OJAN KOVACIK
Elected president of the Slovak FA in 2010,
re-elected in 2014 and again last year.OPAVEL HAPAL
Took Slovakia to the 2017 Euro Under-21s
and became national coach in 2018.OIVAN KMOTRIK
Started out selling currency on the street
but interests now range from TV channel
TAS to ownership of Slovan Bratislava.OOSZKAR VILAGI
Hungarian-speaker who owns 90 per
cent of DAC and is worth up to €150m.OMARTIN SKRTEL
National captain who played for Liverpool
and is now with Fenerbahce in Turkey.MOVERS & SHAKERS
and Vilagi joined their board. In 2011,
Orban’s government took a 21 per
cent stake in MOL. Five years later, Vilagi
stepped in to buy DAC from an Iranian
group which had dragged the club into
a mire of match-fixing problems.
Vilagi’s personal wealth is estimated at
around €150m, but he is not wasting his
money on players’ wages. The stadium
and the academy are the focus – and
MOL sponsors both.
This sponsorship and the Hungarian
government money are simply another
source of funding for Vilagi, who says:
“The border is open. We go to Hungary
for players, too. We don’t care about that
if we want to be successful.”
FIFA’s Forward fund is providing
€350,000 a year between 2017 and
2021 for youth development, while the
Slovak federation contributed €2.9m to
the academy and stadium. As part of
these agreements, national youth team
games will be played at DAC’s academy.
A special changing room has even been
built for these matches – and decorated
in Slovak colours.
DAC do buy players – such as Erick
Davis, who joined in 2015 from Sporting
San Miguelito in his native Panama and
last year became the first DAC player to
feature at a World Cup – but Vilagi’s plan
is based on the academy.
DAC want to be sustainable by
developing and selling players, and Vilagi
adds: “We want to be in the first three
every year and in the international
competitions, but the players here need
to have ambition to play at a big club.
Our club is a bridge to the big clubs.”
DAC currently have a tie-up with
Wolverhampton Wanderers, who have
sent three players – Daniel Csoka,
Connor Ronan and Christian Herc – on
loan to the club, but sales have already
begun. In January, 21-year-old Ivory
Coast striker Vakoun Issouf Bayo went to
Celtic for a club record fee of €2.25m- helping to significantly boost DAC’s
turnover, which was €4.3m in 2017-18.
While Slovak is not even spoken at
the MOL Arena on match days, the club
knows it treads a fine line. The Hungarian
national anthem is not played officially
but sung by DAC fans straight after kick-
off. Only when the last line is sung do the
home fans, including most of the press
box, take their seats.
“The minority of Hungarian-speaking
people in this country will come here but
we do not want to limit ourselves to that.”
says DAC’s head of match operations,
Martin Tournyai. “Everyone is welcome
because we are in a province of just
80,000 people. That is a problem.”
Vilagi initially employed family
members at DAC and then started taking
on whip-smart young graduates like
Tournyai with sports-management
credentials gained overseas.
One of Tournyai’s first jobs was to
actively engage with the fans to improve
the stadium experience. And his success
is evident in the atmosphere, which
eyewitness
belies the size of the ground.
Second-placed DAC trailed leaders
Slovan by eight points before kick-off and
gave away a soft penalty to lose 1-0.
“Our average age is just 22; you can
see the difference in ages between the
two teams on the pitch,” said DAC’s
German coach Peter Hyballa after the
game while conceding that his side’stitle hopes were over.
Bidding to win the league for the first
time since 2014, Slovan have invested
heavily on players, spending over €1m
on Slovenian striker Andraz Sporar, with
Hungarian midfielder David Holman and
Slovenian defender Kenan Bajric costing
€600,000 each.
In a league where half the players
earn less than €1,000 a month according
to the players union, Slovan’s highest paid
player, Sporar, is on €60,000 a month
while the only Slovak starting regularly
is goalkeeper Dominik Greif.
But for all his spending, Slovan owner
Ivan Kmotrik is hugely unpopular and last
season attendances fell to an average of
just 1,629 as fans boycotted games.
A decade ago, Kmotrik demolished
Slovan’s old ground and promised a
new one that is only now materialising,
and then only after he persuaded the
government to let him build a new €75m
national stadium for them – mostly with
their money.
In between, Kmotrik’s land dealings
virtually destroyed Bratislava’s two other
leading clubs, Petrzalka and Inter.
Ph Playing as Artmedia – the name of
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Coach...Pavel Hapal“We have a few small clubs that
are like a village and every season
there is a problem as they don’t
have the money”
Players’ union president Jan MuchaThreat...Slovan
attempt to
keep out DAC’s
Kristian Kostrna