Pyromaniac
Active Member
Money, investment and communism. Clubs were swimming in debt and run badly, government cut budgets on sport which had a knock on effect and a lot of infrastructure is just out dated and poor.
The domestic league cant compete with the European leagues and any half decent talent coming through will jump to another league often to early and end up on the bench at other clubs.
It also doesnt help that some clubs just have vile fans, you know the types, the ones that plague a lot of Eastern European clubs and players coming up dont want to deal with it anymore.
Similar issues hit Poland, Romania, Czech etc.
Also, dont want to be the downer BUT Szoboszlai; he is 19, hes good and has very exciting potential but this thread, especially in the last two weeks with our qualification has gone a bit crazy with his hype, again the potential is there but some of the talk is like he is peak De Bruyne level, need to calm down a little he is still developing and his next club is very important for this.
A lot of communist countries produced great football teams though. Bulgaria, Romania, and Czech had great teams in the 90's, all product of the communist sports training youth system. Poland in the 80's. Czechoslovakia won the Euros in 1976. The best were probably Yugoslavia though, which would have won cups in the 90's if the country didn't dissolve. Steaua Bukarest won the CL in 1986, Red Star Belgrade in 1991. Kinda weird how Hungary suddenly seemed to have lost their football tradition. Did their regime just care less about sports than the other communist regimes?