Hungary as a Sport Superpower

lt;p>The RERIS Studies in International Sport Relations series publishes books that explore interconnectivity between several actors (people, organizations, and/or states) at the international level. It aims to showcase works (individual or collective) that use sources from a variety of different languages and topics that challenge Euro-American centrism and assumptions about gender in global sport.

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What role has football (and sport in general) played in Hungarian foreign policy? Was there a continuity between the inter-war period and communism? Are foreign politics and sporting diplomacy synonyms? This book tries to provide answers to these questions through a careful examination of documents of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry and Hungarian newspapers, supplemented by documentation from several European countries. Through Hungarian football, the author traces a history of Hungary during the Age of Extremes with a special focus on the period during which sport played a particular role in Hungarian foreign policy: from 1924, the date of the Paris Olympics, the first time the country competed after World War I, to 1960, date of the Olympics of Rome. The result is a study from a particularly original perspective, highlighting, first and foremost, the transnational dimension of Hungarian football.