A full-scale bronze statue of Hungarian footballer József Bozsik was unveiled on Tuesday, 2 December in Budapest, Hungary, in front of his namesake stadium. The ceremonial unveiling was attended by Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó of Hungary, who has also been serving as the Chairman of the football club Budapest Honvéd since November 2025.

Honvéd is the celebrated József Bozsik’s boyhood club, which he played for throughout his entire career between 1943 and 1962. The team’s stadium now bears his name. The occasion for the event was the centennial of his birth: Bozsik was born on 28 November 1925. His new bronze statue is the work of Hungarian sculptor Richárd Juha.

At the unveiling, Minister Szijjártó vowed that Budapest Honvéd ‘will return where it belongs,’ the highest levels of Hungarian and international football, as he promised.

State Secretary Responsible for Sports Affairs Ádám Schmidt; son of József Bozsik and former Hungarian National Team head coach Péter Bozsik; and Mayor Kakha Kaladze of Tbilisi, Georgia, a former UEFA Champions League-winning defender, were also in attendance.

Bozsik was part of the legendary ‘Mighty Magyars’, the Hungarian national team of the 1950s. Spearheaded by Ferenc Puskás, the famous side won the Olympic gold in football at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland (before the introduction of the European championship held in the same years as the Summer Olympics, that competition held a lot more prestige), beat England 6–3 at Wembley Stadium in London, United Kingdom in what is known in Hungary as ‘the Match of the Century’, and got to the 1954 FIFA World Cup final in Bern, Switzerland. However, in a major upset, Hungary lost the final 3–2 to West Germany.

Playing in midfield, Bozsik earned 101 caps—a record that stood for decades—and scored 11 goals for Hungary. At the club level, he won the Hungarian league five times with Honvéd.

We ranked him #2 on our list of the greatest Hungarian footballers of all time.

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