Hungary has no official national sport: no act of parliament or government decree names one, and Hungary is not among the countries that have formally designated a sport by law. In practice, though, water polo (vízilabda) is the sport Hungarians treat as their national game. The men’s team has won nine Olympic gold medals, the most of any country, and 16 Olympic medals in all. Football has the deepest emotional claim thanks to the Golden Team of the 1950s, and fencing has won Hungary more Olympic medals than any other sport. So the honest answer is “nothing by law, water polo by love”, with football and fencing as serious rivals.
What Hungarian Law Says About a National Sport
Some countries settle the question on paper. Their parliaments or governments have passed a law or decree naming a sport, usually a game that began there. Hungary never has. Its sport is governed by separate federations under the Hungarian Olympic Committee, which was founded and recognised in 1895, and no single federation holds a legal title above the others.
That leaves the title to be settled by results and public feeling, and on both counts water polo comes first. Hungary is a landlocked country of under ten million people, yet it has won more Olympic medals than any other nation that has never hosted the Games. It has 530 medals at the Summer Olympics and 10 at the Winter Games, and after the 2020 Games it passed Finland to become the country with the most Summer Olympic gold medals per head of population, if microstates are left out. Within that record, water polo is the event Hungarians identify with most, because no other country comes close to their results in it.
Water Polo: Nine Olympic Golds from Los Angeles 1932 to Beijing 2008
Hungary’s men won Olympic water polo gold in 1932, 1936, 1952, 1956, 1964, 1976, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Adding three silvers and four bronzes gives the 16 medals in the chart below. Between 1928 and 1980 the team won a medal at twelve Olympic tournaments in a row. Two decades later, coach Dénes Kemény led the side to three straight titles in Sydney, Athens and Beijing. Six players won all three: Tibor Benedek, Péter Biros, Tamás Kásás, Gergely Kiss, Tamás Molnár and Zoltán Szécsi.
Beyond the Olympics, Hungary has won the World Championship four times (1973, 2003, 2013 and 2023), the World Cup four times, and the European Championship 13 times, which is a record. Its total across all major tournaments is 91 medals, even though it has missed five Olympic men’s tournaments. At home the men’s team has been voted Hungarian Sport Team of the Year 15 times, from 1958 to 2013. Individual records come with the medals. Dezső Gyarmati (1927–2013) won five Olympic medals between 1948 and 1964, then coached Hungary to gold in 1976. The left-hander Tibor Benedek scored 65 goals across five Olympics from 1992 to 2008.
The women’s team has a shorter history, because women’s water polo only joined the Olympics in 2000, but it won world titles at Rome in 1994 and Montreal in 2005. In Hungary the sport is run by the Hungarian Water Polo Federation (MVLSZ). It was set up in 1989, before which water polo was part of the Hungarian Swimming Association, founded in 1907.
Melbourne, 6 December 1956: the Blood in the Water Match
Hungarians feel about water polo the way they do partly because of one semi-final. On 23 October 1956 a student demonstration in Budapest grew into a national uprising. From 4 November, Soviet forces crushed it with air strikes, artillery and tanks. The water polo squad, the reigning Olympic champions, were at a mountain training camp above the capital and could hear the gunfire. They were moved to Czechoslovakia to keep them out of the fighting, and only learned how bad the crackdown had been after they reached Australia.
The Melbourne Olympics then drew Hungary against the Soviet Union. The players had studied Russian at school, and, in Ervin Zádor’s words, they had decided to make the Soviet players angry to distract them. Kicks and punches were traded from the start. Ervin Zádor scored twice, and with Hungary leading 4–0 near the end, Soviet player Valentin Prokopov struck Zádor and left a bleeding gash above his eye. With the crowd close to boiling over, the match was called off in the final minute. Photographs of Zádor’s face went around the world, and the game became known as the “Blood in the Water” match. Hungary beat Yugoslavia 2–1 in the final to take the gold.
Margaret Island, the Danube Arena and Eger: Where Hungarian Water Polo Lives
The sport’s home in Budapest is the Alfréd Hajós National Swimming Stadium on Margaret Island, the park island in the Danube. Its indoor pool opened in 1930. It was designed by Alfréd Hajós (1878–1955), who in 1896 became Hungary’s first Olympic champion by winning the 100 m and 1,200 m freestyle in the sea off Athens. Eszter Pécsi, Hungary’s first female architect and structural engineer, designed its reinforced concrete arches. The outdoor pools followed in 1937, and the complex now has eight pools. It hosted the European Aquatics Championships in 2006 and 2010 and both European Water Polo Championships in 2014.
Across the river, the Danube Arena (Duna Aréna) was built between 2015 and 2017. It was ready in time for Budapest to take over the 2017 World Aquatics Championships at short notice, after Guadalajara withdrew. The arena has 5,000 permanent seats, plus 8,000 temporary ones used in 2017. It staged the world championships again in 2022 and the European Water Polo Championships in 2020.
The sport is not only a Budapest affair. Leading clubs are based in provincial cities such as Szolnok, Szeged and Eger, and in 2018 the western city of Szombathely hosted a youth world championship.
Eger, a wine town in the north, shows how far the game reaches. Its club plays at the Bitskey Aladár pool and has faced Europe’s best clubs there in the Champions League.
Football and the Golden Team, 1950–1956
If water polo is the sport Hungarians win at, football is the one they mourn and celebrate. The Hungarian Football Federation (MLSZ) was founded on 19 January 1901. The national side played its first international in Vienna in 1902, losing 5–0 to Austria, and first appeared at the Olympics in Stockholm in 1912, where England knocked it out 7–0. By the 1950s the roles had reversed. The Golden Team (Aranycsapat) was managed by Gusztáv Sebes and built around Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, Zoltán Czibor, József Bozsik, Nándor Hidegkuti and goalkeeper Gyula Grosics. From 1950 to 1956 it played 69 matches, won 58, drew 10 and lost only once, scoring 436 goals.
That team won Olympic gold in Helsinki in 1952. On 25 November 1953 it beat England 6–3 at Wembley in the “Match of the Century”, then won the return game in Budapest 7–1 in 1954. Its one defeat was the 1954 World Cup final against West Germany. The 1956 revolution broke the side up, and Puskás went on to a second career at Real Madrid. Over his career he scored 84 goals in 85 internationals for Hungary, and FIFA’s annual Puskás Award for the year’s best goal is named after him.
Hungary also reached the World Cup final in 1938, won further Olympic golds in 1964 and 1968, and finished third at the 1964 European Championship. After the 1986 World Cup came a 30-year drought without a major tournament. That ended with three European Championships in a row, in 2016, 2020 and 2024. The national team now plays at the Puskás Aréna in Budapest’s Zugló district, which opened in November 2019 with 67,215 seats on the site of the old Ferenc Puskás Stadium.
Sabre and Aladár Gerevich: Hungary’s Biggest Olympic Medal Source
Measured by medals alone, fencing comes out ahead. It is Hungary’s most productive Olympic sport, and only Italy and France have won more Olympic fencing golds and medals. Sabre is where Hungary has been strongest. Hungarian fencers have won 14 of the 28 Olympic men’s individual sabre titles, including nine in a row from 1924 to 1964. Hungary was left out of the 1920 Games because of its role in the First World War, so that run might have been longer still.
The central figure is Aladár Gerevich (1910–1991). He won seven Olympic gold medals in sabre at six different Games, with 28 years between his first medal and his last. When selectors told him he was too old for the 1960 Rome team, he challenged the whole sabre squad to individual bouts and beat every one of them. The Hungarian Fencing Federation was founded in 1914, and Hungary has hosted the World Fencing Championships in 1959, 1975, 1991, 2000, 2013 and, most recently, Budapest in 2019.
Fencing still lacks the crowd appeal of water polo or the history of the Golden Team. On medals it leads; on feeling it trails. Weighing fencing’s medal count against football’s history, most Hungarians still name water polo, because it combines Olympic records with the story of 1956.
To see how these athletes fit into the wider national story, read our guide to famous people from Hungary, or explore the city that hosts most of these venues in Budapest, Hungary’s capital. For a neighbour that answers the same question differently, see our article on the national sport of Croatia.