LSC Lecture Series | Győző Molnár (Worcester) Sport, Identity, and Power: How Hungarian Politics Exploits Athletes, Football, and Invented Traditions

This talk is part of the LSC Lecture Series on Sport, Politics, Conflict, which is organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World. The talks are open to all staff at UR and IOS, as well as the general public. UR students can sign up for the course and receive credits.

Lecture hall H5 is in the lower Central Lecture Theatre Building (Zentrales Hörsaalgebäude - ZH) located near the Audimax. UR Campus-Plan 

Abstract | This lecture examines the intersection of sport and radical right populist politics in contemporary Hungary through three interconnected case studies. First, it explores how Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has appropriated football and elite sport to reinvent a strong national identity amid forces of Westernisation and post-communist transition. Second, it analyses how sport, related infrastructure, and athletic success have been deployed to (re)establish criteria for Hungarian citizenship and nationhood, both within and beyond the state's geographic borders, as part of a broader illiberal state-building project. Third, it turns to the Kurultáj, a biannual Turanist cultural festival featuring traditional physical practices such as horse wrestling and invented martial arts, examining how heritage nostalgia and physical culture serve Orbán's strongman politics. Together, these cases illustrate how sport, athletes, and bodily traditions become instruments of ethnonationalist populism, offering lessons relevant well beyond the Hungarian context.

Bio | Győző Molnárjoined the University of Worcester in September 2008. He is a critical sociologist with a research focus on empowering marginalised populations with specific focus on gender, migration and identity politics. His current research has focused on the migratory and gendered aspects of Fiji rugby, challenging dominant perspectives in Adapted Physical Activity research and unfolding connections between sport and populist politics in Hungary.

Győző is co-editor of The Politics of The Olympics (2010, Routledge), Ethnographies in Sport and Exercise Research (2016, Routledge), Women, Sport and Exercise in the Asia-Pacific Region: Domination-Resistance-Accommodation (2018, Routledge), The Routledge Handbook of Gender Politics in Sport and Physical Activity (2022, Routledge) and co-writer of Sport, Exercise and Social Theory: An Introduction (2012, Routledge).

Győző has lectured widely in the area of sociology of sport and exercise and qualitative research methods.  He is the leader of the Inclusive Sports and Physical Activity research group and has extensive experience in supervising research students.