On Hungary's "Black Thursday" and Euro Cup 2012

When Debrecen took out FC Fehérvár 2-1 in the increasingly misnamed Hungarian Super Cup, it looked like just another match between just another two hapless teams in just another seemingly hopeless post-commie era soccer league. And it may very well have been exactly that, a crying shame for another Central Eastern European nation's game and representative of a worsening of Hungary's chances to co-host Euro Cup 2012.

The Debrecen/Fehérvár match acted as a coda to a devastating twelve hours in soccer last week on what local journalists are already pessimistically (artistically pessimistically, in that uniquely Hungarian way) calling "Black Thursday." Corruption didn't kill the Magyar cats, but rather rampant incompetence in the front office and on the field.

The notorious, infamous and most celebrated Hungarian club Ferencváros and new championship division squad Vác suffered ignominy of the most lunk-headed kind when the Hungarian appellate licensing committee announced the rejection of their paperwork. The green-and-white, the team most often Hungary's representative in European tournaments and a championship-division squad for 107 years, was simply defeated by paperwork. The most badly-kept secret in Hungarian soccer and most assuredly the reason for the application's rejection is Ferencváros' financial problems, most definitely not due to corruption of any sort.

The Hungarian FA now has a lose-lose situation on its hands. They can stick to their guns and dump Ferencváros and thereby dump prestige and probably cause the burning of the entire district of Ferencváros; alternatively, they can overturn the unappealable (yeah, right) decision, thus showing the "malleability" of the "structure" of Hungarian soccer's "legal" "organization."

Meanwhile, on the pitch Black Thursday evening, Ferencváros rival and Hungary's no. 2 franchise Újpest marked Skipper Bertalan Bicskei's inaugural match with a UEFA Cup qualifying round loss to FC Vaduz of Lichtenstein.

In Budapest.

By a score of 4-0.