A Hungarian kids ‘football team won the Under 14 National Championship after surmounting an impressive 40-goal difference with a 43-1 victory in their very last match of the season.
With just one match left to play, Kerekegyháza SE and Miklós GYFE were tied at 43 points, but the latter had a comfortable 40-goal advantage, which virtually guaranteed its first-ever U14 football title. But there is a reason why ‘virtually’ isn’t synonymous with ‘definitely’. In their last match, Kerekegyháza SE scored an epic 43-1 victory over Palmonostora, the last team in the rankings, while Miklós GYFE only managed a 1-0 victory in their last match. Miklós GYFE was getting ready to celebrate their title after the comfortable win when they got the unbelievable news that they had actually finished second, behind Kerekegyháza. The 43-1 victory is now being investigated by the Hungarian Football Federation.
Photo: Janosch Diggelmann/Unsplash
“First of all, I am very sorry for our children, because this would have been the first championship title of the Miklós GYFE, in terms of any age group,” Bálint Erdős, the president of Miklós GYFE, told Sportal.hu. “Our match ended, we won, and knowing that our goal difference was plus 41, we rejoiced. At that time, we heard the news from the referee that a goal record was set in the other meeting and we came second.”
“Then came the shock that forty-four goals were scored in the eighty-minute meeting, with three goals scored in the sixtieth minute alone,” Erdős added. “In that amount of time, the teams can’t even get back to their sides of the field to restart play… I’m not even talking about the pure playing time, which is roughly forty-eight minutes.”
The Miklós GYFE president expressed hope that the federation’s investigation will clarify how Kerekegyháza SE managed its impressive victory and, if it discovers evidence of foul play, that its U14 team will receive the title they worked so hard for.
Meanwhile, Kerekegyháza SE is still celebrating its historic comeback, and the club’s president insists that everyone there has a clear conscious because there was no match fixing involved. President Antal Kunsági said that the team’s coach “ordered” players to score 50 goals before the match, and actually apologized to the opposing side for the “massacre”.
Although the 42-goal difference seems extreme for such a high-stakes game that ended up deciding the winner of the championship, Palmonostora, the team that suffered the painful defeat, insists that there was no foul play, since these are just 14-year-old kids we are talking about.
News of Kerekegyháza SE’s unlikely victory and title have been making news headlines all over the world, and the general consensus is that no matter how weak the opposing team was, scoring just the right number of goals to win the national championship seems unlikely, to say the least.
