Where should I start? There are loads and loads of reasons so I will only be able to scratch the surface here.
The whole federation is corrupt, the little money they have they launder it. The contractor that they had a service from: didnt pay them even though the whole countrys youth rankings and competition dates were ran on that website. Still they didnt paid them so the contractor shut that part of the website down (
https://ponger.hu )
A lot of clubs no longer exist because they didnt have money or players (but probably both). Actually there was a big club that had a big and good history (cant remember the name) but a few years ago somehow it was found out that the club with the original name was ran under another company, meanwhile no one knew about this.
Guess what they did? Money laundering.
There is only one good club left in the whole country: BVSC, all of the other clubs that remained probably cant even compete with more than one player (if they have one).
The conditions that kids sometimes have to play in are straight up outrageous. One competiton had a few tables and nowhere to sit. The kids had to stand for hours in the 10-15C degrees outside while the competition was going.
Sponsor talented hard working good youth players who have no inside connection with the federation.... Nah.
Why would they do that... Instead they tried to set them back by banning them from the youth national them for small insignificant reasons. (If you are more intrested about hits topic you should look up Fazekas Lizett, she is now playing in croatian colours because of various reasons that I didnt get into)
Also push much worse payers with connections, who realistically has no future in table tennis.
There is no money in table tennis here, probably less than 20 people can make a living out of it, even than I think i said a really big number.
My personal experience is when I went to an open tournament I was put in the strongest group, with kids that had really good rankings (I didnt even have one). I actually managed to beat a few of them, even when the referee started cheating against me, Mind you I was 11 or 12 years old. He gave points to my opponents so my father had to step in. He probably was just some random guy from the community, but I think this already tells a lot.
These are a few reasons why I still play amateurly to this day - after 9 years -
With the change of the government we really hope that table tennis will be in a better place from a few years from now. As in the last years when we thought hungarian table tennis (and the whole country) hit rock bottom, they could prove us wrong.
I hope the stuff that I wrote made sense.
As I said above I only scracthed the surface with this, we could write a whole book about this topic.
