For long, monumental sports arenas have formed a mainstream for
“us”-building. Although they
are transformed into neoliberal event spaces in most of the European counties
in the Hungarian illiberal context they still serve as materializations of
political “us”-building. A very salient instance of all this is the Arena
Pancho, an authoritarian enactment of a spatial logic that constitutes
illiberal logic through merging
a selective national-historical narrativization of the socialist past and
interwar statism. Located in
the hometown of the Fidesz leader Victor Orbán, the new stadium and its club is eponymous to the
famous 1956-match hero Ferenc Puskás. Our analysis focuses on how the Arena
Pancho as an event scape and a
spatio-temporal articulation together
with the club Puskas Ferenc Academy constitutes the illiberal “us”. The paper aims to map out how the illiberal logic of the Fidesz-KDNP
government is reflected in the club Puskas Academy, and the Arena Pancho by embedded
national myths rooting in the feudal pre-modern times of Hungary.
