Derby Days, Poland: The Great Silesian Derby

The Athletic is attending some of the most ferocious derbies across Europe, charting the history of the continent’s most deep-rooted and volatile rivalries. The series began last season, covering 10 combustible fixtures from Athens to Anfield. We attended De Klassieker and the Derby della Capitale, the Eternal Derby and the Old Firm.

We resumed our journey with trips to Copenhagen, Salzburg, Lisbon and Belfast this season. We were in Ipswich and Zagreb in December, then Sunderland and the Black Country, and watched Sparta play Slavia in Prague last month.

Now to the coal fields of Upper Silesia and a fixture between two of Poland’s most historically successful clubs…

They have waited long enough.

It is far from the scenario the Ruch Chorzow ‘ultras’ had in mind but, like a gambler who knows he has left it too late to recover his losses, they are going to play their trump card anyway. Just for the hell of it.

And so with time running out, drifting to defeat at the hands of their fiercest rivals, drifting towards relegation, someone gives the signal and they unfurl a huge tifo of what appears to be… Bart Simpson… looking terrified as he is… plunged into a cauldron… by a sinister-looking, muscle-bound figure wearing a blue shirt with the motif PF (which stands for “Psycho Fans”).

Underneath it, another banner runs the length of the stadium. The message translates roughly as: “Let the cauldron bubble, let the fire burn — today, without mercy for our rivals.” The juxtaposition of The Simpsons and (it seems) Macbeth is quite something.

It is held there for a few minutes, a wonderfully compelling backdrop to a game that has lost its way. Then comes a pyrotechnic display, a huge number of red smoke flares lighting up the sky. All of this has been arranged in advance and the Ruch fans are not going to allow something as inconvenient as the scoreline to disrupt their best-laid plans.


Bart Simpson descends into his cauldron (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

Why Bart Simpson, though? Unlikely as it sounds, he has become a poster boy for Gornik Zabrze’s ultras. In their depictions, he is usually wielding a baseball bat. But to Ruch fans, he is a figure of ridicule, hence their image of him being plunged into a cauldron — the witches’ cauldron, “kociol czarownic”, being the nickname for the club’s Slaski stadium.

The imagery is cartoonish, but this is no laughing matter. Ruch vs Gornik is a bitter, bloody rivalry in the Polish industrial heartland of Upper Silesia: two cities just nine miles apart in the south of the country, politically and economically connected since 2017 under the banner of the Metropolis GZM district but viciously divided when it comes to football.

On the hour or so’s drive west from Krakow, with its medieval market square, world-renowned university and old-world charm, the landscape changes markedly as you approach Silesia.

Greenery gives way to shades of grey and an industrial landscape with coal mines, steelworks, power stations, mills, slag heaps and factories. It is like travelling back in time to the days when coal was king; in the late 1980s, Poland produced more than 250million metric tons of coal a year, the majority of it from the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, an area encompassing cities such as Katowice, Sosnowiec, Gliwice, Tychy and Wodzislaw Slaski, as well as Zabrze and Chorzow.

“It’s not like (Poland’s capital) Warsaw, where you have one big city,” says former Gornik executive Rafal Kedzior, who is now a sports presenter for Viaplay TV. “In Upper Silesia, the whole region is focused on industry, so these small communities grew up around the coal mines and the steelworks and so on. The settlers started to build villages, which became towns, which became cities.

“Each community wants its own city. And you know how it is — each city wants to be the leader.”


Ruch scarves on sale outside the stadium (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

A casual observer might be excused for regarding Sosnowiec, Gliwice, Tychy, Zabrze and Chorzow as mere satellites of Katowice, Upper Silesia’s biggest city; and in terms of economy and infrastructure projects, there has been much greater integration since the establishment of Metropolis GZM. But cooperation only goes so far.

“Poland is a fascinating country and Silesia is a fascinating region with its own identity,” says Alex Webber, author of the forthcoming book The Heart Of Poland: An Odyssey Through A Country’s Football Culture. “It’s got the heavy industry that makes it natural to be a football hotbed, like the Ruhr in Germany or the north-west of England. It has also got this very distinct flavour in terms of the local rivalries.”

When four teams in the Zabrze area merged in 1948, they called the new club ‘Gornik’, which is the Polish word for miner. ‘Ruch’, founded in 1920, means ‘movement’, which in this case is widely believed to refer to the movement for Silesian liberation from the Weimar Republic at that time. Ruch label themselves “the most Silesian of Silesian clubs”, no doubt fully aware that other clubs would make the same claim.

But as powerful as the Silesian identity might be — with its own language and a separatist movement, campaigning for the region to reclaim the status it held between the World Wars as an autonomous region of the Second Polish Republic — the sense of local identity is even stronger.

“You’ll see a lot of football graffiti and murals,” Webber says. “These delineate borders and strongholds. You get raiding parties going out at night to deface another team’s murals. Doing this kind of thing is where the young fans earn their stripes, to earn the respect of the older fans. But if you get caught out doing that, your life is in danger.

“It sounds absurd, but that really is what happens.”


Ruch were founded in 1920, their name means “movement” (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

For many years, Ruch and Gornik were by far Poland’s most successful clubs, drawing on their resources of local talent and fuelled by fervent support. By the end of the 1980s, they boasted 14 league titles apiece. The next most successful club was Wisla Krakow with five. Legia Warsaw had won just four — and none since 1970.

The past four decades have seen a very different story. Since 1989, the year that marks a watershed in Polish history, neither club has won another title; Legia have celebrated 11.

There is a familiar story across European football over this period of big-city clubs asserting a new-found superiority while provincial ones, mostly from industrial towns, have found it harder to adjust to the socioeconomic realities of the 21st century.


Ruch coach Janusz Niedzwiedz (Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

But in Poland, it is not quite as straightforward as that. There is a neat symmetry in the fact that the Ruch-Gornik axis fell into decline in the same year that Poland ditched communism for the free market and also began to move (gradually) away from coal, but it doesn’t entirely work as an explanation.

For one thing, while coal production has declined dramatically across Europe over recent decades — to almost nothing in the case of the UK — Upper Silesia is still fiercely and proudly committed to heavy industry. In 2022, Poland produced 53million tonnes of hard coal (97 per cent of the European Union’s total), and it came almost entirely from Upper Silesia. If anything, the type of sharp economic decline suffered by many former mining and manufacturing communities across Europe has been resisted for as long as possible.

Beyond that, it has not just been a case of Legia taking control and leaving provincial sides in the shade. Ten clubs have been champions of Poland more recently than Ruch or Gornik, a list that includes their Silesian neighbours Zaglebie Lubin, Slask Wroclaw, Piast Gliwice and (last season) Rakow Czestochowa. Jagiellonia Bialystok, this season’s unlikely pacesetters, from near the north-eastern border with Belarus, are on course to become the 11th.

This season, Ruch returned to the top-flight Ekstraklasa after a six-year absence, but the campaign has been one of grim struggle for Polish football’s sleeping giants. Their fear, as they prepared for the clubs’ first league meeting in Chorzow since September 2015, was that it might be the last for some time.

 


Ruch fans arrive for their first meeting with Gornik in Chorzow for nine years (Andrew Piggott/The Athletic)

In the days before ‘Wielkie Derby Slaska’ (the Great Silesian Derby), a row erupted between the clubs. Gornik and their fans were furious at being allocated just 2,000 tickets, pointing out that Legia were given 4,000 for their visit last month.

Gornik took the opportunity to portray themselves and their supporters as “uninvited guests” in enemy territory. Their former Bayern Munich and Arsenal forward Lukas Podolski fronted that campaign, declaring that Ruch “probably see how our fans sing and how much energy they give and that’s what their fans were afraid of”.

Podolski was born in Gliwice, a 10-minute drive from Zabrze, and raised as a Gornik fan, even though his family left for Germany in his infancy. It was one of his dreams to come back to his boyhood club to finish his career. Even at 38, having achieved so much in his career, lifting the 2014 World Cup with Germany, winning trophies at club level in four different countries, the thought of a derby against Ruch excites him.

“It arouses emotion and attracts fans,” he says ahead of the game. “It’s what football is all about.”


The much-decorated Podolski has relished playing for Gornik in this derby (Mikolaj Barbanell/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Author Webber agrees, saying this is one of the great derbies in European football, but he suggests it is not quite the pure, unfiltered derby experience we would be getting if this match was being held at the more compact 9,000-capacity Ruchu stadium. He says it will still be loud and fiercely passionate at the five-times-bigger Slaski — Ruch’s temporary stadium while their historic home waits, and waits, for redevelopment and modernisation — but less “visceral”.

It certainly doesn’t feel visceral walking through Park Slaski, past the zoo and the planetarium towards the ground. Contrary to Polish football’s reputation for hooliganism, it feels sedate. A little bit Premier League, if anything. There are a lot of families with young children.

There are also, intriguingly, fans wearing the colours of Widzew Lodz and Wisla Krakow. They are here to support Ruch — and, just as pointedly, to oppose Gornik. It is one of those fan coalitions that is particular to Polish football.

“Friendship,” says Bartlomiej, a Ruch supporter.

“Ruch and Wisla? Friendship. Ruch and Widzew? Friendship.”

Ruch and Gornik?

He laughs, grasping for the right word. Rivals? Enemies? “Yes, enemies,” he says, his eyes lighting up.

But why? “We hate them,” he says.

Are they really so different to you? He glares and walks off, chanting something that doesn’t seem to be about solidarity with their Upper Silesian neighbours.


Stadion Slaski, Ruch’s temporary home (Andrew Piggott/The Athletic)

At this point, there are no Gornik supporters to be seen. They are already inside. The sirens that were heard at least an hour earlier were those of a police escort for the buses carrying the fans from Zabrze to the stadium.

It is the phenomenon of the “bubble trip”, as used for high-risk matches in England and Wales where, to eliminate the risk of skirmishes between rival fans, the only way to get into — or indeed anywhere near — the away section is by travelling en masse with the police as part of a “bubble”.

Hooliganism has been a serious issue in Polish football. Former Gornik executive Kedzior cites a terrifying experience when attending an indoor tournament in Katowice in 1998, when more than 100 spectators were injured in clashes between fans of multiple teams.

Numerous Ruch-Gornik matches have been marred by crowd trouble — most recently in the Polish Cup last season — but both Webber and Kedzior suggest the worst incidents occur away from the stadiums.  In 2017, a prominent Gornik supporter was beaten to death by a group of men believed to be Ruch ultras.

Sometimes it comes down to those undercover ‘raids’ on enemy territory, an attempt to deface murals or steal flags.

“The flags are essentially seen as sacred in Polish fan circles,” Webber says. “If your flags are stolen by a rival team’s ultras, it is seen as a humiliation.”

Then there is the tradition of ‘ustawka’. The literal translation is “setup”, as in a pre-arranged fight between rival fans — often in the surrounding woodland or on a piece of waste ground. “They might meet in the forest, 30 vs 30,” Webber says. “They even have rules. Medical staff on stand-by from each group, no phones, no knives… that sort of thing.”


The police presence outside the stadium (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

The Polish hooligan movement has begun to be squeezed in recent years, particularly in Chorzow. At a court case last year, 15 of Ruch’s “psycho fans” were sentenced to prison — in one case, for 15 years — after being found guilty of a variety of wide variety of offences, some relating to hooliganism and others to organised crime.

In that unnerving context, the atmosphere on the walk up to Stadion Slaski feels reassuringly calm.

But it changes on arrival at the stadium perimeter, where the police presence is enormous. It almost feels overbearing: a long line of officers on horseback here, another long line with dogs there. Most of the officers are wielding batons or carrying what look like gas canisters. Helicopters are circling overhead and there are police vans, with blue lights flashing, as far as the eye can see.

 


Gornik manager Jan Urban (Mikolaj Barbanell/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As a counterpoint to the raw machismo of the rivalry, the lyrics of the clubs’ anthems, belted out with gusto before kick-off, are amusingly twee.

Gornik:

“A big club is entering the arena again.
The team from our fondest dreams.
Let everyone do their best today.
Football is a sacred game.”

Ruch:

“Our beloved team, we all love you, boy and girl.
Play well, play like in the old days,
when everyone on the pitch shouted, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’.”

Those carefree days can hardly feel more distant for Ruch’s supporters once play begins. They make most of the running in the first half and are a little unfortunate to see a goal disallowed after a VAR review, but there is a drudgery to their football. It is the antithesis of, “Hey, hey, hey!”.

But the home fans provide the spectacle — and the noise — with a series of choreographed displays.

First, as the teams emerge from the tunnel, is a mosaic acclaiming “Super Ruch”, with 14 gold stars on display to mark their number of league titles. Then, just as the game is about to start, a synchronised release of blue and white flares. On 15 minutes, another pyrotechnic display with blue and white fireworks the length of one stand. The air becomes so thick with smoke that the referees have to halt play for several minutes.


The pyrotechnics force the referee to stop play while the smoke clears (Oliver Kay/The Athletic)

Gornik, with Podolski in the front line and former Liverpool youngster Dani Pacheco in midfield, do not seem to be at the races, but they take the lead in first-half stoppage time through Adrian Kapralik. The away fans, corralled in the upper tier behind the goal he scores into, go wild and start letting off fireworks of their own.

As a football match, it resembles two bald men fighting over a comb. Once they fall behind, a comeback never seems likely for Ruch, who look doomed to relegation. Not that you would detect it from the atmosphere.

There is another tifo display early in the second half and then, as the game enters its closing stages, the piece de resistance: Bart Simpson and the witches’ cauldron, at which point their fans produce so much smoke that you briefly wonder whether it is all a ploy to have the game abandoned.

The smoke lifts just in time for us to see Soichiro Kozuki, a Japanese winger on loan from German club Schalke, score Gornik’s second on the counter-attack.

The mood on the terraces remains defiant and Ruch find a consolation — of a very limited sort — when substitute Soma Novothny pulls a goal back in the closing stages, four minutes after coming on. But by now the home fans are out of fireworks and their team are about to run out of time. No pyro, no parity.


No pyro, no parity (Andrew Pigott/The Athletic)

At the final whistle, there is something striking about the atmosphere.

There is no sense of anger towards a home side who have won just two of their 25 league matches all season. For all the hatred that hangs in the air throughout, there is a sense of unconditional — and perhaps unrequited — love for their team, or at least for the football club and what, even after three decades of unexpected misery, Ruch are perceived to stand for.

By now, all the noise is coming from the away end, where Gornik’s players are celebrating wildly in front of their supporters. Podolski has somehow got his hands on a megaphone and, grinning ear to ear, is making himself heard above the din.

Later, Podolski posts a picture on social media from the Gornik dressing room, where he is sitting in the bath, still grinning, still wielding his megaphone. He references “unwanted hospitality” and says he and his team-mates are happy to “take three points to Zabrze”.

In another post, he references having “cooked something in this cauldron”. He always did enjoy spicing things up.

On Monday afternoon, nearly 48 hours later, Ruch called a news conference.

“On Saturday, we witnessed a football celebration, the Great Silesian Derby,” said club president Seweryn Siemianowski. “Everyone saw perfectly what the celebration looked like on the pitch and in the stands.”

But then his tone changed.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “after the match we learned that the losses in the (away fans’) sector are very, very large.”

At this point, Adam Strzyzewski, the stadium director took over. He described “enormous devastation” to the stadium’s IT infrastructure and to the toilets in the away end. “The double metal doors securing the server room were literally broken in half,” he said.

“It was not fans,” Siemianowski said. “Fans are a multitude of wonderful people all over the world. It was Gornik Zabrze hooligans who destroyed and devastated the visiting sector.”

At this, he declared that all away supporters would be banned from the stadium until further notice.

There was an empty seat at the top table because, according to Siemianoswki, Gornik had rejected an invitation for a board member to attend. But they did have their say.

In a statement, the club said they disputed the allegations, suggested that “the damage occurred when Ruch Chorzow fans tried to force the gate and enter the Gornik sector” and that Gornik “should not be held responsible for the lack of proper supervision of the organiser of a mass event”.

As well as expressing the hope that all those responsible for vandalism be identified and held accountable, Gornik concluded by saying, “We hope that this will allow public attention to be focused on the most important element of the Great Silesian Derby, ie, the events on the field; ie, the second victory in a row for the tricolour team.” (They also beat Ruch 1-0 in September’s reverse fixture.)

There followed a very public spat between the two clubs’ media officers on social media. Gornik’s Mateusz Antczak claimed no one had invited the club’s security manager to a post-match inspection (“as it is done in all stadiums”). Ruch’s Tomasz Ferens accused his counterpart of a “false statement”, saying that Gornik’s security had attended the post-match inspection.

“You can win the derby,” Ferens said. “But you can’t buy class.”

This is exactly the kind of thing Webber was talking about. “Pure hatred,” he says. “It’s an ongoing war. It will never stop.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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