Weekend Read: Budapest Sports Arena

The Budapest Sports Arena (BS) is our house since the the old arena burned down in 199 and the new one was opened in 2003. Aside from 2015 the national team has played there at least once every year and will do so again next week for the Olympic Qualifying tournament.

It is without a question the Vároligeti Műjégpálya is the cradle of Hungarian hockey, this is where the national team played their first international game on January 24th 1929 when we beat England 1-0, also the first Hungarian league game was played here on December 27th 1953. This is where the inaugural class of the Hungarian Hockey Hall of Fame was inducted in 2011 and in 2009 the Winter Classic was held here and currently the Hungarian Hockey Museum is here as well. However the current home of Hungarian hockey has moved to the BS.

The “old” BS was designed by István Kiss and served as the home of Hungarian sports from 1982 until 1999 when it burned to the ground. The facility had been the venue of a number of historical Hungarian hockey moments. This was where in 1998 Hungary was promoted from the C-Pool to the B-Pool by going undefeated.

After the catastrophe in 1999, the construction of a new arena was under way on June 30th 2001 and was completed in 2002 with it officially opening in 2003 . The arena was officially named László Papp Budapest Sports Arena but is still called the BS for short. In 2003 the arena hosted its first world championships, which also happened to be the first time Tamás Sille represented Hungary at an IIHF event and 10 years later he played his last game at the 2013 world championships which also happened to be in the BS.

The 2003 world championships didn’t so smoothly as Holland jumped out to a 2-0 lead.

Hungary was able to quickly flip the game as Csaba Kovács scored in the 23rd minute to score the first Hungarian goal in the new BS, we would scoring three more times has Hungary defeated Holland 4-2. Hungary would end up tying Romanian, losing to Kazakhstan and beating Lithuania and Poland to finish third at the tournament.

In the following years there was at least one game each year in the arena up until 2015 when hockey also invaded the Tüskecsarnpok as the national team played there twice.

In 2004 we hosted Canada, 2006 Sweden and in 2009 Finland was the guest nation. There were also a number of 4Nation Tournaments and Olympic Qualifying tournaments. The 2011 world championships might have been the most memorable event, there were 8,723 fans cheering on Hungary as they were on the doorstep of the A-Pool,losing to Italy in overtime.

By this time the 111st sector had become the main sector for the diehard fans also know as the best fans in the world and this is where the great environment starts and engulfs 8-10 thousand fans.

This is exactly what will happen during the Olympic Qualifying tournament, the single game record at the BS was against Canada in 2004 with over 12 thousand people in attendance, since then a number fire safety regulations have been issued and that record will probably never be broken so the max capacity of the arena is between 8-9 thousand.

At the last Olympic Qualifying round Hungary lost to Holland on November 11th 2012 in a shootout at the Clog Wearers moved on to the next round instead of Hungary.