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Why Hungary’s Gabor Kiraly wears sweatpants at Euro 2016

By on June 20, 2016

Hungary goalkeeper Gábor Király has raised eyebrows at Euro 2016 by wearing tracksuit bottoms, but his famous habit started long before this summer’s European Championships.

Gábor Király is a creature of habit and over the course of his twenty-three-year career, he has amassed a stunning number of superstitions. Under his matchday kit, Király wears a black basketball jersey with the number thirteen on the back and another T-shirt with the face of a tiger on the chest.

According to The Guardian, the Hungarian goalkeeper’s pre-game routine is also littered with superstitions. He is always first off the team bus, puts his left shinpad on before the right, and listens to Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” before every game.

And so it’s easy to imagine that’s also why Király famously wears tracksuit bottoms in goal but for the forty-year-old goalkeeper, it’s a much simpler matter of comfort, not (entirely) superstition or fashion. The habit started early in his professional career at his hometown club Szombathelyi Haladás in Hungary and has made him a fan favorite in a club career that has spanned Hertha BSC, Crystal Palace, West Ham United, Aston Villa, Burnley, Bayer Leverkusen, 1860 Munich, and Fulham.

Said Király, per the BBC: “It started 20 years ago these gray bottoms, it began in Hungary and it brought me luck and then I take to (Hertha) Berlin and it brings luck as well as we were in the Champions League. After that, I take it to London, to Crystal Palace.

“I want to be confident in the game. You cannot just put gray bottoms on in goal (to play well), you have to move your bottom. I want to work and I can only do this in these gray bottoms. In the beginning, they were black, the kit man didn’t wash them and on Friday and on Saturday we had a game. I had no other bottoms and I take the gray ones and that was the start of the luck.

“I play 20 years in these bottoms for Hungary and I don’t think I’ll be changing.”

As The Guardian explained, his team went undefeated in Király’s first eight “gray pants” games and stayed in the first division so Király continued to don the exact same pair of joggers, which hang in his wardrobe to this day.

He then was faced with the task of finding a new pair. “Some of my clubs had to ask their manufacturer to make the gray bottoms for me because they did not have it in their collection but at 1860 Munich they were sold in the club shop as Kiraly’s jogging bottoms,” he said. “The most important thing is that they should be loose, preferably one size bigger.”

After a successful seven-year spell at Hertha BSC in Germany, he joined Crystal Palace in the Premier League, where he spent two years before being shipped out on loan to West Ham and Aston Villa.

He tried wearing shorts in this time but it just didn’t suit him.

“I’m a goalie, not a top model!” he told Hungarian publication Lo Journal Francophone de Budapest.

“It’s essentially a question of comfort. I’ve played on clay or grass that’s been frozen in winter; it makes your legs hurt when you fall so jogging bottoms seemed obvious.

“I always take a size above to facilitate movement. I tried shorts during my spells in Germany and England but it didn’t suit me. The end result is more important than your look.”

He then moved to Burnley and Bayer Leverkusen in search for consistent playing time but didn’t settle down until he joined 1860 Munich in 2009. There he made over 160 appearances over the course of five years before moving to Fulham and then back to his hometown club Haladás last year.

His international career has been a success from the start, the player having saved a penalty against Austria with his first touch in his debut for Hungary. Eighteen years later, he reached his landmark 100th cap for the national team in the build-up to the Euros and became Hungary’s most capped player of all time.

Furthermore, he became the oldest player ever to play in the Euros at the age of forty years, two months and two weeks. Hungary are currently sitting top of Group F and as a seasoned veteran, Király has been leading their charge; he kept a clean sheet in a 2-0 win over Austria and made multiple fine saves as Balázs Dzsudzsák’s men drew Iceland 1-1. They will hope to seal a spot in the knockout rounds against Portugal on Wednesday.

However, Király’s bottoms — rolled underneath bright green socks — have once again overshadowed his more impressive achievements and he is somewhat bemused that they continue to create such a fuss all these years after he first broke out onto the scene. “I have used the [tracksuit trousers] for the last 20 years, and I have explained in a lot of interviews why I use them,” Király said, per The Guardian. “I’ve been in football for 24 years, this isn’t the first year. But it’s a famous tournament so maybe that is why people are looking.”

Homepage photo credit: Ampfinger (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.