THE TEN COMMANOMENTS
Without playmakers, there is no modern football” was the last of 10 commandments that Ferenc Puskas jotted down in his sumptuous Madrid apartment. Football theory wasn’t really his thing but, recognising that a professional lifestyle was essential if he was to resurrect his playing career in Spain, he cut down on smoking, drinking and sausages, and had time on his hands. Reflecting on the game that defined his life – and making several false starts at penning an autobiography – gave him something constructive to do if he wasn’t playing or training.
His many notebooks, letters, journals and memorabilia now live in the Puskas Academy in Felcsut, not far from Budapest, curated by his biographer, Gyorgy Szollosi. The posters and pennants Puskas collected resemble the pageantry of a bygone age, yet it isn’t the pomp and circumstance of souvenirs that’s most moving. It’s his handwriting.
The meticulous care with which he charted his goals and appearances for Real Madrid – year by year, competition by competition – reveals that, as much as the Hungarian liked to take a detached view of his own success, such details mattered to him.
The commandments were documented in handwriting so neat and tidy, it was as if Puskas was doing homework back at school in Kispest, now a suburb of Budapest, where he grew up in the 1930s and ’40s. His earliest memories, he once said, were of the roar of the crowd from the nearby stadium coming through the windows on matchdays.
Puskas had always held strong beliefs on the
