the pitch. Diagonals and tabelas (one-twos) emerge and disappear as situations unfold rather than optimal positioning dictating the execution of third-man triangulations. And at the micro level we see flexibility in the ginga swing of the dribbler’s snaking hips.
“Brazil played the 2022 World Cup according to the dominant positional culture and against the football of the Brazilian people, against all our characteristics. Brazil in 2022 looked like England in 1950. It was a slap in the face to the Brazilian people and everything we built in this sport. This submission is our greatest defeat”.
It is here that we return to Istvan Beregi’s Hungarian tactical manifesto. Beregi spoke of how Brazilian football had been influenced by the arrival of Hungarian coaches who brought with them the fluid and flexible style of the Danubian school.
Beregi referred to how Hungarian and Brazilian culture share a ‘similar folk spirit’ and a preference for ‘inventive solutions’. There is also a sense that ambiguity and confusion are often more readily accepted in these more flexible interpretations of order. There is less of a need for immediate clarity and definition, plasticity trumps rigidity, rules are to be interpreted rather than obediently adhered to.
“In addition, we were among the first to use false positions, such as Hidegkuti as a false 9, which also had the purpose of deception”
The Hungarian Golden Team’s style was indeed full of trickery and deception. Things were rarely as they seemed, but if you pay close attention to those classic games it’s possible to spot the patterns of Functional Play. Wingers like Czibor move freely across the pitch, play is progressed by passing and moving, close-proximity combinations emerge all over the pitch and attackers form diagonals to deceive the opposition.
Watching Puskas step-over the ball along an attacking diagonal immediately conjures images of Pele or Zico. There are Hungarian fingerprints all over the mythical Brazilian style.
Hungary’s Golden Team use a pass-and-move, one-two and a diagonal step-over to score against South Korea in 1954.
We see similar movements and patterns in the attacking pay of Diniz’s Fluminense. Players approaching the ball, pass and move, one-twos, and diagonal cutbacks with a step-over to finish. On both these occasions the wide combinations involve both wingers. Left winger Keno has crossed the field to combine with right winger Arias.
This asymmetrical overloading of one side, with wingers abandoning their positions (without being filled by rotations), is almost completely absent in Positional Play. These Functional patterns were already present in Hungary’s famous 1953 victory over England at Wembley.
“It is revealing watching a video of the game today that, midway through the first half, Wolstenholme [TV commentator] observes, in a tone midway between amusement and amazement, that The outside-left Czibor came across to pick up the ball in the outside-right position”.
— Jonathan Wilson
Kocsis plays diagonally inside to Puskas who steps over again to create the chance in the 1954 World Cup Final against West Germany.
The 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Cerezo plays the diagonal, Mendonça steps over and Roberto completes the escadinha. Danubian flows animate the Brazilian’s Functional style.
Movement immediately after the pass (toco y me voy) is a fundamental tenet of Functional Play. Here we see a wonderfully inventive scooped give-and-go/one-two combination against Uruguay.
False 9 Hidegkuti finds himself as a deep midfielder. He plays to Jozsef Bozsik (the ‘real’ one) who glides forward through the challenges — I play and I go. A beautifully controlled give-and-go penetrates the defensive line.
Energised by the success of teams like Fluminense, the current Hungarian national team made a conscious decision to move forward by looking back to the past. There is a feeling that by ‘returning’ to the principles which animated the Golden Team a new version of non-zonal, Functional Hungarian football can be brought to life.
The popularisation of Bozsik’s Functional Play afforded an alternative analytical lens through which the classic footage could be observed and evaluated. By reinterpreting the patterns weaved by Puskas, Hidegkuti and Bozsik this ambitious project dreams of reconnecting Hungarian football with the spirit of the people.
“Watching the games back before I couldn’t really abstract from today’s football, therefore I couldn’t understand well enough what was happening on the pitch. As I dug deeper into functionality, I started to understand more and more, finding for example the tendency of that team always going to play the ’kényszerítő’ (tabela / one-two). Or the fact that our winger -Czibor- sometimes moved from the left side to the right to overload by surprise, which was even more unique in that time’s rigid football. Why is it important? I think we can only live in the present well, if we understand the past of who we were, giving us the cultural context. As a nation, we don’t like to be systemised, we often go around the system to find unique solutions — why would we do differently on the pitch? It’s not a coincidence that in the history of the game Hungarian and Brazilian football are connected to each other — as nations, we have a similar soul, and also there is the football connection as well (Dori Kürschner, Béla Guttmann).”
In an article for German website Spielverlagerung, Beregi leaves us in no doubt as to the cultural significance of reconnecting with a lost tactical heritage.
He also cites the texts of Jozsef Bozsik.
7. Kényszerítő
Hungary arrive at the 2024 European Championships in Germany in good form; They’ve lost only once in fifteen games. Head Coach Marco Rossi has been clear about the non-zonal tactical identity of his team going into the tournament.
Hungary’s ‘3–4–3’ has collapsed into a left-side overload. Radical asymmetry. No10 Szoboszlai dictates the play from the left touchline, always looking for diagonal entry points into the opponent’s block.
Szoboszlai drops into the left-back zone to initiate the play. Once again the Hungarians gather in the ball sector. Pass and move, pass and move. Players approach the ball carrier to offer the kényszerítő — kényszerítő (the Hungarian word for one-two) means ‘forcing’, as in ‘to force’ the opponent into a decision they don’t want to make — follow the ball? follow the man? or be left for dead.
Again the left-side overload, the pass and move, Szoboszlai from the left, dribble, accelerate, penetrate inside, kényszerítő, goal.
When the players become more attuned to the possibilities afforded by close, ball-oriented proximity we begin to see more elaborate, free-flowing and unpredictable combination play. Again we see the prevalence of the kényszerítő with two in quick succession.
This time Szoboszlai receives the diagonal pass in more orthodox central position. He drives forward, Kerkez approaches to offer the kényszerítő. Szoboszlai plays and goes. The scooped return is perfect. Players flood the box, the next third man arrives to make the attempt at goal.
Now the tilt appears on the right. The Hungarians can overload on either side. Quick combinations attract the defence. Play and go, always making depth runs to threaten the space behind the defensive line.
Back to the left. Swirling movement and activity as six players buzz around the ball zone. The defenders don’t know whether to stick or twist. The Hungarians build the intensity through sharing the ball, speaking their language with every pass. A run in behind, a chipped pass to make the box entry.
A diagonal entry from the right. Aggressive pass-and-move play forces Hungary upfield. The left-side defender Szalai Attila plays and goes - toco y me voy!- always threaten the backline.
In build-up Hungary set up with a relatively evenly distributed positional arrangement. But as soon as the ball is played the unpredictable movements begin. Players approach the ball carrier and look to advance with narrow combinations through the side corridor.
This goal-kick restart demonstrates the problem Hungary’s unusual attacking play poses to modern defences. Serbia want to mark man-to-man. But ‘no10’ Szoboszlai drops to stand next to the goalkeeper. Serbia’s defensive midfielder doesn’t want to follow Szoboszlai that far and leave the 4v4 man-to-man backline unprotected. Szoboszlai takes the ball on the six-yard line to and draws the press to create the free defender. Hungary sweep upfield with pass-and-move combinations. The free Szoboszlai makes the through pass and, if the final lay off was made, Hungary’s playmaker might have finished a quite spectacular move himself.
There is a growing feeling that defensive systems have now adapted to the problems posed by decades of clearly structured Positional attacks. Well-drilled man-to-man and hybrid pressing are becoming increasingly effective against zonal build-up structures. This trend is another reason why coaches like Rossi are turning towards a non-zonal attacking organisation. More radical attacking movements force man-to-man defenders into decisions they don’t want to make.
8. Art and Deception
It seems like a story stranger than fiction. Hungary’s tactics have been influenced by the controversial theories of an esoteric, anonymous online blogger. Stranger still, the blogger, who we assume is Brazilian, uses one of Hungary’s greatest players as a pseudonym and avatar. Hungaro’s decision to remain anonymous encapsulates the deeper significance of this entire caper. By resisting identification, Functional Play’s source remains shrouded in mystery.
Who is Hungaro? We are still none the wiser. But in the Functional paradigm clarity and certainty are not valued as they are in the mainstream analytical industry. So much of Hungaro’s analysis avoids presentations of data. The texts do not seek to establish objective truths, they are stories about how people relate to each other through a common football language.
Functional play is a study of feeling, of interpretation and of how diverse perspectives can interact to create new combinations. Quantification and data are not seen as necessary when contemplating the human nature of Functional Play’s tactical facts.
Whatever happens to Hungary’s Functional football project it is vital they do not make the mistake of believing there exists some fixed, knowable or essential essence which they must rediscover. Fixedness is the enemy of Functional and Relational play. Taking inspiration from past events is not the same as returning to some idealised version of the past. Lineages and essences must be seen as multiple, fluid and ever-changing rather than singular, fixed and sedentary.
The Hungarian Connection links an alternative mode of tactical analysis to the material reality of top-level professional football. It represents a radical subversion of industry gate-keepers who seek to control the content and form of ‘tactical analysis’. We were told that ‘professional coaches’ have no interest in obscure online jargon, as if the people who work in football are somehow incapable of comprehending anything more complex than a brightly coloured pizza-chart.
In any domain of competitive game-theory deception is a primary tool. If you are able to functionally coordinate your intentions whilst simultaneously hiding them from the opponent, huge advantages can be gained. Encryption and espionage are fundamental techniques in arenas of conflict and competition. Homogenised communication is so obviously sub-optimal. The more localised, specific and culturally relevant the dialect, the harder it is for outsiders to decode.
The art of misdirection is a quality embodied by all the greatest players, so why should tactical theory not be geared towards confusion, misdirection and deception at the level of collective organisation? Functional Play, Relationism — and analysis within these frameworks — prefer not to relentlessly spoon-feed chunks of objective data. In this alternative paradigm meanings emerge from the bringing-together of diverse patterns and signs. This is football and its analysis taken seriously as an artistic endeavour. As they say in Brazil, this is futebol arte.
The great Italian painter Giorgio De Chirico once wrote that every profound artist has been a deliberate deceiver.
We might never know Hungaro’s true identity. But I guess that’s the point.
