Two days were enough for the communists. How bourgeois football was liquidated

On Friday 27 February, just two days after the Chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and Prime Minister Klement Gottwald returned from the Castle from the President of the Republic Edvard Beneš and announced the ‘victory of the working people’ to the tens of thousands gathered in the Old Town Square in Prague, fundamental changes occurred in the football structure changes.

The Action Committee, a group of putschists not elected by anyone and authorized by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic, dismissed the proper leadership of the Czech Football Association and established new conditions. The most fundamental change was that all components came under a single one – Sokol. That means football too.

The directive decision was officially announced on March 19 by an official announcement of the obedient National Front, which brought together political parties and social organizations, issued by the Czechoslovak press office.

The ‘new times’, which lasted 41 years until November 1989, were chronicled as the dark ages, unless a much sadder – but more apt – comparison is chosen.

With the new conditions came personnel changes. The president of the football association, Václav Valoušek, the long-time head of football club Slavia, was immediately dismissed by the action committee. He took over the position of the highest Czechoslovak representative from Rudolf Pelikán, a professor at the Cologne gymnasium, the longest-serving head of the highest football body (1923–1946), who worked his way up to the position of vice-president of FIFA.

Even though it was a fairly reasonable principle that a representative of the most powerful clubs Sparta or Slavia should not sit at the head of the organization, as this would increase the threat of a conflict of interests, businessman Václav Valoušek was already chosen as a viable solution in the rather difficult post-war period.

He knew how to deal with people, he knew how to deal with complex situations. However, he could not handle the communist coup. As a democrat and mainly a representative of the bourgeoisie – he traded in hops and meat – he was dismissed by the action committee.

Red Right journalist Miroslav Stjažkin was installed in his place. “I don’t even remember that he was one of the significant journalistic personalities of the newspaper,” discusses football historian and witness Miloslav Jenšík. “He was a member of the sports section, but he hardly wrote about football at all,” he continues.

However, as a renowned expert not only on football events, he advises not to look for any logic in Styažkin’s credentials. “The action committees did whatever they wanted,” Jenšík describes the conditions in February 1948. “They formed abruptly, there was no system in them,” he describes. “And there was a lot of arbitrariness in them, young cadres were working their way up, who presented their awareness as the only value,” reveals Jenšík.

Stjažkin made his mark in the sports public’s consciousness the most with a book published in 1947 entitled Drobný, černý konů Wimbledon, which was rather a notebook of the specialist sports edition of Aktuality and described the trip of Czechoslovak tennis players to the USA. He wrote it together with Václav Švadlena.

Just to illustrate the time: an excellent tennis player, Václav Drobný, but also a hockey player – world champion in 1947 and Olympic silver medalist from the 1948 Olympic Games in St. Moritz, left the totalitarian regime illegally in 1949 and won Wimbledon in 1954 as a citizen of Egypt…

Slovakia, which after almost six years of independence as a vassal of the Nazi German Empire (1939–1944), returned to union with the Czech nation after the war, had a quite different position. It established its own bodies, which had no counterweight on the Czech side, and which controlled political and social life across the Moravia River.

When Miroslav Stjažkin resigned after a few months as the chief representative of the headquarters of the Football Association of the Czech Republic. the municipality of Sokolská, which was obviously not enough and did not fulfill much, it was taken over by dr. Július Viktory, otherwise a trustee – commissioner of justice of the Slovak National Council.

He thus became – without suspecting it – also the highest man in Czechoslovakian football. However, the archives have yet to reveal that anyone appointed him, let alone elected him. In the historical overview of the tallest men in football, he is not so ranked.

White spaces can still be filled, especially on the political map.

Václav Valoušek, who was recalled, was going through a difficult period in his life as well. As a rich entrepreneur and owner of extensive property, he became an exploiter and a class enemy of the people.

In January 1949 he was arrested for the first time, but soon released, in March he was arrested again, this time on serious suspicion of membership in the illegal group National Unity Party. The suspicion was not confirmed, but he knew that nothing good awaited him at home, in the new political system.

In November 1949, the whole family managed to emigrate to Sweden under very dramatic circumstances. The secret departure from the old airport in Ruzyna was accompanied by drama, fortunately no shots were fired from the prepared weapons. However, according to the testimony of relatives, the eighteen-year-old son Zdeněk turned completely gray.

The family settled in Sweden, where Valoušek again did business. He started with a small amount of money but soon managed to build a thriving business. He and his wife bought a non-functioning milk bar in Stockholm, which they converted into a Conti restaurant. He died in Stockholm in 1965 at the age of seventy-two.

He was also active in sports, he founded the Sokol village in his new homeland. He never forgot his beloved Slavia. “He hung a Slavist flag on his house,” recalled Jarmila Bicanová, the wife of the King of Gunners, of the man who brought her future husband to Prague from Admira in Vienna in 1937.

Valousek, however, caused himself only trouble. “The neighbors immediately accused him of promoting a criminal ideology, they thought it was a red star, a symbol of communists,” Bicanová recalled, the paradoxes Valousek had to navigate in Swedish exile.

The supreme football body – i.e. the Football Association of the Czech Republic. Sokol municipality – already in socialist Czechoslovakia, a real expert was put at the helm only in 1949, when Emil Bryndač took over the position, who had done a lot of work already in the pre-war period in the field of referees.

He was certainly a person who did not mind the new government, and eyewitnesses document that he used to have a very left-wing attitude, but he knew the football environment and knew how to navigate it.

And he was also related to him. His daughter was married to goalkeeper Alexa Bokšay, a native of Transcarpathian Uzhhorod, who in 1938 replaced the legendary František Plánička in the goal of Slavia Prague and won the Central European Cup in a jersey with a red star on the chest.

With the one that, eleven years later, angered the Swedish democrats so much in Stockholm, when the exile Valoušek hung a Slavist flag on his house.