CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Leleszi, Zsofia |
|---|---|
| Title | Playing for More Than Victory: Non-White Footballers and The Making of Belonging Through Football in Contemporary Hungary |
| Summary | Football in Hungary is often framed as a symbol of national pride, community cohesion, and ethnic homogeneity. While racialized players are occasionally celebrated for their performance, their presence is typically understood as temporary, tolerated only under the condition of athletic success. Existing research has examined how sport can serve as a site for identity formation and community building, particularly among racialized groups. However, little attention has been paid to how these dynamics unfold in Hungary, where racial diversity is politically contested, and football remains a largely exclusionary space. The aim of this research is to explore what a local Hungarian football community comes to mean for non-white players who participate in it, and how they are perceived, spoken to, and spoken about in ways that reflect broader national discourses around race and belonging. Fieldwork was carried out in Budapest, Hungary, during football trainings and matches. The data was collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings suggest that while players routinely encounter racial abuse from fans, these experiences are often normalized and rarely viewed as exceptional by the players themselves. Instead, the football club emerges as a space of emotional support, friendship, and everyday solidarity. For many players, it offers more than a team – it becomes a community and a site of subtle resistance against their racialized exclusion. The study highlights the importance of informal, grassroots collectives in fostering belonging within exclusionary environments, and contributes to broader conversations on race, nationalism, and everyday resilience through sport in contemporary Hungary. |
| Supervisor | Prem Kumar Rajaram and Kris Orszaghova |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/leleszi_zsofia.pdf |
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