Ferenc Puskás – football's all-scoring, all conquering Marco Polo

In Episode 26 of the Ademola Bookmen Podcast, we reviewed Captain of Hungary, by Ferenc Puskás. It's a name that every football fan probably knows but to most, he is probably little more than a name.

I knew very little about Puskás. I knew that he was Hungarian and that he played for Real Madrid. I also knew that he had a bit of a different build than your average modern footballer. But I doubt I could I have picked him out of a lineup of players of his day.

Puskás wrote this book when he was 26-years-old. He had already conquered Hungarian football with five league titles, but his incredible successes in Spain where he won five more leagues and three European Cups, were all ahead of him.

He also wrote it from behind the Iron Curtain in 1956. Given our understanding of censorship in those parts around that time – the year of the Hungarian revolution – it did feel like a bit of a gamble committing to read this book. When it arrived in the post with its out-of-focus cover picture, two-inch margins and flimsy binding, I was worried that our gamble had been misguided.

I am glad to say, I was wrong. We have read some bad books since we launched the podcast. As it turns out, being a good footballer and having a good career, does not necessarily mean you can write a good book. Who would have thought it?

But Puskás was not only a great footballer, he was a great writer too. My co-host Al says that he knew we were on to a good thing when Puskás told his story about stealing a cat from his local butcher and selling it to buy tickets to a football match.

Cat stealing aside, there is an innocence to Puskás that is just unimaginable in a footballer today. It's hard to see how anyone who grew up in the cut and thrust of the modern game with its all agents and personal chefs, could ever be as taken as Puskás was by something as simple as a trip around London. Here is a line from the man himself:

"Big Ben towering in majestic loneliness counts the minutes, the hours, the centuries. Its booming voice, shocks one into realisation that time is passing. This voice has warned many generations that every second offers its pleasures and we should make use of them with intelligence."

The language is lovely and Puskás' sense of adventure and real excitement at seeing these things, just jumps off the page.

In Mexico, he was appalled by the spectacle of bullfighting. In Sweden, he found himself in a world of confusing, Covid-esque rules, having to buy a meal in order to get a glass of wine. In Vienna, he described how the simple green rectangle of a football pitch was an oasis for the people of a city scarred by the Second World War. In Egypt, he was predictably totally and utterly taken by the Pyramids.

It is sweet, it is engaging. And it is so utterly out of time.

In a recent article in The Financial Times called 'What and how to read', Janan Ganesh told us not to bother reading anything from the past few years. If its worth reading now, it will be worth reading in ten or twenty years. If not, it will have been forgotten.

In the case of football books, this really rings true. Of the 28 books we have read so far for the podcast, the more modern ones have tended to be bad – James Milner's Ask a Footballer and Mark Noble's Boylen Boy are dreadful books. Guillem Balague's Messi biography, which we just finished last week, was the worst one yet.

But the Puskás book is great – part tactics manual, part travelogue, written by a man who left an indelible mark on football and who managed to see the world at a time when this kind of travel really was rare.

I am happy to say that I know a lot more about Puskás now, having read the book. And I am even happier to say that he wrote another, in 1998, after another 40+ years traveling around the world with his gift for football and his wonderful appetite for adventure. Something to look forward to in the new year.

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