If anyone doubts the powerful impact soccer had on sports lovers across the globe (even in the somewhat reluctant baseball and football-crazy United States), the phenomenal success of the recent World Cup would convince him or her otherwise. It united all races in South Africa and lifted the spirits of economically battered Spain, the Cup's winner.

Television and brilliant marketing enlarged the scope of success, of course, but the love of soccer has deep roots in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the 1950s, the “golden team” of Hungary was considered to be the best and its captain, Ferenc Puskas, one of the best players in the world. The author is correct in regarding this success as a compensation for national traumas, a recently lost war, and the subsequent terror of the Stalinist regime. I remember well, as a high school and college student, how the sole “safe” conversation was about sports, and why not, when triumphs in soccer on a global scale were so amazingly and heartwarmingly numerous. When totally unexpectedly and sadly for Hungarians, the team lost in 1954, in Bern, at the World Cup's final against Germany, 3 to 2, I was in a Hungarian army camp. We listened to the loudspeakers, and at the end, thousands of young soldiers were sobbing uncontrollably.

Borsi-Kalman wrote a sprawling, totally disjointed, constantly digressing, and wonderful book on this subject. One should not look for organizational clarity here, but the author's passionate exuberance compensates for the imperfections and offers gems about the intricacies of a beautiful game. The author himself has not only been an interested spectator, but also an active player himself, a member of a first-class Hungarian team, Ferencváros, between 1968 and 1970. He certainly is a man who knows the game from the inside, and those pages are the best in the book. The good players, like Puskas himself, may have been uneducated, and they probably still are, but they have had to possess a superb intelligence to create not only individual feats of daring, but also outstanding teamwork, which has always been the key to a successful soccer game.

Borsi-Kalman is also a well-known and highly regarded cultural historian. Not surprisingly then, he is well aware that soccer is more than just a game: It has become an integral part of modern nationalism, “the uncontrollable sphere of national self-expression” in his formulation (42). The author is correct in his analysis of this kind of nationalism as a collective compensation for past and present traumas. I wish he had stopped at this stage and not proceeded to viewing the victories of the “golden team” as the consolation for all the failures of modern Hungarian society and the state (60). That is clearly an exaggeration. The post-World War I dismemberment of Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon, for instance, has been an open wound in Hungarian national consciousness, immune to any consolation, including victories on the soccer field. At best, these victories offered a temporary diversion.

A similar exaggeration is to regard Puskas as “the embodiment of the most revealing, most talented, and most spectacular representative of the national character” (174–75). The study of national character is a notoriously murky area that opens more questions than it can conceivably resolve. If Puskas was the embodiment of Hungarian national character, why were other members of the team, and particularly Puskas' rival, Sándor Kocsis, definitely not in the same category? And how can national character be accurately fixed, when only a few years after the 1956 revolution, some of its defiant heroes turned into timid opportunists in the Kádár-regime? All this does not mean that Puskas was not a fascinating personality in his own right. Borsi-Kalman describes him with a mixture of awe and affection, with warts and all. Puskas came from modest circumstances, was a crude suburban roughneck, arrogant, and obscene. Yet, he was also ready to help his teammates and fellow soccer players if they got into trouble. As the star of the “golden team,” Puskas cleverly used his influence with Mihály Farkas, minister of defense, who became his intermediary to the Stalinist Politburo.

Puskas maintained his ability to behave as an equal to others of high station, when he later met Admiral Horthy and General Franco. He demonstrated a keen intelligence adjusting to new circumstances during the 1960s as one of the star players of “Real Madrid” in Spain. There, apparently, Puskas metamorphosed into the facsimile of a refined Spanish gentleman. He became a legend in his own times, although his later coaching career was undistinguished and his physical decline late in life was truly tragic. Still, he was warmly celebrated upon his return to Hungary. He died there in 2006 and received a “baroque” state funeral, reserved in Hungary only for a select few leaders. Borsi-Kalman's book, although not without problems, is a worthy testament to the unparalleled success of the “golden team” and its captain, Ferenc Puskas.