This button is Puskás”: How a mass-produced object becomes personified
Button football is a curious phenomenon in twentieth-century Hungarian play and sporting culture. While it may seem like a simple children’s game at first glance, it is in fact a complex cultural practice that brings together a love of football, material culture, identity formation, and creativity. Drawing on design culture research methods, Hanna Zalka reflects on how an ordinary mass-produced button can become a ‘personified’ object.
Photo: Fortepan /Ernő Márton Kovács
The story of button football is closely intertwined with the spread of football in Hungary. Football was introduced to Hungary in the late nineteenth century, following the English model, with coaches from England playing a key role in establishing the sport. Although button football is often regarded as a quintessentially Hungarian game or even a uniquely Hungarian invention, the basic idea originated elsewhere. English coaches had already been using small boards and discs to demonstrate tactics and recreate match situations. [1]
In Hungary, however, the game was reinvented in its own way. From the early twentieth century, children began turning ordinary household buttons into footballers, adapting them to suit their needs and imagination. Like football itself, button football required little money to play, making it accessible to people from all walks of life. It could also be played indoors, whatever the weather. Usually played by two people, though it can also be played alone, the game follows the rules of football, with each player controlling a team of eleven. There is no set way to make the pieces, leaving plenty of room for players to get creative.
The author’s own button collection acquired from Facebook Marketplace.
In the early days, children used bone and wooden buttons, often pilfered from old coats, as we know from numerous literary works [2] and personal recollections. [3] From the 1950s onwards, the rise of the chemical industry and the growing popularity of plastics brought Perspex, Bakelite and hard rubber buttons into the game. Players chose their buttons to suit different positions on the pitch. The goalkeeper was usually a larger, heavier button, often from a coat. Defenders were thicker, sturdier pieces, sometimes made by gluing several buttons together. Wingers were smaller and flatter, allowing them to move faster. A tiny button, usually from a shirt, served as the ball. [4]
Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff offers a useful theoretical framework for understanding button football. He argues that objects, like people, can have “biographies”, with their functions, meanings, and status changing over time. In modern societies, many objects begin life as mass-produced commodities, but certain social practices can take them out of circulation and give them a distinctive, personal significance. Kopytoff calls this process singularisation. [5]
Button football offers a particularly clear example of this process. The button at the heart of the game starts out as an ordinary, mass-produced, functional object: a fastening for clothing, yet in the hands of players, it takes on an entirely new identity as a player on the pitch. Buttons were sanded down, glued together, combined, and reshaped to suit individual needs. As their appearance changed, so did their meaning. What had once been a clothing accessory became a player in a football team. For Kopytoff, singularisation hinges on the personal attachments and identities that objects come to embody. [6].
Even without names [7] or markings, everyone involved knew exactly which footballer each button stood for: “This button is Puskás.” The button thus became more than a physical object: through the players’ imagination, it took on a symbolic role that went beyond its physical existence, standing in for a real footballer.
Photograph from Miklós Vastagh’s estate, 1929. Fortepan /Gábor Fóris
The makeshift facilities needed to play were also created by finding new uses for everyday spaces and items. The pitch was usually a kitchen table, an old tabletop or even the parquet floor, with the lines drawn in chalk. Goals were typically made from matchboxes or cardboard, with nets fashioned from gauze or scraps of fabric. Players sometimes used improvised tools, such as plastic combs or wooden sticks, to flick the buttons across the pitch. In 1937, psychologist Ferenc Mérei described the game as “Button football has retained its traditional, free-spirited character. Although toy manufacturers have been trying for at least fifteen years to market factory-made button football sets complete with printed rulebooks, every such attempt has failed. Successive generations of children have stubbornly stuck to buttons cut from coats, filed down on stone kitchen floors, and held together with pitch and wire.” [8]
The origins of button football can also be understood through anthropologist Michael Thompson’s theory of value. Thompson argues that an object’s value is neither fixed nor determined by its material properties, but shaped by social processes. He distinguishes between three categories: transient objects, which lose value over time; durable objects, whose value remains stable or increases; and rubbish, objects that have lost their social significance and practical value. Crucially, rubbish is not necessarily the end of the story. Objects can become valuable again by acquiring new meanings and functions. [9]
When a garment wore out, its buttons could be salvaged and given a new lease of life – turning what Thompson would term “rubbish” into something valuable once more. Through creativity, buttons that had lost their original purpose became players representing famous football players. In other words, the process of becoming rubbish was reversed. Their value was restored not in economic terms, but on a symbolic and emotional plane.
Each button, carefully worked to suit its owner’s needs, carried memories, a sense of belonging to a team, and a connection to childhood identity. Owners treasured their pieces and repaired them when necessary. But not every button football team was assembled from pilfered buttons. Players also enjoyed visiting tailors’ workshops [10] and haberdasheries to buy buttons for new teams. As one player recalled, “I bought large buttons at Röltex, glued two together and roughly shaped them on my grandfather’s filing machine, then used a finer file to create different types of striking surfaces. Later, I also made a few players out of Perspex.” [11]
The author’s own mass-produced button football team.
The game underwent a major change in the 1950s with the rise of mass-produced plastic sets featuring pictures and names of football players, their shape now the only link to traditional buttons. During the Kádár era, button football became a popular “home sport”, as historian Tibor Valuch put it. [12] Factory-made sets were sold in tobacconists’ and Ápisz stationery shops, first attached to cardboard sheets in paper boxes and later in plastic tubs with lids. The advent of factory-made sets may also have helped turn what had largely been a children’s game into a popular pastime among adults, allowing those who had played in childhood to rediscover the game in a new form. The growing influence of the media on how people experienced football may also have contributed to the game’s popularity.
Fans followed matches through newsreels, radio broadcasts, and sports newspapers, and button football gave that experience a tangible form. Children and adults alike could relive real matches or play out their own versions.
With earlier versions, it was the players themselves who gave the buttons their individual identities. Mass-produced sets, by contrast, came with those identities already in place. This shift is particularly interesting because the pieces were no longer buttons in any practical sense, yet the game retained its name and rules. Traditional buttons remained popular among children despite the arrival of factory-made sets [13], offering a glimpse into changing consumer habits. While early button football was rooted in creative adaptation and reuse, mass production all but eliminated the players’ role in shaping the pieces themselves. The game itself, however, did not disappear. It developed into an organised sport [14], attracted a community of collectors, and factory-made sets are still available today. The fate of traditional handmade sets is far less certain. Some find their way into museums or private collections, others are passed down as family keepsakes, often from father to son. Many once-treasured sets, however, end up forgotten in attics or consigned to the bin.
Photo from 1960. Fortepan /Etelka Dömölky
The first comprehensive exhibition of button football was held in 2006 at the Museum of Ethnography, as a companion exhibition to Plastic, under the title From Bone to Plastic: From Button Football to Sectorball. [15] In 2013, the Hungarikum Button Football Museum opened in the basement of a pizzeria in Szigetszentmiklós. Although the exhibition includes some very early sets made from traditional buttons, most of the sets on display are mass-produced. The collection also features various items of memorabilia, including a button football pitch painted on the desk of legendary footballer József Bozsik. The museum is an ideal destination for anyone looking to revisit childhood memories, as well as collectors and table football enthusiasts. Its collection continues to grow, and the museum’s director encourages people to donate sets they would otherwise throw away. As the museum’s guiding philosophy suggests, “The mission of the museum is to preserve this traditional game as a cherished part of Hungary’s cultural heritage for future generations. We also want to give young people the opportunity to discover button football, develop a love for the game, and get to know its competitive form, sectorball.”[16] In 2013, a concerted effort was made to have button football officially recognised as part of Hungary’s national cultural heritage, but ultimately proved unsuccessful. [17]
The study of button football reveals that an object’s meaning is shaped not just by its material properties or original purpose, but by the social and cultural context in which it is used and transformed.
The rise and heyday of button football coincided with a period when material scarcity and disparities in living standards lent new significance to everyday objects, whether still serving their original purpose or long since discarded. A button pilfered from a coat and transformed by hand could become a powerful expression of creativity and passion for football.
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The research was conducted as part of the MA programme in Design Theory at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME), within the course Special Research: Object, taught by Klára Kuti.
The project was recognised with the Stefan Lengyel Excellence Scholarship in spring 2026.
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[1] Imre Gráfik. 2023. A Game Imitating Football: Button Football. In Magyar Nyelvőr, vol. 147, no. 2, pp. 199–213.
[2] Dezső Tandori brought button football into the literary spotlight with his widely read children’s novel The Big Book of Button Football (1980), followed by The New Big Book of Button Football (1985) and The Latest Little Big Book of Button Football (1989).
[3] [17] Imre Gráfik. 2016. Button Football: The Game of Games. In Napút, vol. 18, no. 7, pp. 114–122.
[4] Imre Gráfik. 2023b. Games During the War Years? YES! In Festschrift Celebrating the 70th Birthday of Ethnographer and Museologist József Kriston-Vízi. Nagykőrös, pp. 178–212.
[5] [6] Igor Kopytoff. 2008 (1986). The Cultural Biography of Things. In Replika: Object Biographies, pp. 107–130.
[7] Some teams featured players’ names handwritten on adhesive tape and stuck onto the buttons. It is also interesting to see which Hungarian, international, and even fictional footballers and teams their makers chose to bring to life.
[8] Ferenc Mérei. 1937. The Child Playing Button Football. In Gyermeknevelés, issues 9–10, pp. 131–134.
[9] Michael Thompson. 2017 (1979). Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value. London: Pluto Press.
[10] Interestingly, the first organised button football club was established after the Second World War by László Balogh, a master tailor in Pécs. (Gráfik 2016, p. 118)
[11] Péter Granasztói. 2007. Generations of Button Football Players. In Museum of Ethnography MaDok Booklets, pp. 84–85.
[12] Tibor Valuch. 2006. GOAL! – Sport. In Everyday Life in the Age of János Kádár. Budapest: Corvina Publishing House, pp. 145–146.
[13] A 1973 newsreel offers a humorous portrayal of the game and the use of buttons. A couple in a prefabricated apartment watch a football match on television, while the commentator’s voice carries over to a scene of a sectorball team recreating the live action on a tabletop. In the final scene, children are seen flicking buttons across the carpet as their father discovers, much to his annoyance, that his coat is missing all the buttons yet again. Newsreel. 1973. Hungarian Button Football Players. Last accessed 20 May 2026. https://filmhiradokonline.hu/watch.php?id=21297
[14] The Hungarian Table Football Association was founded in 1989. The sport’s official name is sectorball.
[15] Anonymous. 2007. From Bone to Plastic: From Button Football to Sectorball. In Plastic, edited by Zoltán Fejős and Zsófia Frazon. Budapest: Museum of Ethnography, pp. 346–347.
[16] Anonymous. n.d. Introducing the Hungarikum Button Football Museum. Last accessed 20 May 2026.https://gombfocihaza.hu/?page_id=27
