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As one of the most modern football academies in Hungary, the Sándor Károly Football Academy is located in the immediate neighborhood of the New Hidegkuti Nándor Stadium, in the former, previously unused area of the Józsefváros railway station.

Since its foundation in 2001, the academy has operated in and around a castle in Agárd, in a park with ancient trees, before moving to Budapest in 2019 and taking up its new facility in May 2023.

Since its launch in 2001, SKFA has clearly established itself as a leader in the field of youth football and has provided a high level of player training up to the professional level. The academy’s work first culminated in 2008 with our adult team winning the championship, with twenty of the twenty-five players in the squad coming from the academy. Interestingly, the majority of the league matches that year were played with nine home-grown players.

Besides this, our academy has trained professional footballers not only for MTK Budapest, but for the whole of Hungarian football.

Over the past 20 years, more than 250 MTK players have made their debut in various age-group national teams, and more than 120 have played in the NB I; over 50 have secured contracts abroad (with clubs such as Liverpool FC, FC Internazionale, Manchester City FC, RSC Anderlecht, RB Leipzig, Red Bull Salzburg, Real Zaragoza, Genoa CFC and Olympiacos PFC, among others), and more than two dozen of our players have also played for the Hungarian national team – their names, together with the date of their debut, are listed on the facility’s side, motivating our young talents every day to follow in the footsteps of their great predecessors.

THE EVOLUTION OF "MTK DNS" AND THE MTK STYLE

The roots of MTK’s current football go back to the 1910s, to the work of the club’s former coach, Jimmy Hogan. Hogan came to MTK from England through the Netherlands and Austria, with the help of the club’s president, Alfred Brüll, and won three league titles in a row (1916-1917, 1917-1918, 1918-1919) with his team.

Instead of the “kick and rush” that was prevalent in England at the time, Hogan focused on the Scottish "passing game", which he developed further at MTK. His game, which relied on a lot of improvisation, dribbling and flat passing, took the European footballing world by surprise. It was no coincidence that MTK was then mentioned among the three strongest teams in Europe, with the names of clubs such as Real Madrid and Bayern Munich among the defeated. It says a lot about Hogan’s training methods that the Fulham players found them completely unusual. What exactly? He used the ball too much during training!

Of course, the MTK style is also evolving, but the basics are constant. For a long time it was called passing football because of Jimmy Hogan’s wording, in the “new era” it was typically described as a flat passing, then short passing game. Today, we mostly describe our game as conscious, proactive game building, but of course "passing football" or "trying to win possession" remains a key element of this. We describe our training methodology as a game of question and answer, where players have to answer questions posed by the opponent and game situations with the help of the coaches, but preferably independently, based on what they have learned before - this is how we want to train them to play independently and with courage.

Over the years, players absorb the style of play through training, developing an intrinsic need for this type of football. Most important is that players know that progress is the result. The founder of a rival academy once said that the MTK academy is special because: "EVEN IF THE TEAM'S NAME IS NOT ON THE JERSEY AND I'M WATCHING THE GAME FROM AFAR, I KNOW IT'S MTK."