Ferencvaros, a club even more sports than Barça

In the southeastern part of the monumental Budapest the park emerges Nepliget. Built to commemorate the centenary between Buda and Pest (1873), in its 110 hectares is located the SportKozpunt, the immense sports city of the most important club in the country, the Ferencvaros, more than a football team and more sports complex than Barcelona, ​​which has up to 15 sections with great athletes in their ranks.

The jewel in the crown is the men's water polo team, European champion in 2019 and winner of 23 league titles, whose squad is the base of the national team since they returned to the elite in 2016 after a few years of drought. “For them the Hungarian league is even more important than the Champions League. They always want to win it and have bet on it thanks to the fact that the football team has started to get more income and they have been able to benefit“, commented Adrià Delgado, who has played in Hungary in two stages (2014 and 2016). Water polo is a passion, the third most popular sport and followed behind handball. At the Elek Gyula Arena The men's and women's teams that are among the top three in the country play their games, especially the girls, who have 12 leagues.

But apart from the successes and professional team sports, Ferencvaros has other minority sections but equally relevant in the sports culture of the country. An example is swimming, with Olympians like David Verraszto or Liliana Szilagy, now trained by Shane Tusup, former Katinka Hosszu coach. It even has an ice rink where two young but historic people train, the liu brothers, of a Hungarian mother and Chinese father who in the Pyongyang Olympics they won the gold medal in 5,000 meters short track skating, the first in the country's history. Curling or ice hockey are other sports that are practiced.

Hundreds of athletes and children pass through the park every afternoon willing to learn other sports of the club, such as fencing (the country won four medals in Rio 2016), wrestling, gymnastics, athletics, cycling or even canoeing (three medals in the last Games). “It is a humble neighborhood on the outskirts of Budapest, far from the center”, summarizes Delgado. But Sergei Rebrov's first team prefers “the solitude of the morning. The atmosphere is familiar, but first thing in the morning there is calmer and it is better,” says Albert Bosch, the Ukrainian coach's assistant.

In fact, the Ferencvaros project is more ambitious. “The club is building another sports city to differentiate football from other sports but right now the project is stopped. Rebrov commented that he wanted to fix the sports city when he arrived. Now we have four natural grass pitches and two artificial grass pitches. pitch depending on the state of the grass. This year we created a subsidiary, because we only had one U-19 “.