In National Sport<\/em>London correspondent Tibor Haltenberger spoke in reverential terms about the English game, likening it to \u201ca sphinx before us\u2026.miracles will arise before the Hungarian eye.\u201d To further whet his readers\u2019 appetites, Haltenberger described the prospect of the match as being like \u201cfootball chocolate.\u201d<\/p>\n Haltenberger\u2019s fascinating pre-match piece reveals that Austrian icon Hugo Meisl, a contemporary and confidante of Chapman, had organised the tour which would see us play matches in Vienna, Prague and Budapest and be paid a tidy \u00a32,200 sum.<\/p>\n In Budapest, the team stayed at the Royal Hotel, visited the Royal Castle, and their pre-match meal consisted of boiled chicken, tea and toasted bread. A raft of A-list Hungarian celebrities were scheduled to attend the match at the Ulloi uti Stadion (the home of Ferencvaros), including actors Sandor Pethes and Vera Molviar. <\/p>\n \n Read more<\/span> <\/p>\n We faced a combined Ferencvaros and MTK Budapest XI, and the 28,000 available tickets could have sold out several times over. Given the auspicious occasion, a film crew was dispatched to capture the key moments during the match. Although they’d now been playing in N5 for 13 years, the visitors, playing in front of a crowd wearing suits and bowler hats, were still labelled as Woolwich Arsenal.<\/p>\n The Nemzeti Sport piece included some quirky details on our stars. One of right-back Tom Parker\u2019s \u201cmost interesting traits is that he neither smokes, nor drinks alcohol,\u201d readers were told. Centre-half Jack Butler\u2019s \u201cfather worked on a tea plantation in Ceylon,\u201d while star forward Charles Buchan\u2019s \u201cwitty play makes it a great honour to play alongside him.\u201d <\/p>\n Reports on the match, which took place on May 13, suggest that Chapman acted as an assistant referee, deploying his flag \u201cwith gusto\u201d throughout the game. The match ended 2-2, with Jimmy Brain, whose 139 goals in 232 appearances make him our\u2019 joint-fifth top scorer of all-time, and John \u2018Jack\u2019 Lee scoring for the visitors. <\/p>\n Two days later, Arsenal defeated Slavia Prague 5-1, with Brain scoring a brace, before losing 1-0 to a Rapid Vienna All-Stars team, our first defeat in an overseas friendly.<\/p>\n The Central European tour represented the early signs of a push by the phenomenally well-connected Chapman to elevate our international profile and introduce his players to a continental style of play. Certainly, Haltenberger was delighted with the result in Budapest, writing: \u201cApplaud our players\u2026.it seems the English are not gods either.\u201d<\/p>\n \n Read more<\/span> <\/p>\n Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We head to Budapest for the Champions League final exactly a century on from a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} How Leeds City changed Arsenal history forever <\/span>
\n <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/article>\n When Puskas wore our red and white at Highbury <\/span>
\n <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n