Nemzeti Bajnokság I 2026/27 (M)

MOL Tatabánya KC have finished third in seven of the last ten NB I seasons. That is not a run of bad luck; it is a precise description of how this league is built. Above them sit two clubs operating on a different scale, and below them ten who do not expect to reach either. Tatabánya hold the border between those two worlds, and they have spent a decade unable to cross it.

The numbers measure the moat. Across those ten seasons the gap between second and third never fell below four points, and it reached eleven on three separate occasions: 2021/22, 2023/24 and the shortened 2019/20. The narrowest margin, those four points, came twice — in 2017/18 and 2018/19 — and both times it was Tatabánya themselves brushing against second without ever taking it.

Only four clubs have reached that third step since 2016: Tatabánya, Ferencváros and, once each, Balatonfüred and Gyöngyös. None has gone further. The question that carries the Hungarian season is not who wins, but how long it takes for someone to turn the podium into a three-way fight.

And the border barely moves from below. Balatonfüred, third in 2021/22, and Gyöngyös, third in the 2019/20 season, are the only two clubs to have interrupted Tatabánya's habit across the whole decade.

Veszprém won all 26 matches. Not a defeat, not a draw, and 52 points out of a possible 52: a perfect sweep the Hungarian league had not seen in a decade. They scored 1,033 goals and conceded 715, a difference of 318 — better than twelve goals of average margin per game.

Szeged put together a season that would have been enough in almost any other year. Twenty-two wins, one draw and three defeats for 45 points, with 929 goals scored and the best defence in the competition: 709 conceded, six fewer than the champions themselves. It was not enough, and the only way it could not be was losing both head-to-head meetings.

Behind them Tatabánya managed 20 wins and 40 points. Ferencváros were fourth on 32 with a 15-2-9 record that shows the real distance: eight points off third and thirteen off second. At the other end, Szigetszentmiklós stayed up on 16 points, Komló finished on 15 and Budakalász closed the table with 12. The champions, for comparison, won twenty-four more games than the bottom club.

The league opens on 1 September in Eger, and that is no small detail: SBS Eger Eszterházy are one of the two newcomers, and they draw Szeged for their first night. Dabas, the other debutant, visit Ferencváros three days later. Veszprém do not appear until 2 September, at home, against ETO University.

The champions arrive with a perfect season behind them, which is both their best credential and their worst inheritance: anything short of another sweep will read as a step backwards. Szeged arrive with the opposite argument — the best defence in the country and nothing to show for it — and two dates circled in red. Between them the two clubs hold the last ten titles.

What is genuinely open starts at third. Tatabánya defend a position they have made their own, Ferencváros want back the step they held in 2024/25, and Gyöngyös and Csurgó have sustained respectable mid-table campaigns. For the two newcomers the target sits on another scale: Budakalász survived last year on 12 points, and that is the real bar for staying up.