István Juhász turns 75 today

"Of the strikers on show, young Juhász has an almost unparalleled flair; he found the net four times in his first few top-flight matches," journalist Gyula Németh wrote in 'Népsport' newspaper on November 8th, 1963, following Ferencváros' league match with Pécsi Dózsa.

István Juhász was born on July 17th 1945 in Budapest, and in 1959 he became a registered player at Ferencváros Torna Club. At the beginning of his football career, he played an inside forward before moving back into midfield. Following the emergence of Zoltán Varga, it became clear that Juhász would rather - in today's terminology - be involved centrally in the engine room of midfield. He became an undroppable first-team fixture, a key part of every great Green and White success over the next decade. The only outfield player to appear in the finals of three different European competitions for a Hungarian club, Juhász was part of the 1964–1965 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup triumph, as well as the runs to the 1967–1968 Fairs Cup final and the 1974–1975 European Cup Winners' Cup final, goalkeeper István Géczi the only other man to achieve this feat. Furthermore, Juhász was the only player to play in the last league match in the old Üllői út stadium in the early sixties and in the new ground's inaugural match against Vasas in May 1974.

With Ferencváros, he won four Hungarian league championships (1964, 1967, 1968, 1975–1976), finished runner-up six times (1965, 1966, 1970 spring, 1970–1971, 1972–1973, 1973–1974) and third three times (1963 autumn, 1969, 1974–1975). He also became a three-time Hungarian Cup winner (1972, 1974, 1976).

On June 15th 1969, having already won Olympic football gold the previous year with the Hungarian Olympic team, he made his international debut and by May 29, 1974, had 23 caps. He fell out of favour after his first three games but was then recalled by Rudolf Illovszky, a resumption in the summer of 1971 which he marked by helping Hungary to a draw against world champions Brazil. Juhász was also a member of the suad which finished fourth at the following year's UEFA European Championships. His last match for Hungary came at the same time as Flórián Albert, even though he was only 29 years old.

Earlier, he'd won the Népsport Cup at the end of the 1972-1973 season, an award for the player with the best average rating in Hungary's sports daily newspaper over the whole season. Half a year later, MLSZ declared him the 1973 Hungarian Player of the Year.

Juhász transferred to the Medosz Erdért team in 1976, and a year later returned to Ferencváros, no longer as a player, but as supervisor of the construction work of the sports centre taking place in Népliget. He moved to the United States in the late 1970s: “I was registered with Kansas City first, but when an English coach with whom we couldn't agree on football's nuances arrived, six or seven of us terminated our contracts. We settled in Florida with my family, where I started coaching and trading in tools. Later, I also coached three youth teams in San Diego and trained thirty or forty children at a time in summer camps. It was a nice way to earn money”, Juhász told Péter Forró in an interview published in the Magyar Hírlap newspaper. The former Ferencváros favourite returned home to Hungary in 1996 and now lives as a pensioner in Alsónémedi.