The whispered rise of Polish football

by STEPHEN GANAVAS

In November last year, I was in Catania, Sicily. It was the international break, always a busy period for scouts trotting around Europe: I was due in Lausanne, Switzerland and then Zagreb, Croatia; but my trip began here, in Italy. Although I was based in the country, I lived in Turin - Catania, a port city on Sicily’s east coast, was a long way from home, and I’d come all this way to watch Poland and Bosnia’s U-19 sides compete for EURO qualification. At half-time, some Italian scouts around me engaged in an animated discussion. I knew enough of the language to half-understand the topic: they were discussing the recent emergence of Polish football as a continental challenger.

It’s been a decade since a Polish club last graced the UEFA Champions League. Legia Warsaw ran the three-game gauntlet of second-round qualifying in 2016/17, eliminating Bosnia’s Zrinjski Mostar, Slovakia’s Trenčín, and Ireland’s Dundalk to reach the group stage. You have to travel twenty years further to find the last Polish team to qualify for the tournament before that: Widzew Łódź.

Legia’s experience amongst Europe’s elite was, to be generous, a mixed bag. They were steamrolled by Thomas Tuchel’s Borussia Dortmund, who clobbered them 6-0 in Poland and then 8-4 in Germany. Between those matches, they were beaten 5-1 by Zinédine Zidane’s Real Madrid, but managed to salvage some respectability with a 3-3 draw at home. No Polish team has qualified for the Champions League since. In the same period, Polish teams have qualified for the Europa League group stage just three times.

But something is changing. I eavesdropped on the Italian scouts because I’d noticed the phenomenon, too. I was already zeroed in on what attacker Oskar Pietuszewski was doing at Jagiellonia Białystok; in January, he was sold to FC Porto. The previous step of my enlightenment had come in October, when Poland’s Under-21s travelled to Sweden and obliterated them 6-0. The team was packed with a host of players that I would come to appreciate over the course of the Ekstraklasa season; others were already trickling into the top-five European leagues.

That day in Catania, Poland dominated. They won 2-1. Soon after, I went tumbling down a rabbit hole, keen to understand the Polish phenomenon I was witnessing.

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There’s a mystique to the legendary national teams of the old Eastern Bloc. Lev Yashin headlined an iconic Soviet Union side who won Olympic Gold in 1956 and a European Championship in 1960. A famous Czechoslovakian team birthed the legend of Antonín Panenka’s chipped penalty while winning the 1976 European Championship and Olympic Gold in 1980. And Hungary had a Ferenc Puskás-led side in the 1950s, who were arguably the greatest team to never lift the World Cup title - they lost the 1954 final to West Germany.

While Poland’s own ‘Golden Generation’ of the 1970s and early 1980s didn’t claim any silverware, they did achieve third-place finishes at the 1974 and 1982 World Cups, with a quarter-final appearance in 1978 sandwiched between. And like all teams of the Eastern Bloc era, they were a product of heavy state investment. Soviet countries took elite sports seriously, especially as a tool for projecting soft power on the international stage.

In the midst of Poland’s third-place finish at the 1982 World Cup though, the country fell into crisis. A deteriorating economic situation, mirroring that of the wider Soviet Union, had led to the rise of the famous Solidarity movement: the first independent labour movement to emerge in the bloc and significantly challenge Soviet authority. While the Polish government attempted to undermine Solidarity, implementing martial law and making mass arrests, its momentum would not be curtailed. By 1989, the Polish government sat down with the movement’s leaders, elections were announced, and by 1990, Solidarity’s leader, Lech Wałęsa, was President of Poland. A year later, the Union collapsed.

But this watershed moment didn’t initiate an immediate end to economic hardship. Poland underwent the now infamous economic ‘shock therapy’ of the 1990s, as did other former Soviet republics. This was typified by a host of measures, including widespread privatisation of state assets, all targeted at opening the economy to Western markets. While Poland avoided some of the more devastating effects of shock therapy - like the astonishing reductions in life expectancy seen in Russia, where a man in 1994 could only expect to live to 57 years old - a crippling recession ensued. Unemployment, which had been almost non-existent during the bloc, became widespread. In 2004, with the unemployment rate hovering around 20%, accession to the EU led to a widespread exodus of working-aged Poles.

Polish football naturally fell into crisis. Previously state-backed clubs entered a new age: funding dried up, hooliganism became prominent, and widespread corruption grew within structures once organised by the state. In the Ekstraklasa, match fixing and bribery were rife. Football could not escape the decades of decay that had claimed the Polish state. Player development stalled. And after qualifying for four consecutive World Cups from 1974 to 1986, Poland wouldn’t return to the tournament until 2002, and the European Championship until 2008.

Player development crises leave a lag. You can’t magically invent elite players in their prime at 27 years old. While Poland’s accession to the EU helped supercharge an economic recovery that had already kindled, the recovery of the nation’s football has required much more time.

A sporadic emergence of talents littered the 2010s, headlined by Robert Lewandowski but supported by other solid European-level performers like Piotr Zieliński, Jakub Błaszczykowski, Kamil Glik, and Wojciech Szczęsny. A reliable production line is more difficult to build, and requires investment and the time to settle. The top European nations are stacked with highly professional academy set-ups between several highly competitive clubs, not just one or two.

But as Lewandowski and co. tried and failed to match the lofty heights of the famous teams of the 1970s and 80s at international tournaments, change was afoot. In May this year, the Polish government proudly published a press release: “Over the past 22 years in the EU, our economy has more than doubled: Poland’s cumulative GDP growth between 2003 and 2025 stood at almost 130%, the highest in the EU (the EU-27 average was 34.5%). Our GDP per capita has risen from just under 50% to over 80% of the EU average […] Our GDP has topped USD 1 trillion, and in December 2026 we will take part in the summit of the world’s 20 largest economies”.

Today, Poland is emerging as a new economic pole (nice - ed) in Europe. It’s now the sixth largest economy in the EU27. It’s the fifth biggest by its population of roughly 38 million. The Polish migrant waves, which once had been controversial - to put it politely - in the political discourse of countries like the UK, are now actually reversing.

As part of the renewal, football has received its fair share of investment. Poland’s co-hosting of Euro 2012 was a key catalyst, for which four stadiums in Warsaw, Gdańsk, Wrocław and Poznań were either built or renovated. But these were far from the only new stadiums to have emerged in the country over the last 20 years; in fact, those of almost every professional club in Poland were either built or renovated during this period, and many of those yet to receive one are planned to do so. Interestingly, almost all of these stadiums were built by local governments.

While the balance-sheet merit of these investments can be debated by nerds, communities inarguably love football. Polish fans have flocked back to the league in record numbers since it hit rock-bottom in the 90s. In 2001/02, the average attendance at an Ekstraklasa game was 4,169. Last season, that number hit 13,591. Post-COVID, the league was expanded from 16 to 18 teams. Club revenues are exploding. An October 2025 report released by the league stated that total revenue raised by Ekstraklasa clubs in 2024/25 had reached €298.6 million, up from €117.5m a decade prior. This number is growing rapidly; TV rights, sponsorship and gate revenues are rising year-on-year. But there’s one revenue stream Poland have been slow to tap into, that is only now beginning to pay its dividends: transfer fees.

In October 2025, I saw the result of a football game and knew I had to watch it, desperate to understand what had happened. The result in question: Poland’s Under-21s had travelled to Sweden and obliterated them 6-0. The Polish team was packed with a host of players that I would come to appreciate over the course of the Ekstraklasa season; Antoni Kozubal and Michał Gurgul at Lech Poznań, Marcel Reguła and Igor Drapiński at Zagłębie Lubin, Marcel Krajewski at Widzew Łódź, Tomasz Pieńko at Raków Częstochowa, Filip Luberecki at Motor Lublin. It was a mix of stylistically unique players, plying their trade at a variety of clubs across the Ekstraklasa, and more importantly, playing regular senior minutes.

A few months earlier, a few young Poles had departed the Ekstraklasa for solid fees. Jan Ziolkowski landed in Serie A with Roma and Maxi Oyedele was picked up by Strasbourg. These weren’t quite league record sales for a Polish player, but they were close. Ekstraklasa clubs had managed to sell a handful of local players before then, but many had proven false dawns. Kacper Kozłowski never cracked the Brighton squad. Jakub Moder fared better with the Seagulls but never amounted to more than a squad player. Sensing a trend, Michał Karbownik also failed to make an impact with Brighton — perhaps they weren’t wrong about the market, just early. Poland’s most successful export of the 2020s has undoubtedly been Jakub Kamiński, who forged a great career in the Bundesliga and now landed himself at Benfica.

Momentum is growing. Oyedele and Ziolkowski weren’t the only interesting players to be sold by Polish clubs in the summer of 2025/26. Adrian Przyborek joined Ziolkowski in Rome, but with Lazio, while Dominik Sarapata moved to Denmark with FC Copenhagen and Filip Rózga joined Sturm Graz in Austria. This was supplemented by the real bombshell move in January: Oskar Pietuszewski’s €8 million move to FC Porto. While the proliferation of sub-€10 million fees feels underwhelming, the sheer volume of exports lays the foundation for increased valuations as Poland’s sons continue to find success across the continent.

Back in Catania, I laid eyes on two players that moved this summer without breaking the eight-figure barrier: the precocious, technically talented centre-back Bright Ede, still establishing himself as a senior pro, who joined Deportivo A Coruña; and Jagiellonia’s Bartosz Mazurek, an all-action, athletic midfielder who joined Red Bull Salzburg. It’s only a matter of time now before the €10 million glass ceiling is breached, and breached, and breached again.

A young centre-back by the name of Wojciech Mońka also played in Italy that day, alongside Ede and Mazurek. The 19-year-old established himself as a senior regular at Lech Poznań not long after and was almost bulletproof in the back-half of the season as Lech stormed to the Ekstraklasa title. Alongside Monka at Lech is Antoni Kozubal. He is a dynamic, technically proficient midfielder who provides his team with value from whichever midfield zone he is deployed. I sense that one of these two is destined to become the new record sale for an Ekstraklasa club; the record of €11 million is jointly held by Moder, Kozłowski, and Ante Crnac. Marcel Reguła, a versatile attacking player, also reportedly courted by clubs in Germany, likewise seems destined to be sold for a relatively large sum.

In the meantime, Polish results in European competitions are improving dramatically. While the Ekstraklasa didn’t boast any representatives in the Europa League or Champions League last season, its clubs became a recurring theme of the Conference League, with Raków Częstochowa finishing second in the league phase. They were joined in the next phase of the competition by Lech Poznań (11th) and Jagiellonia Białystok (17th). Only Legia Warsaw (28th) missed out on qualification for the knockouts.

Lech, Raków and Jagiellonia performed gallantly in the latter stages, too. Jagiellonia almost pulled off a stunning upset after losing their first leg knockout phase match against Fiorentina 3-0. Buoyed by a Mazurek hat-trick, they won 4-2 in the return leg, ultimately going out 5-4 on aggregate. Fiorentina would go on to knock Raków out 4-2 on aggregate in the Round of 16, while Lech lost 4-3 on aggregate by Shakhtar Donetsk at the same stage of the competition, but not before dispatching Finland’s KuPS in the knockout play-off.

Legia and Jagiellonia had also both performed heavy lifting for Poland’s UEFA coefficient score the season prior, when they reached the quarter-finals before being beaten by Chelsea and Real Betis respectively. The Ekstraklasa was ranked the 30th best league in UEFA’s coefficient as recently as 2022/23, behind countries such as Hungary, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Bulgaria. It’s now in the top 15.

Perhaps the rise of Polish football was inevitable. The story of football in Europe is largely an economic story, after all: financial restrictions in European football are linked to revenues, revenues are linked to market size and power. The traditional top five leagues are based in the countries with the four largest economies and populations in the EU - and, of course, England.

Poland now have the fifth largest population in the EU27. At current rates, they are on course to overtake the Netherlands as the fifth largest economy in the next 15 years. Of course, there are complicating factors: the purchasing power of consumers in Poland on a per-capita basis still lags behind much of western Europe. But the wheels that were set spinning over two decades ago are finally approaching top speed. Poland’s facilities are modern, its pedigree in player development growing, its league system competitive and rejuvenated, its revenues exploding, and its player sales ever-more impressive. One day in the near future, you won’t need to eavesdrop on half-understood conversations to hear about Polish football’s future; it will simply have arrived.

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