Sándor Bródy with his teammates in Ferencváros TC, abt. 1913.
BIOGRAPHYUntil 1921, the general training in IFK Göteborg's many teams was handled by people from the management, various team leaders, or by the players themselves. The latter was more common in the lower reserve teams where the team captains had a large role and a lot of responsibility. In 1921, however, the course was changed and a strong contributing factor was the fact that this year the club could boast as many as seventeen teams, all of which needed a leader who could fully devote himself to their development, something that had become an impossibility for the management to solve on their own.
When the issue was raised, the board immediately decided to hire a professional manager and their top choice was the Hungarian Sándor Bródy, who in Sweden came to be called Alex Bródy. He had an impressive track record with 17 caps for his country as a player, which was a respectable figure in a time where a lot fewer national matches were played and where the selectable player pool was much more diverse than today when you had to deal with the fact that not everyone could get away from their job.Bródy was born in the small village of Sekule (Székelyfalva) on May 16, 1884 in what was then Austria-Hungary, and today Slovakia. His parents Moritz and Mina could see early on that he was interested in football, and the young Sándor started playing organized football with a youth team called Pannonia in the ninth district. Years later, in October 1901, a teammate from that team saw him and suggested that he come and play for Ferencvaros fourth team. Bródy liked the idea and the following Sunday he found himself out on the field in Ferencvaros colors and played, as he himself put it, "as well as God allowed", which made the coach take him off at half time and send him away to instead represent the third team later that same day. The following week he was a fully fledged member of Ferencváros first team, and when teammate József Berán suddenly died in 1905, he took over his role as team captain. He stayed with Ferencvaros until the outbreak of war in 1914, and during those years managed to win no less than eight Hungarian championships and made 307 appearances for "Fradi".
He was relatively short, no more than 168 centimeters tall, had slightly protruding ears and a hairline that for each day crawled a little further back - but he was also muscular, tireless, gifted with a fighting spirit beyond the ordinary and could decide matches with his outstanding headers. As a half-back, he also helped in the attacks with long, precise and well-timed cross balls and his name is still as well known in Ferencváros circles as legends "Bebben" or "Fölet" are in IFK Göteborg. In Ferencváros, the "Fradi heart" is a well-known thing, and for a very long time it was Bródy, the team captain, who personified Ferencváros heart.
Sándor Bródys birth record.
World War I, however, marked an abrupt break in Bródy´s career. He was called up for service in the Austro-Hungarian military, but in March 1915 he was captured by the Russians in the Polish city of Przemysl and spent the rest of the war in the Russian concentration camp Berezovka on the river Ob in Siberia. The camp respected for most parts the laws and regulations that applied to prisoners of war and Bródy was able to make the most of his time in captivity - he learned both Russian and English, and even got to play football regularly. In the camp, he played for the 5th Battalion, thousands of kilometers from his hometown, and also participated in highly unofficial international matches. When he was released after the war, on July 12, 1920, he returned, at the age of 36, to Hungary and Ferencváros. After some build-up training, he then made a comeback as a player on the 8th of December 1920 - and at the same time took up the baton as a youth coach for a new generation. In the spring of 1921, the Gothenburg Alliance (consisting of IFK Göteborg, GAIS and Örgryte IS) went to Hungary with a combined Gothenburg football team, and met MTK Budapest FC, Újpest FC - and Ferencváros TC. Here, IFK Göteborg noticed Ferencváros halfback, the highly merited Bródy with great coaching ambitions, and offered him the job as manager of IFK Göteborg.
Just six months earlier, in the summer of 1920, IFK Göteborg veteran and club dignity Carl Linde had traveled to Hungary and visited MTK Budapest FC and was very impressed by the Hungarians fast short-pass play and although he most likely did not encounter Bródy in connection with that trip, it is reasonable to assume that this was where the idea was born that a Hungarian manager would be something for IFK Göteborg. When he returned as IFK Göteborg´s representative in the Gothenburg Alliance in the spring of 1921 with a board decision to hire a professional manager in his pocket, it was probably he who negotiated with Bródy from IFK Göteborg´s side of the table. The offer from IFK Göteborg was not the only offer Bródy had to decide on, he had offers from both Italy and Germany where several teams were interested in his services, but in the end the choice fell on IFK Göteborg, who offered him a monthly salary of 500 kronor (about 16 000 Ft or $52). The contract had a duration of six months, with an extension of one year if all parties were satisfied. Bródy was very pleased with the conditions and in addition to the challenge he saw great opportunities, he intended to learn Swedish and after a couple of years return to Hungary as a representative of a Swedish factory and start up his own business. Should the agreement not be extended, he had a ready-to-exeute plan to instead accept any of the other offers.
The concentration camp Bródy was detained in between March 1915 and July 1920.
On July 26, 1921, Bródy came to Gothenburg and was received by the club´s players at Ullevi Stadium. In the daily newspaper Göteborgs Dagblad, he was described as "one of the continent´s foremost football experts". In Gothenburg, he immediately became responsible for all the club´s 17 teams, but with the main focus on the first team. Quite immediately, the club felt very satisfied with its recruitment. According to the club magazine Göteborgs-Kamraten, Bródy had the "great international player´s long experience and deep insights, the professional manager´s insights into all the secrets of the profession and an enthusiasm for his task, which seems contagious". They were also impressed by the energy that the by then 37-year-old Bródy was filled with, and that he was so sympathetic in his manner and demeanor. Furthermore, the magazine stated that "He has managed to, at the same time, gain respect and popularity among the players," and continued: "Our football players´ education is in good hands". In terms of results, the club felt that Sándor stood for a significant improvement. The team had started off poorly in the spring, but under Bródy´s management, they eventually worked their way back to their old punching power with glimpses of the style that had resulted in three Swedish Championships. Despite a nice run of wins in the closing days of the season, IFK Göteborg ended up finishing 5th in the league, and were immediately eliminated from the Swedish Championship in round 1. However, the District Championship was won by a victory against Fässberg in the final. In late summer, MTK, then considered Europe´s best team, also came to Sweden to take part in local newspaper GT´s "Football Week", a mini-tournament IFK Göteborg won after a victory against the Hungarian champions in the final. After GAIS was defeated 2-1 on October 9, 1921, in one of the last matches of the year, Bródy received good reviews in the press, and it was pointed out that he must have worked with the reserve players as well, because even though there were plenty of reserves fielded in that game, while team stars "Murren" and Hjelm were with the national team and met Denmark, IFK Göteborg played in "large-scale with delicious passes and excellent co-operation". On November 22, it was decided at a board meeting to extend Bródy´s contract throughout 1922.
For obvious reasons, he devoted most of his attention and time to the club´s first team, but through a series of articles in the club magazine "Göteborgs-Kamraten", he also reached out to the "small teams" with exercises and with his thoughts and ideas about the game of football. Among other things, he called for hard winter training so that one would not have to start with fitness training every spring, and encouraged players to focus training on their left feet and not spend all their time practicing shots with their right foots, which were already of good enough quality: "It is extremely few who during the training shoot with the left foot and this is so much more peculiar, as the left leg needs the most exerciseâ€. Here he also highlighted the details that certainly attracted Ceve when he was impressed by Hungarian football, such as that the inside and outside forward needed to alternate, and thus both needed to be skilled at shooting and dribbling, but above all he emphasized the understanding of the game: “It is clear that a team´s strength lies largely in the understanding one player has for the other […], knowledge of each other´s way of playing and the requirements that the game places on the various positions. The more a player has played in different positions in the team, the more valuable he is, usuallyâ€.
The legacy of Bródy´s coaching career lived on in IFK Göteborg for many years - and to some extent to this day. He was not only the first professional manager in the club, but he also personified a course change that meant more professional and serious training, which in the long run can be argued is one of the reasons why IFK Gothenburg is the predominant team in the city of Gothenburg in regards to support, legacy and titles, and for example not Gårda or Mölndal-based Fässbergs IF which also achieved some success during this time period. With his typically Hungarian playing philosophy, the one that through a number of contemporary managers and coaches in many ways also shaped today´s football, he also laid the foundation for the pass-oriented football that IFK Göteborg came to be known for.
On a â€propaganda tour†through Sweden in 1922 (Stockholm - Gävle - Sandviken - VästerÃ¥s - Köping - Örebro - Karlskoga).
The following year, Bródy led the team in a total of 45 matches, which was more than any previous year. Of these, only 6 matches were lost, but despite that, the team was once agian knocked out of the Swedish Championships in the first round. On the title account, however, Bródy was able to bring home the Kamratmästerskapet, after a victory against IFK Eskilstuna in the final. And, once more, IFK Göteborg matched against Hungarian opposition in the form of Újpest (3-2) and Ferencváros (0-1). The match against Újpest was the eighth of the season, and it was noted in the newspapers that Bródy´s philosophy of training hard even in winter had yielded results as they had made colossal progress and were already in such great shape that they had won eight straight matches. The season that followed, however, was anything but successful. "Murren" emigrated to the US, and was followed shortly afterwards by teammate Levin - and Moje Sandberg moved to neighboring city Uddevalla. Severely weakened by these player losses, Bródy had to experiment with different reserve players to fill the gaps, and it was not until the autumn that the team started to play well again. In the Swedish Championships, the team won the qualifying round, but then, like Gais and Öis, chose to drop out of the competition due to a controversy between the Gothenburg Alliance and the Football Association, stemming from the fact that the acassociation once again had drawn IFK Göteborg against local rivals Gais in the first round, and then refused to move the match day, which collided with a previously planned mini-tournament with foreign opposition, for which the Gothenburg Alliance has already taken the expenses for. But, by this time, Bródy had begun to suffer from homesickness for Hungary, and at the end of the year when the contract expired, and after two and a half years in Sweden, he returned to his homeland.
For the next few years he worked closely with the Ferencváros first team, and in 1937 he made a comeback as head coach after Zoltán Blum left. Under Bródy´s leadership, Ferencváros performed stunning football, and the team won its first two matches superiorly by 8-1 and 10-0. Then suddenly one day he failed to show up for training. The management of Ferencváros was soon reached by the news that he had contracted the flu, but it turned out to be much more serious than that. Bródy had suffered a major heart attack and was in need of long-term medical care. His return as head coach was over almost before it started, and he retired from football and was replaced in Ferencváros by József Sándor.What next happened to Sándor Bródy is today a puzzle that cannot be fully solved, even though many of the pieces are available. In 1939, World War II broke out, and anti-Jewish laws severely restricted Bródy, whether or not he fully recovered from his heart attack. He, who had once been the very heart of the Ferencváros football team, was now banned by law, not only from football, but from being part of any sport whatsoever. On March 19, 1944, the German occupation of Hungary began, and the relative sanctuary that the country had hitherto been for the Hungarian Jews ceased overnight. By the time the war was over, some 550,000 of Hungary´s 825,000 Jews had been annihilated. There is currently no information showing exactly how Sándor Bródy died, but several independent sources all point to the same thing - on April 19, 1944, not long before his 60th birthday and exactly one month after the German occupation, he perished in the Holocaust, murdered by the Nazis.
Recognitions:
Bródys birth record was found by Elizabeth Long of the Facebook Group Jewish Genealogy Portal, and Ludwig Mauskopf, among other things, helped translate a Hungarian article. Károly Horváth of Tempó, Fradi! provided additional information about Bródy. Also, Krisztián Skoumal of the Hungarian Genealogy Group on Facebook helped me look into Bródys life.