Poland’s integration into EU project spurs football success

Five years ago, Poland were 76th in Fifa’s rankings, and the default fan chant was, “Poles, nothing has happened”, to show they still loved their lowly team. On Tuesday Poland kick off their World Cup against Senegal ranked (albeit a touch flatteringly) the eighth best team on earth.

Trying to explain Poland’s ascent, many will reach for the “great man” theory of history. This is a decent team with a brilliant striker, Robert Lewandowski, Poland’s footballer of the year seven times running, who has 55 goals in 95 internationals.

But even a great player emerges — and becomes greater — in a context. Polish football got better largely because Poland since the 1990s has become a European social democracy plugged into the continent’s knowledge exchange. For all the Warsaw government’s Euroscepticism, Polish football benefits from bordering western Europe, the world’s dominant footballing region.

The Polish team’s golden age was 1972 through 1982, when the team won two Olympic medals and finished third at two World Cups. No communist country’s national team ever did better as the state paid for elite training from childhood on.

Then communism collapsed, and nobody funded football any more: unlike many eastern European countries, Poland doesn’t have oligarchs. Corruption and hooliganism over-ran the domestic game. Poland missed all major tournaments from 1988 through 2000.

But meanwhile the country was transforming. Since 1989 Poland’s economy has expanded 2.5 times, faster than any other European country, notes Marcin Piatkowski, author of Europe’s Growth Champion. In 2004 Poland joined the EU. Eight years later Zbigniew Boniek, a star of the communist era, took over as head of the country’s football association and dragged it into modernity, says Seweryn Dmowski of Warsaw university.

The domestic league remained weak, but players increasingly emigrated west, sometimes as teenagers. In 2006, Poland’s World Cup squad included only five players from the big five western European leagues. This year, there are 14.

Proximity to Germany in particular — once Poland’s downfall — now gives Polish players access to cutting-edge football know-how. Lewandowski is a case-study. As an underweight teenager in Poland, he received dubious advice to fatten up on bacon, yet flunked out of Legia Warsaw aged 18. He picked himself up, and in 2010 joined Germany’s Borussia Dortmund. “When I left Poland,” he has recalled, “I had all sorts of complexes — like probably every Polish man — that I’m from Poland and so probably not as good as others.”

But at Dortmund he absorbed professionalism. He practised one-on-one battles in training against the club’s coach, Jürgen Klopp, a former defender, for €50 bets. He learnt to play with his back to goal. Guided by his wife Anna, a karate champion and nutrition expert, he cleaned up his diet. Admiring teammates nicknamed him “The Body”.

Now, at Bayern Munich, he starts his meals with dessert and finishing with the starter because that supposedly accelerates fat-burning. Pep Guardiola, who coached him at Bayern, called him “the most professional player I’ve ever seen.” Other Polish internationals have also learned to meet top-class European fitness standards.

With 38m inhabitants, Poland has more football potential than other central European countries. Its model must be the rise of Spain, Portugal and (briefly) Greece after they emerged from fascist-imposed isolation in the 1970s. The three have won a combined total of four Euros and one World Cup since 2004.

Poland’s immediate aim is more modest: to reach the World Cup’s knockout stage for the first time since 1986. But it has longer term ambitions. In 2007 its government launched a sports-field building project called “Orlik”, or “young eagle”, after Poland’s national symbol. Here was European social democracy at work: a state-led distribution of resources to citizens. About 2,600 fields were built, even in remote villages. The next Lewandowski could be an Orlik alumnus.