Inside The Fascinating, Dark World Of Polish Soccer

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When Poland’s manager, Franciszek Smuda, left church on Easter Sunday and checked his phone for messages, he expected nothing much. Instead he found a bombardment of missed calls and messages saying that two of his players had been arrested during a drunken night in Cologne, Germany. “They’ve ruined my Easter. They’re out of the squad!” Smuda reportedly shouted. It’s not what any coach wants to hear weeks before his country co-hosts the European Championship. It turned out that when the Polish players Slawomir Peszko and Marcin Wasilewski had climbed into a taxi imperfectly sober the night before, the driver had ignored their instructions and taken them straight to the police station. Smuda later flew to Cologne to conduct a personal investigation, and ended up banning only Peszko. (Perhaps not totally coincidentally, Wasilewski is the better player.)The incident seemed to sum up all that’s wrong with Polish soccer: It’s amateurish, silly and drunken. Poland’s national team, the Biale Orly (“White Eagles”), is only just recovering from its long-held status as a national joke. In this peculiar soccer country, most of the best players these last 30 years have been goalies. Yet when soccer’s traveling circus descends on Poland and Ukraine this week, in Poland, at least, visitors might be pleasantly surprised. Not only is the soccer team no longer quite such a joke, but as the foreign minister Radek Sikorski said recently, “Today’s Poland is the best we have ever known.” The country with perhaps the saddest history in Europe is rising fast. When I first visited Poland 20 years ago, you couldn’t imagine a European Championship here. It was then a largely gray country, where most city dwellers seemed to live in concrete blocks. Restaurants served you reluctantly and vastly inflated the bill, and yet the meal (typically dumplings) would end up costing less than $1. Most towns still bore the marks of the Second World War. One in five Poles died in the conflict -- proportionally, the greatest carnage in any country on earth. When Hitler’s soldiers left Poland, the Russian army arrived and stayed. After 1945, the great powers moved Poland a few hundred kilometers west. The country was granted large swaths of what had been Hitler’s Germany; Gdansk, a host city this summer, was mostly German-speaking Danzig until 1945. Meanwhile Stalin’s USSR grabbed much of Poland’s east; Lviv, a Ukrainian host city for Euro 2012, was Polish until 1939. Soccer hasn’t done much to cheer Poles up. Before 1974, Poland had played just one World Cup match in its history: a 6-5 overtime defeat to Brazil in 1938, with Ernest Wilimowski scoring 4. A year after the game, the Germans unleashed the European war by invading Danzig and nabbed the ethnic German Wilimowski for the Third Reich’s national team. At Wembley in 1973, the Polish keeper Jan Tomaszewski, derided on British TV as a “clown,” stopped everything England threw at him to take his country to the next year’s World Cup. Poland finished third in 1974, performed decently in 1978, came third in the world again in 1982 and reached the second round in 1986. After that, it didn’t qualify for any tournament for 16 years. When communism finally collapsed in 1989, there were side effects: among them, the rise of a Polish mafia and the collapse of Polish soccer. Under communism, state-owned companies had owned and funded soccer clubs. After communism, hardly anybody did. In the 1990s some clubs got taken over by Poland’s new rich, who were often rather dubious characters. Some of these types haven’t entirely disappeared. At Polonia Warsaw, for instance, the club president Józef Wojciechowski instituted the notorious Klub Kokosa: “Coconut Club.” According to FIFPro, the international soccer players’ trade union, players who displease him (for instance, by refusing to hand in their contracts when he asks) often get exiled from the playing field to the “Coconut Club,” where they never play matches but are made to do vast amounts of running. There are so many sorry things in Polish soccer. In 2001, the sports minister, Jacek Debski, was lured out of a restaurant by a call on his cell phone and was then shot in the head in what was probably a mafia hit. Over 300 players, coaches and referees have been arrested in an investigation into past matchfixing. Last December, two days before the draw for Euro 2012, tapes were released in which Zdzislaw Krecina, secretary-general of Poland’s Soccer Federation, appeared to be talking about the distribution of bribes, including the cut due to Grzegorz Lato, the federation’s president. Krecina lost his job. However, Lato kept his, seemingly only because he was a great player in the 1970s. Michal Buchowski, anthropology professor at Poznan University, who studies soccer, says: “Many say the federation people are old chaps in new times. Lato doesn’t meet standards. He doesn’t speak foreign languages.” Yet Lato is about to co-host the world’s third-biggest sports tournament. Continue Reading

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