Hungary to face England, Germany and Italy in next Nations League

While the task ahead of Rossi's squad may look daunting, they can take solace from the fact that Hungary avoided defeat in each of their last matches against these three opponents, two of which came this year. In 2022 World Cup qualifying, Hungary came away from Wembley with a 1-1 draw against England while a 2-2 draw was achieved against Germany in Munich in the group stage of Euro 2020. Looking further back at Hungary's last encounter with current European champions Italy, a memorable 3-1 home success was achieved in the Puskás Stadion in August 2007, a time at which Italy was also a reigning champion of a major tournament, the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

The draw for the 2022/23 Nations League took place at UEFA's headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland. Hungary were drawn into group A3 first as fourth seeds, then came Germany from pot 3, England from pot 2 and Italy as first seeds. The first four matchdays will all come between 2-14 June 2022 with the fifth and sixth coming between 22 and 27 September. The winners of the four Division A groups will contest the four-team finals tournament in June 2023, while the four bottom-placed teams will be relegated to Nations League Division B. There will also be a route to the next European Championship from the Nations League, but the exact conditions for this will only be determined by UEFA in June 2022.

Marco Rossi, Hungary head coach: We've been drawn together with practically the strongest team from each pot. The European champions, the European Championship runners-up and Germany; it's a terribly difficult group in which, as has happened to us several times recently, we are once again the weakest. We didn’t give up then though and we fought, which is what we’re going to do now too!

According to expert sources, almost all of their players are worth individually more than our entire squad. Nevertheless, as before, we will give our best against them. Except in the case of Italy, we know from experience how strong they are. We'll have to run and fight a lot, and they will definitely have more ball possession than we will, so we'll have to be prepared to regain the ball as much as possible and for the elements of the game which follow. It is also our advantage that we know exactly what it's like to play football against the best teams in Europe, and in fact, this challenge has been overcome by our players on several occasions in memorable matches.

However, if we want to be successful, we have to forget our good matches against England and Germany this year, and instead we have to think about the future, because those were the exceptions where a small team can achieve an outstanding result once out of 10 matches against a stronger team, so from now on, we must develop our game against them, and we'll work with even greater strength and determination to repeat those results. Every match starts at 0-0 and the final result is influenced by many small factors. We’re going to make sure these factors help our opponents as little as possible and make their lives as difficult as possible by battling hard and playing well.