Hungary announce three Euro 2024 warm-up friendlies

Marco Rossi's Hungary men’s national team will play its first warm-up match of this year against fellow 2024 European Championship participants Turkey in Budapest on 22nd March. Turkey, also managed by an Italian in Vicenzo Montella, are currently 37th in the FIFA world rankings, ten places behind Hungary, but this can be quite deceptive in terms of the two teams’ relative strength. Last November, Turkey defeated Euro 2024 hosts Germany 3-2 away and collected another major scalp in October, when they triumphed  1-0 away against Croatia. Montella's team is therefore a particularly dangerous opponent away from home, which, considering that the venue of the match will be the Puskás Arena, is already very much worth bearing in mind.

Four days later, on 26th March, Rossi’s charges will take on Kosovo, also at home. Although Kosovo  didn’t make it to this summer’s European Championship, the nation performed creditably in its qualifying group with one of our Euro2024 group opponents, Switzerland, remaining undefeated at home (2-2) and away (1-1).

Our penultimate opponent before the European Championship will be Republic of Ireland, against whom Hungary will play on 4th June in the 50,000-capacity Aviva Stadium in Dublin, which will also host this year’s Europa League final. The home football association has already set the match’s kick-off time at 19:45 local time, so 20:45 in Hungary. The Irish didn’t reach the European Championship either and are currently ranked 60th in the world rankings, but they play a very similar style of football to one of our other European Championship group rivals, Scotland, so this match will be an excellent preparation for our third group fixture.

"When choosing the opponents, we also had to take into account which teams were available for each preparation match and which of them wanted to play us", Rossi told mlsz.hu. "Of the three opponents we’ll face, Turkey is clearly the strongest; they have a good, united team with players playing in top leagues. In terms of player strength, they are roughly as strong as Switzerland or Scotland of our European group opponents. Kosovo and Ireland can be said to be somewhat weaker, but in regard to them, the emphasis was not on the tactical aspects, the playing system, for us, but on the fact that they play physical football, which, in the cases of our two aforementioned European Championship opponents, we will also encounter during the tournament, so these two matches will also serve as ideal preparation".

Rossi has previously said that if everything goes to plan, Márton Dárdai will be a new member of the squad in March, but otherwise, he doesn’t plan to make any big changes in terms of player selection.

"As always, we’ll decide what we want to try in these matches, and whether it makes sense to test anything new at all, or if the best solution is to continue to improve what we have done so far", Rossi explained. "However, it is certain that even now we will only invite players who fit perfectly into the squad and can help the national team. Moreover, no one should expect big changes, because we achieved good results last year and the year before, precisely because there were only minimal changes to each squad. If there’d be five or six changes every time, we wouldn't be able to be a unified team on the pitch”.

Discussions on the start times of the first two fixtures and the identity of the opponents in the fourth and last warm-up match before the start of Euro 2024 are still ongoing, but are expected to be concluded shortly. As soon as this happens, the information will be released publically.