Flórián Albert

• 1. Introduction

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  Flórián Albert stood on a pitch in England in 1966, and made a crowd forget about Pelé. That is not a small claim. Hungary were facing Brazil in a must-win World Cup group match, and Albert, who had already claimed the Ballon d'Or the previous year, turned in a performance so commanding that the supporters gave him a standing ovation. Hungary beat Brazil 3-1. Albert had already been playing senior football for nearly a decade. He was still only 24.

  How does a boy from a small border town in Hungary become the best footballer in Europe? How does a player who spent his entire career at a single club win the continent's highest individual honour? And what does it say about football in the 1960s that a forward from a team most people have never heard of could top the Ballon d'Or vote by 28 points? This documentary follows Albert from a talent day in Budapest when he was 11 years old to a funeral attended by the President of Hungary, and everywhere in between.

• 2. The Boy from Hercegszántó

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  Hercegszántó is a little town near the border with the former Yugoslavia, and that is where Flórián György Albert was born on the 15th of September 1941. His father was a blacksmith of Šokac heritage, his mother a Serb. She died when Flórián was two years old. He grew up playing football with his two brothers, which is the kind of origin story that sounds inevitable in hindsight but was simply a childhood at the time.

  When the family moved to Budapest, the young Albert attended a talent day held by Ferencvárosi TC. The coaches were impressed enough to select him on the spot. He was 11 years old. It was the beginning of a relationship with one club that would last, in various forms, for the rest of his life. He would go on to hold administrative roles there decades after his playing days ended, and in 2007 the stadium would carry his name.

• 3. A Debut and a Nation

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  Albert made his senior debut for Ferencváros on the 2nd of November 1958, against Diósgyőr, and scored twice. He was 17. Hungarian national team manager Lajos Baróti had already spotted him in a youth match between Hungary and Yugoslavia. The call-up followed quickly.

  His first appearance for Hungary came on the 28th of June 1959, against Sweden, who had finished runners-up at the 1958 World Cup just the year before. Albert contributed two assists as Hungary won 3-2. Over the course of his international career he would earn 75 caps and score 31 goals. Before he was out of his teens, he had already played against two of the best sides in the world and come out on the right side of both results.

  The 1960 Olympics brought a bronze medal, the first of two he would collect with the national side. The second came at the European Championship in 1964, where Hungary finished third. Those finishes sit quietly in the record books, but at the 1962 World Cup the individual recognition was harder to ignore: Albert shared the Golden Boot Award with five other players, each having scored four goals.

• 4. Ferencváros and European Glory

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  Albert played for Ferencváros from 1952 to 1974. His biggest club success arrived in 1965, when Ferencváros won the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. The path to the final ran through AS Roma and Manchester United. The decisive match was against Juventus, and Ferencváros won it 1-0.

  That same year Albert was the Hungarian Championship top scorer for the third time, having previously won the title in 1960 and 1961. The league title itself came in 1963, 1964, 1967, and 1968. The Hungarian Cup waited until 1972, the final addition to a domestic collection built over two decades at the same club. He also appeared in the 1968 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup final against Leeds United but lost by a single goal.

  Ferencváros were not a global superpower. They were a Budapest club competing in a system that did not export its best players the way Western European leagues did. That Albert built the career he did without ever leaving added a particular weight to everything he achieved.

• 5. The Ballon d'Or Year

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  Nineteen sixty-seven was the year everything arrived at once. Albert won the Hungarian Championship with Ferencváros and claimed the Hungarian Player of the Year award. His son Flórián Albert Jr. was born in December of that year. And then, in the same month, Albert was awarded the Ballon d'Or.

  He topped the voting with 68 points, twenty-eight ahead of Bobby Charlton in second place. The margin was not modest. For a player from Hungary, for a player who had never left Ferencváros, the gap represented something more than a close vote. Albert had been named FUWO European Team of the Season in 1966 and 1967. He had already won the ADN Eastern European Footballer of the Season. The Ballon d'Or was the European prize, and he won it with room to spare.

  The nickname "The Emperor" had been earned before this point, but 1967 made it official in the language of continental football. He was 26 years old.

• 6. Injury and the End of a Career

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  On the 15th of June 1969, in a World Cup qualifier against Denmark, Albert collided with Knud Engedal, the Danish goalkeeper, and suffered a serious fractured leg. He was sidelined for almost a year. When he returned, he could not recover his previous form.

  His return to league football came on the 27th of April 1970 against Salgótarján. His first international appearance after the injury was on the 4th of April 1971, a friendly against Austria. His final major tournament was the 1972 European Championship, where Hungary finished fourth. He played twice.

  His last league match came on the 17th of March 1974 against Zalaegerszeg. Albert came on as a substitute in the second half and scored, making it 3-0, the final goal of his career. After the match he received greetings and gifts from teammates and opponents, ran to the stands, bowed for the fans, and left the field on the shoulders of his teammates. It was the kind of farewell that belongs to someone who had given a club everything.

• 7. Legacy and Death

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  After retiring as a player, Albert had two short spells managing Al-Ahly Benghazi in Libya, though with limited success. He returned to Ferencváros and worked there in several roles: technical director, department leader, and honorary chairman. In 2007 the club stadium was named after him. That same year Hercegszántó, his birth town, made him an honorable citizen. Budapest followed in 2010, Ferencváros in 2011.

  On the 27th of October 2011, Albert underwent coronary artery bypass surgery after suffering a vasoconstriction. A press release from Ferencváros the following day said the operation had been successful. He then suffered a heart attack and died in the early hours of the 31st of October 2011, at the age of 70, in a hospital in Budapest.

  His funeral took place on the 6th of November 2011 in the Cemetery of Óbuda. Among the mourners were Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary; Pál Schmitt, President of Hungary; and former teammates including Kálmán Mészöly, Gyula Rákosi, and Tibor Nyilasi. Hungarian public television Magyar Televízió broadcast the event live.

  Before a Ferencváros league match the same afternoon, the floodlights were switched off and the stadium fell dark, with candles carried by supporters providing the only light. The players wore an all-black kit. A banner in the stands read: "God shall be with you Emperor." Supporters of SK Rapid Wien, linked to Ferencváros by longstanding ties, held their own tribute the same day. The memorial match arranged for the 11th of November against Liechtenstein was moved from the Sóstói Stadion to the Ferenc Puskás Stadium so that more people could attend, and Hungary won 5-0 in front of a sold-out crowd.