Ryan Hubbard is a freelance Polish Football writer who first came to prominence as an English language authority of the beautiful game in Poland around the staging of the European Championships which was held jointly by Poland and the Ukraine in 2012. His analysis and feature articles were published on sites such as Goal.com, Kitbag.com, Unibet and Hubbard served as ‘Poland Expert for Euro 2012 for the Mirror Football website. Later that year Hubbard was a TV Pundit for Sports Tonight Live offering insight and opinion of the Polish game. On the same channel he contributed to the Ekstraklasa Ekstra Time weekly highlights package. August 2012 saw him become the co-founder and co-editor of the #Ekstraklasa Magazine – a downloadable PDF and over the course of it’s year in existence published five issues. His work has been published by the Daily Record and Sunday Mail in Scotland as well as FourFourTwo and When Saturday Comes. The last ten years have seen him appear on BT Sport, BBC Radio 5Live and Talksport. After so many years immersed in Polish football Hubbard published his book From Partition to Solidarity independently in July 2019. 

As in the title of his study, Hubbard covers the first one hundred years of Polish football but his monograph is not only the preserve of soccer there but covers the political and social history of the region over the course of the 20th century. The book is made up of six acts which are as follows: 1. A Partitioned Poland, 2. A Reunified Poland, 3. An Occupied Poland, 4. An Oppressed Poland, 5. A Rebellious Poland and concludes with a chapter on ‘A Free Poland’. The history of the game is covered from it’s early years during Austrian-partitioned Poland and concludes after the collapse of the Communist regime in the country. Though with such an expanse of history covered in such a tomb with a light touch, Hubbard finds time to recount the stories and anecdotes of notable players such as Ernest Wilimowski, Zbigniew Boniek and Kazimierz Deyna. Though the struggles of Poland as a nation and a state have been well documented the story of football there is not as well-known. The central thesis of Hubbard is to highlight the inextricable link between history and football to promote Poland to a wider audience than it currently enjoys. His interest in Poland is from personal curiosity and intrigue.

As the historian Norman Davies remarked ‘Nothing stands still’ in Poland and we see that from the first recorded game in the history of Polish football which took place in a city that is no longer confined by its borders. The historic event occurred on the 14th July 1894 between teams from Kraków and Lwów in the latter’s Sokól ground which is now part of the Ukraine (pp. 16-23). We see how Polish clubs fair in Austrian Galicia, Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire; the impact of insurrection and the destruction of war on the game in God’s playground; the highpoint of Polish club football and the golden era of the national team from the late ‘60s to ‘80s provide a fascinating insight into probably the most capitalistic of sphere’s, professional football, and it’s relationship with the Communist regime. Hubbard details the impact of the Great War and the development of regional and national football tournaments. After providing us with this background the book really comes to life when detailing the story of Ernest Wilimowski the first ‘poster boy’ of Polish football (pp. 90-102). During the First World War he was born to German parents while his hometown was part of the German Empire, which when the borders were redrawn became known as Katowice. Such are the complications over place, language and identity at this time that Wilimowski refers to himself as ‘Górnoślązak’ translating as ‘Upper Silesian’. Ezi as he was known, set the record for most goals scored in a FIFA World Cup match. Against Brazil in 1938 Wilimowski scored 4 goals and it was a record which stood till 1994 when it was surpassed by Russian striker Oleg Salenko. Though the Ruch Chorzów striker remains the only player to finish on the losing side after scoring four goals in a World Cup game. It is using the case study of Ezi that we see Hubbard’s knowledge and depth of understanding of history and culture at it’s excellent best. This ability to use biography to explain and explore wider historical and cultural issues is deftly done throughout this study. After the division of Poland, Wilimowski re-takes German citizenship and plays for their national team 8 times between 1941-42. After the war Ezi is regarded as a traitor by the Polish government and was not permitted to visit Silesia by the Communist regime (pp. 121-23).

The story of Wilimowski in it’s presentation is only surpassed by Chapter 15 entitled ‘A Decade of Two Clubs’ which is a very comprehensive analysis of the dominance of Legia Warsaw and Górnik Zabrze, the latter led by the talismanic figure of Włodzimierz Lubański making inroads in European competition (pp. 154-67). From here on it is very much a ‘who’s who’ of Polish domestic and national football that is an enjoyable and nostalgic look back on what quite easily can be deemed the golden age of soccer in the country. This pioneering study of Polish football in the English language has been painstakingly, thoroughly and even lovingly presented by Ryan Hubbard. Not only do we have references to the pivotal figures in Polish football history we see it mixed with quotes from Jean Jacques Rousseau, Otto von Bismarck and the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska and to paraphrase her words, maps lie but Hubbard gives us the reader access to the ‘vicious truth’ of the Polish game.