The first part of the season ended with the international break, and the next few weeks hold significant challenges for DVSC. Sporting director Hayk Hovakimyan told dvsc.hu about the recent period and the future as well.

“First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the fans for their amazing support throughout our European journey. Huge respect to all the fans that traveled to Armenia and Austria. I was very sorry to hear that some of our supporters were stuck in Vienna on their way to Yerevan because of a flight delay. On behalf of the whole club, I would like to thank those more than 27,000 fans who supported the team at Nagyerdei Stadium. A few months have passed since my last interview and now it’s time to have a sincere conversation again. There is nothing to hide, so we have collected the questions that may interest our readers. Let’s go!”

The summer transfer window period was quite long and it may be interesting for the fans to know how the club works during the transfer window. Can you share more details?

“The summer transfer window was really long and exhausting but, in my opinion, DVSC had a very balanced and rational transfer campaign. We started the work a few months ago. Together with the head of the scouting department Bence Gulácsi, we had discussions with the head coach to know the positions that needed to be strengthened. He gave us characteristics of the players he wanted to see in those positions.

Before signing a player, we consider numerous conditions. At first, we check if we have a player in the same position in our second team. After that we analyze the Hungarian market, only then the foreign market.We have a fixed strategy regarding foreign players. Of course, there might be some exceptions, but we don’t plan to sign a foreigner who is over 27. I hope it is useful information for those agents who want to work with us.

A football club is like a living organism, inside of which keeping harmony and balance is of vital importance. Due to this, before signing a new player to our family, we try to gather maximum information not only about his professional qualities but also about his personality. If I go into more details, I can tell that we analyze everything, even the social media pages. Considering all the information that we have, we make a portrait based on his personality traits. Before choosing a player, we make sure that his game is entertaining to watch, his attitude is exemplary, that he is the one that kids who come to Nagyerdei Stadium can admire and look up to.

We work in two directions: the first one is our everyday work with the scouting department. In the previous interview, I already mentioned that we have recently launched a scouting department. Our regional scouts do the research, they upload their scouting reports to a special platform and update their lists after each game. I constantly keep track of this procedure and get in touch with the players’ agents immediately to gather all the information. Close interaction with the agents is the second direction. We receive a huge number of requests every day, the hardest task is to filter them. If we receive a profile of someone playing in the championships covered by our scouts, we immediately consult them, and me and Bence took over the other profiles.”

During the summer transfer window, the core of the squad didn’t change, but of course, there were some departures and valuable players arrived. How would you assess the quality of the squad at the moment?

“In my opinion, we have quite a balanced squad with equivalent substitutions. We have a depth in the squad. Our priority task was to keep the core of the squad, which also concerned the extension of the contracts of the coaching staff. I believe that we have succeeded in establishing competition among the players because I’m sure that for them it’s possible to grow only in that type of environment.

Overall, I’m very confident and happy about the squad that we have now. I don’t want to make assessments, it would not be fair with the newcomers, they need time for full integration to show their best qualities and prove why we chose them to become a player of Debrecen. Let’s trust and support all the players who joined us this summer and hope that they will avoid injuries.”

Would you call Babunski’s transfer to Grasshopper Club Zürich successful?

“It is always painful to lose key players, Dorian had a significant impact on the team’s success in the previous season, and, naturally, there was a great interest around him from different clubs. Together with Dorian and his agent, we agreed to be open and honest with one another from the very first day of the summer transfer window. We also agreed to discuss every concrete offer but the final decision was to be made only after Loki finished its appearances in the Eurocups. And that’s how it happened. After our match with Rapid, the Swiss Grasshoppers showed great interest, the sides agreed and Dorian went to explore new horizons. Of course, it’s hard to find a worthy replacement for Dorian, but we made our choice and we fully trust our strikers.

I want to thank Dorian for the goals he scored in the colors of Loki, for his respect towards the club and the fans. One more team was added to my Flashscore! Good luck, Dorian!”

From your last interview, it became even more clear that DVSC strives for the development of young Hungarian players. A few young Hungarians joined DVSC, how is the process of developing and educating youngsters going?

“I have full trust in the leadership, coaches and Spanish partner coaches of our Academy. I’m waiting for the coming wave of promising Hungarian players (starting from 2005-born) with great excitement. As you may be aware, we have a wide range of players, some of them have already trained with the first team. We closely monitor the games of the second team. I can only say words of appreciation for Péter Máté, we are in constant contact.

By the way, unfortunately, I have a bad habit and sometimes I read Facebook comments. I noticed that after the games of the second team, people ask who David Nwachukwu is. I advise you to read the article about our African partnership. David is the first fruit of that partnership, and I promise to introduce that project with more details in the near future. Currently, I can tell that David scored 5 goals in 5 matches, which is a very good result. We don’t want to hurry and we try to systematically integrate our talented young players who have exceptional results in the second team. David is not an exception to that.

Our scouting department puts forth a lot of effort to find a skillful young Hungarian footballer or foreigner with Hungarian roots. In this regard, I can say that our efforts during this transfer window were successful. We signed Botond Vajda (2004), whose integration to the team was quite fast and successful. Unfortunately, he is currently recovering from an injury, so I wish him a fast recovery. We have a loan agreement with Győr regarding Máté Tuboly. I know that one of the questions that makes everyone worry is whether we have a buying option and if not, what is the reason to sign and develop a player from another team? Both the scouting department and the coaching staff approved Máté as a candidate. We see a big potential in him, he has a huge work rate and a high football intellect. As he joined us a bit late, he needs time to adapt to our football philosophy but I’m sure that everyone will see him in action soon. What concerns the buying option, our agreement doesn’t include such a possibility, but still, it doesn’t mean DVSC doesn’t have a chance the acquire the player in the future. Nothing can hinder the club from sending an official offer for a player. As I already told you during the last interview, we really lack 2003-born players and we don’t have a big choice. We needed one more 2003-born player and after discussions with the coaching staff, our decision was made and we brought Máté here.”

DVSC has made a lot of progress in player selection and player monitoring. At which stage is this process now?

“It’s a never-ending process. As I started my professional career in scouting, this area stands really close to me. I am very happy that I can work on joint projects with like-minded people, such as Bence Gulácsi.

Scouting doesn’t have boundaries. As you may know, we’ve already explored the African market, in January, we will probably also explore the Latin-American, Talent doesn’t have boundaries. There will be a great youth U-20 tournament with 132 participant teams. We try to enlarge our networking as much as our human resources let us to. I will be honest, we decided to work on the Latin American market after this transfer window. Three Brazilian players were very close to joining DVSC but these transfers fell through for various reasons. For football managers, refusals are normal things but, in these cases, we were so impressed with the skillfulness of the players that we decided to find talents of similar quality.

I know that everyone is waiting to hear sensational announcements or insides but I can make only a small hint. If nothing extraordinary happens, in the summer of 2024 one very talented and promising Hungarian player will join us. We have been following him for a long time, I have more than 15 pages of reports about him.”

The international cup matches attracted a lot of fans, more than 27,000 gathered during the two home matches of Loki at Nagyerdei Stadium. After eliminating the Armenian Alashkert and achieving a remarkable draw in Vienna, Rapid decided to stop us. Are you satisfied with the performance of the team?  

“Behind the scenes of our European journey, stand a lot of effort, diligence and hard work during the previous championship. The whole club and the team suffered a lot to participate in those matches. Our efforts speak about the fact that we deserved to introduce Hungary internationally. How successful we were, that’s the other side of the medal.
For me, the match against Alashkert was very emotional as I’m Armenian. I know their coaching staff and players well, so I knew what to expect from them. In those thrilling games, victory was on our side. The fact that Alashkert hasn’t lost any games in the current Armenian championship speaks a lot.

What about the games against Rapid, whatever I tell now, it may sound like an excuse. We played a brilliant away match, I will dare to say that we could even win, but the home match wasn’t successful. There are a lot of reasons for that, we should look inside for the answers and just move on. Every home loss is painful and psychologically it was very difficult for everyone to recover after that. However, it is the beauty of football that after a few days, we had a chance to make our fans happy again. The best way to move past a loss is to win. If we go into the reasons of the defeat more professionally, I can tell that I agree with the coach, who said that the players were overexcited and they just burned out. They wanted to make the supporters feel proud and happy. Rapid was scoring goals right when we had a chance to mount a comeback.  After the first goal, Dorian scored and evened the score but due to a minor offside, the goal was cancelled. Rapid scored their second goal just after that. We eagerly launched into the second half and gained many set pieces. Almost all Rapid’s defense was on yellow cards. I really believed that we could make a comeback. Unfortunately, we were unable to respond quickly and Rapid scored a third goal on a counterattack. The game was decided by this goal. It is very hard to be prepared for such games as there aren’t a lot of matches with such intensity in the Hungarian championship. Anyway, the better team won but in my personal opinion, there is not a 5-goal difference between the teams.

If we consider how we started the previous championship and where we ended up, we can even make a Netflix series out of it.”

We started the championship with home matches, we managed to win 4 out of 5, DVSC leads the table. What can we expect from this season?

“It’s a fact that, at the moment, we are in first place in the standings, but I try not to pay too much attention to that and I advise our supporters to do the same. We should bend our line, which was the key to our success in the previous season. We should think from training to training and from match to match, we should be united in good and bad times and only then it’s possible to register good results again. These are the results after 5 home matches and, indeed, the presence of the 12^th player has a huge impact on the positive outcome. We should follow our principles and continue our systematic and focused work. I’m a man of system and I’m devoted to the process and the coaching staff’s ideology.”

We have injured players, how do you see the game of Loki without those players? When they are expected to join the team?

No matter how much time we devote to injury prevention and how much time our players spend with working with the professional staff, they are never secured from getting injured in playing moments. Unfortunately, injuries are regular in our profession, but I assure you that our medical staff and head of performance are excellent professionals, who go above and beyond to ensure that the players recover fast.

I’m very sorry for Mojzis’ injury because it was very hard to find a left-footed centre-back in the market that would fit all our requirements. Alex has played more than 2,000 minutes in the last 4 consecutive seasons, he is a physically strong athlete, unfortunately he has a very unlucky period of injuries following each other. What about Dreskovic, during the game against Mezőkovesd, he made a sliding tackle. Luckily, the injury only involves a partial ligament rapture and not a more serious condition. This week, Vajda should start partial training with the team. What concerns Joao, additional tests are underway and we expect him to train with the team very soon.”

What are you most proud of since you have been working as the sporting director of Loki?

“Above all, I’m honored to be here. I don’t think it’s appropriate to evaluate my own work, I believe in my ideas and I hope that in the future I will have even more things to be proud of.

Finally, I’d like to wish everyone a peaceful sky and a successful season. Hajrá, Loki!”