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From Partition to Solidarity: The first 100 years of Polish football
Whilst the history of 20th century Poland is well documented, the history of its football is not. In From Partition to The first 100 years of Polish Football , Ryan Hubbard attempts to show that, however separate the subjects may seem, an inextricable and often fascinating link between the two has always existed.
The book is split into six acts, each covering a different era of the country's recent
• "A Partitioned Poland" details the early years of Polish football, in a 'country' battling for independence from its three partitioning rulers.
• "A Reunified Poland" recounts the creation of league and cup competitions, and the early years of the national team, against the backdrop of a country struggling to both establish and identify itself in a vastly changed Europe.
• "An Occupied Poland" tells of how Poles, decimated and displaced due to the bloodiest conflict in human history, used football to keep spirits high - often despite the risks in doing so.
• "An Oppressed Poland" focuses on Poland being dragged under the wing of the Soviet Union, and the country's successes on an international stage at a time when oppression was rife back at home.
• "A Rebellious Poland concentrates particularly on the 1980s, and the role that football played in the fight to bring down communism.
• "A Free Poland" touches on Poland's transformation into a western-style democracy, and dealing with the problems which for years had been hidden by communist cover-ups.
Starting from its humble beginnings in Austrian-partitioned Poland, and ending a century later in a post-communist world, it is difficult to ignore the impact that 123 years of partition, two world wars and over 40 years of Soviet puppetry has had on a rapidly developing Polish game.
Through the stories of Ernest Wilimowski, Kazimierz Deyna, Zbigniew Boniek and many more, From Partition... tells the astonishing history of Polish football like no other book has done before.
About the
Over the last decade, Ryan Hubbard has written about Polish football for such publications as the Daily Mirror , Daily Record , ESPNFC.com , Goal.com and FourFourTwo . He has appeared on a number of TV and Radio shows (BT Sport, BBC Radio 5Live, Talksport), and was a regular pundit for Sports Tonight Live’s coverage of live Polish Ekstraklasa football during the 2012/13 season. Ryan has also led commentary on several games involving Polish clubs, ranging from pre-season friendly games to the 2016/17 Polish Cup Final.
The book is split into six acts, each covering a different era of the country's recent
• "A Partitioned Poland" details the early years of Polish football, in a 'country' battling for independence from its three partitioning rulers.
• "A Reunified Poland" recounts the creation of league and cup competitions, and the early years of the national team, against the backdrop of a country struggling to both establish and identify itself in a vastly changed Europe.
• "An Occupied Poland" tells of how Poles, decimated and displaced due to the bloodiest conflict in human history, used football to keep spirits high - often despite the risks in doing so.
• "An Oppressed Poland" focuses on Poland being dragged under the wing of the Soviet Union, and the country's successes on an international stage at a time when oppression was rife back at home.
• "A Rebellious Poland concentrates particularly on the 1980s, and the role that football played in the fight to bring down communism.
• "A Free Poland" touches on Poland's transformation into a western-style democracy, and dealing with the problems which for years had been hidden by communist cover-ups.
Starting from its humble beginnings in Austrian-partitioned Poland, and ending a century later in a post-communist world, it is difficult to ignore the impact that 123 years of partition, two world wars and over 40 years of Soviet puppetry has had on a rapidly developing Polish game.
Through the stories of Ernest Wilimowski, Kazimierz Deyna, Zbigniew Boniek and many more, From Partition... tells the astonishing history of Polish football like no other book has done before.
About the
Over the last decade, Ryan Hubbard has written about Polish football for such publications as the Daily Mirror , Daily Record , ESPNFC.com , Goal.com and FourFourTwo . He has appeared on a number of TV and Radio shows (BT Sport, BBC Radio 5Live, Talksport), and was a regular pundit for Sports Tonight Live’s coverage of live Polish Ekstraklasa football during the 2012/13 season. Ryan has also led commentary on several games involving Polish clubs, ranging from pre-season friendly games to the 2016/17 Polish Cup Final.
282 pages, Paperback
Published July 18, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 10, 2020
Decent history of Polish soccer that maybe gets a little bogged down with too much research and not enough storytelling. I think it's a little under-edited, too, but it's kinda obvious that this is a self-published type thing. Anyway, it's not terrible. The bits in the last third are the most interesting -- the stuff about Communist Poland and the top players' and fans involvement in the fall of Communism. Kinda wish there was a whole book more about that and less about the foundations of Polish soccer in the 1920s (those sections basically consist of a recitation of a bunch of Polish names and clubs I am not familiar with). Still, considering the fact that this might be the only book in English about Polish soccer, beggars can't be choosers. Makes me even more excited to go to a Polish soccer game next month.
August 4, 2025
An interesting telling of the story of Polish football - or technically the first 100 years, from 1894 to 1994. It gets bogged down a bit in the start - partly because the clubs tend to have long names like Towarzystwo Cyklistów-Turystów, which you read while referring back to the pronunciation guide at the start, and partly because early Polish history is very confusing, particularly in terms of what Poland actually is and isn't. Sometimes it doesn't exist, sometimes it extends as far as Lviv and Vilnius, sometimes it's both of those at the same time.
But once you get past this, you're rewarded with a story told in parallel with general Polish history, and the nuggets start to emerge. So Polonia Warsaw, the oldest club in the capital, are so-named because Polish names were banned while under German occupation - so rather than go with Polen Warsaw, clubs like Polonia opted to name themselves in Latin, and to wear all black rather than the banned Polish colours of red and white. Later on, players are banned for speaking Polish on the pitch rather than German.
A real turning point in the telling of the tale is The Final Game, a friendly match between Poland and Hungary on 27th August 1939. With political tensions mounting, their Scottish coach declined the chance of being in the dugout for the match, the Hungary team became the first side to fly in to Warsaw so they could get out as quickly as possible, and many in the crowd were dressed in military uniform in anticipation of the call-up which, of course, came five days later. The chapter on football under Nazi occupation is, of course, harrowing enough reading, with games taking place surreptitiously in random parks, with limited crowds so as not to draw attention, and lookouts posted to abandon the game at an instant if required. Any semblance of a championship was abandoned, particularly when the game was formally banned, and those playing, organising or watching games were risking their lives, either due to the possibility of a sudden attack from Nazi soldiers, or from arrest and transportation to a concentration camp. When the war is over, with one-fifth of Poland's pre-war population now dead, a search gets underway to see who is left of the national team, of clubs, of officials. The Iron Curtain complicates things, and Ernst Wilimowski - the ethnic German who scored four goals for Poland against Brazil in the 1938 World Cup - is deemed a traitor for leaving the country for Germany and playing for their national team during the war; he's never allowed back into Poland.
After the war, football slowly recovers, and then European competition is invented. Polish clubs struggle at first, but start to find form in the 60s in particular. Górnik Zabrze, a mining club, reach the 1970 Cup Winners' Cup final in bizarre fashion - after 1-1 and 2-2 draws against Roma in the semis, they leave the pitch believing they'd lost on away goals (the stadium announcer even announcing as much), and only when a journalist comes into the dressing room asking about the replay do the players and officials realise extra time doesn't count for away goals. They win the replay on the toss of a coin.
1973 is the year of the famous Jan Tomaszewski performance - the keeper broke his finger in the first minute of the game. 1982 is their second World Cup semi-final in three tournaments - with Solidarity starting to gain in popularity throughout the country, there's banners in the crowd, so Polish TV cut to scenes of Polish fans from other games when required. Against the USSR, a large banner behind one goal causes problems - Polish TV has reception issues every time the ball nears the goal, but that's clearly absurd and soon abandoned. The banner is successfully removed by officials in the ground, only for a small number of Polish expats in the crowd to manage to get the 60,000 - mostly Spanish - crowd to start chanting for Solidarity instead; the picture of the Soviet team lined up with a large Solidarity banner in the background makes many papers the following day.
Escaping or leaving Communist Poland is complicated, and maybe could be explained a bit better. Kazimierz Deyna, with 41 goals and two World Cups to his name, "effectively announced his retirement from the international team by transferring to Manchester City" in 1978, but two years later, Grzegorz Lato is allowed move to Belgium because he's now 30. Fourth choice keeper Jacek Jarecki is caught by teammates half-way out a hotel window at the last training camp before the 1982 World Cup, and they help facilitate his escape, but after the World Cup Zbigniew Boniek (28) leaves for Juve and continues to play for Poland. Why the difference? Possibly because the government figured they were better off with the large portion of the transfer fee Juve pay, but the change in attitude isn't made clear.
There's a couple of other minor quibbles. The book is self-published - slightly strangely, given the idea of telling a country's history through football is a common theme for books now - and the prose could do with trimming down in places ("Four Danish goals in the first half were followed by four more in the second, and the Poles' lack of reply meant that the defeat would surpass that against Yugoslavia as their worst ever" for example), and there's more-than-required random hyphens at times. Probably most strangely, the book only really covers the first 100 years, so despite being published in 2019, it only really goes up to 1995. But the period since then is easily a separate chapter in itself - Poland co-hosting Euro 2012 is barely mentioned, the rise of money and TV in football turning Polish clubs into also-rans isn't really covered, Robert Lewandowski doesn't get a mention. It makes for a strange end to a decent read.
But once you get past this, you're rewarded with a story told in parallel with general Polish history, and the nuggets start to emerge. So Polonia Warsaw, the oldest club in the capital, are so-named because Polish names were banned while under German occupation - so rather than go with Polen Warsaw, clubs like Polonia opted to name themselves in Latin, and to wear all black rather than the banned Polish colours of red and white. Later on, players are banned for speaking Polish on the pitch rather than German.
A real turning point in the telling of the tale is The Final Game, a friendly match between Poland and Hungary on 27th August 1939. With political tensions mounting, their Scottish coach declined the chance of being in the dugout for the match, the Hungary team became the first side to fly in to Warsaw so they could get out as quickly as possible, and many in the crowd were dressed in military uniform in anticipation of the call-up which, of course, came five days later. The chapter on football under Nazi occupation is, of course, harrowing enough reading, with games taking place surreptitiously in random parks, with limited crowds so as not to draw attention, and lookouts posted to abandon the game at an instant if required. Any semblance of a championship was abandoned, particularly when the game was formally banned, and those playing, organising or watching games were risking their lives, either due to the possibility of a sudden attack from Nazi soldiers, or from arrest and transportation to a concentration camp. When the war is over, with one-fifth of Poland's pre-war population now dead, a search gets underway to see who is left of the national team, of clubs, of officials. The Iron Curtain complicates things, and Ernst Wilimowski - the ethnic German who scored four goals for Poland against Brazil in the 1938 World Cup - is deemed a traitor for leaving the country for Germany and playing for their national team during the war; he's never allowed back into Poland.
After the war, football slowly recovers, and then European competition is invented. Polish clubs struggle at first, but start to find form in the 60s in particular. Górnik Zabrze, a mining club, reach the 1970 Cup Winners' Cup final in bizarre fashion - after 1-1 and 2-2 draws against Roma in the semis, they leave the pitch believing they'd lost on away goals (the stadium announcer even announcing as much), and only when a journalist comes into the dressing room asking about the replay do the players and officials realise extra time doesn't count for away goals. They win the replay on the toss of a coin.
1973 is the year of the famous Jan Tomaszewski performance - the keeper broke his finger in the first minute of the game. 1982 is their second World Cup semi-final in three tournaments - with Solidarity starting to gain in popularity throughout the country, there's banners in the crowd, so Polish TV cut to scenes of Polish fans from other games when required. Against the USSR, a large banner behind one goal causes problems - Polish TV has reception issues every time the ball nears the goal, but that's clearly absurd and soon abandoned. The banner is successfully removed by officials in the ground, only for a small number of Polish expats in the crowd to manage to get the 60,000 - mostly Spanish - crowd to start chanting for Solidarity instead; the picture of the Soviet team lined up with a large Solidarity banner in the background makes many papers the following day.
Escaping or leaving Communist Poland is complicated, and maybe could be explained a bit better. Kazimierz Deyna, with 41 goals and two World Cups to his name, "effectively announced his retirement from the international team by transferring to Manchester City" in 1978, but two years later, Grzegorz Lato is allowed move to Belgium because he's now 30. Fourth choice keeper Jacek Jarecki is caught by teammates half-way out a hotel window at the last training camp before the 1982 World Cup, and they help facilitate his escape, but after the World Cup Zbigniew Boniek (28) leaves for Juve and continues to play for Poland. Why the difference? Possibly because the government figured they were better off with the large portion of the transfer fee Juve pay, but the change in attitude isn't made clear.
There's a couple of other minor quibbles. The book is self-published - slightly strangely, given the idea of telling a country's history through football is a common theme for books now - and the prose could do with trimming down in places ("Four Danish goals in the first half were followed by four more in the second, and the Poles' lack of reply meant that the defeat would surpass that against Yugoslavia as their worst ever" for example), and there's more-than-required random hyphens at times. Probably most strangely, the book only really covers the first 100 years, so despite being published in 2019, it only really goes up to 1995. But the period since then is easily a separate chapter in itself - Poland co-hosting Euro 2012 is barely mentioned, the rise of money and TV in football turning Polish clubs into also-rans isn't really covered, Robert Lewandowski doesn't get a mention. It makes for a strange end to a decent read.
March 2, 2022
A solid, informative and enjoyable read combining three of my favourite things; history, football and Eastern Europe. Definitely up there with the likes of Inverting the Pyramid and Behind the Curtain as the best football history reads!
August 6, 2021
My team only gets two mentions, but it's a good insight into how soccer is tied in to nationhood and dissent.
November 12, 2024
A highly interesting read about the very turbulent history of Polish Football.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews