Women’s Football in Poland: What Were Its Beginnings?

kobiety_graja_w_pilke_nozna_5.jpg, default, ‘Zagłębie’ illustrated weekly, 1974, photo: Śląska Biblioteka Cyfrowa

The first official female Polish football champions came from… a newspaper. An advertisement was published in the weekly ‘Wiadomości Zagłębia’ asking ‘Would you care to play football?’ Although for many years it was believed that football was strictly a men’s sport, women did not let themselves be discouraged. Here is what the beginnings of Polish women’s football looked like.

It was in 1921 that the first women’s football division was established at the Towarzystwo Sportowe Unia (Unia Sports Society) in Poznań, and the press announced their pioneering match against rivals from Gdańsk. A year later, some additional keen players appeared in another association from the capital of Greater Poland – Klub Sportowy Zorza (Zorza Sports Club). At the same time, men were already starting their adventure with national football because it was in 1921 that the Polish team played their first official international match, losing to Hungary 0:1 at the stadium in Budapest. Polish women would have to wait sixty years for their international debut – they lost to the Italians in an away match on 27 June 1981, losing by three goals. The beginnings of women’s football in Poland meant an arduous fight against patriarchal beliefs. And not only in Poland – suffice it to mention that the first women’s football world cup was held only in 1991, i.e. at a time when men’s football had already enjoyed a history of fourteen world cups.

I went to have a laugh

‘Przegląd Sportowy’, 1921, photo: Jagiellońska Biblioteka Cyfrowa

In the pre-war Polish press, women’s football was presented mainly as a curiosity: it was reported in the tone of exotic news that there were women’s teams in England, France or Belgium. The news about English soccer players in Dziennik Łódzki (Łódź Daily) ended by quoting the opinion of their doctors, who admitted that yes, ‘football can be practiced by women, provided that such teams play only with other women’s teams’. It may sound like common sense, but it was the relatively low popularity of football among women and the simple lack of opponents that was the biggest problem in the development of women’s football in the interwar period. For this reason, the pioneering women’s division of Poznań’s Unia did not manage to survive longer than a year. Less than a decade later, in an issue of the weekly Stadion (Stadium), Jan Hauptman, a journalist-correspondent and sports activist associated with the Wisła Kraków football club, reported his stay at a women’s match in Antwerp:

Prepared for a farce, I went for some laughs but was met with complete disappointment. The sight of these 22 young women, perfectly built and bursting with health, was a very pleasant thing […]. I read a lot about these matches, and everywhere I found opinions about their harmfulness to the female body and that the sight of a woman playing football had nothing to do with beauty. […] I watched each of the athletes closely, but I didn’t notice any fainting […]. The pace was always lively, the moments changed as in a kaleidoscope, there was screaming and laughter on the pitch; in a word, there was life.

From today’s perspective, Hauptman’s openness in admitting his own prejudices, even if they were later confronted with a completely different reality, may be somewhat surprising. At that time, similar beliefs were expressed by the daily Robotnik (Worker): in a note about matches between the English and French women, it added condescendingly that ‘this sport, fortunately, is not practiced by our ladies because it requires truly masculine strength and endurance’. To call the beginnings of women’s football a ‘hard battle’ is not an exaggeration. After the war as well, in 1947, in Słowo Polskie (Polish Word), Jan Podoski wrote about a women’s match as ‘quite a sensation’. He further added that ‘the players had beautiful long legs and impeccably sewn costumes. Better not to mention the game itself however.’

Called a circus

The development of women’s football in Poland gained momentum in the post-war period, and an important turning point was the Gomułka thaw bringing social liberalization. The first women’s football team of the People’s Republic of Poland was Kolejarz from Katowice. Gazeta Zielonogórska (Zielona Góra Gazette) wrote, ‘The football players are worried about a lack of opponents’; fortunately, the Upper Silesian players were soon followed by the Spółdzielczy Klub Sportowy Czarni Szczecin (Czarni Szczecin Cooperative Sports Club), and it was between them – on 25 August 1957 – that the first post-war match of women’s football teams was played. The match ended with a four-goal loss for the Szczecin team. The end of the 1950s was a time when the popularity of women’s football flourished: new division were created, and women’s teams had more and more rivals. Women played in, among others, Ślęza Wrocław – the oldest football club in post-war Lower Silesia – Polonia Warsaw, Kolejarz Opole and Widzew Łódź. The match between the last of the mentioned divisions with the Ślęza players, which took place in 1957, was even called a ‘circus’ in Gazeta Robotnicza (Workers’ Gazette) (‘we still believe that they [women’s matches, ed.] have nothing to do with sports’, wrote the editor, Miech). In 1975, an unofficial women’s-league competition began, and the first final – a clash between Checza Gdynia, founded four years earlier, and Zakłady Azotowe Puławy (Puławy Nitrogen Works) played at Dziesięciolecia Stadium – ended with a four-goal victory for the Gdynia players. However, there was still no structured league in which players could officially compete for the title of Champions of Poland.

Champions of Poland from an ad

‘Sportowiec’, 1946, photo: Jagiellońska Biblioteka Cyfrowa

‘Would you care to play football?’ was the headline of a unique advertisement in the weekly Wiadomości Zagłębia (Zagłębie News). It was August 1974, just over a month had passed since the final of the men’s World Championships in Germany, from which the Poles returned with a bronze medal. The Zagłębie paper decided… to look for women athletes willing to play. The announcement quoted an anonymous letter allegedly sent to the editorial office in which a teenage reader asks rhetorically, ‘Isn’t all this men’s sport business an exaggeration?’ and indicates that football, like other activities, does not have to be the domain only of men. ‘So maybe it’s just men with their innate egoism who reserved this, one of the most beautiful and popular sports, for themselves’, wrote the teenager, at the same time encouraging Wiadomości Zagłębia to provide the future team with editorial patronage. It was already in the next issue that the weekly published the names of fourteen women willing to play who responded to the appeal (they were mainly residents of Sosnowiec), and two weeks after publishing the announcement, Wiadomości Zagłębia boasted of as many as seventy-five applications for the team to be named Zagłębianka.

Ultimately, almost a hundred soccer players applied, and the editors admitted that the response was a ‘huge surprise’. Among those who volunteered was Zofia Kilim, who later became the first captain of the Polish national team, nicknamed ‘Pele in a skirt’. The Czarni Sports Club took over the organizational care of the women’s team – and this is how the Czarni Sosnowiec women’s team was created, which would become the record holder for titles of Champions of Poland. By the 2023–24 season, it had won as many as thirteen, which is a considerable achievement considering that the official women’s league started in Poland in the 1979–80 season (the Sosnowiec team triumphed in the inaugural composition of the league). On the occasion of the Czarni team’s third championship, Andrzej Wasik wrote in Wiadomości Zagłębia: ‘It’s a pity that the women’s football games do not yet have a proper ranking. It is the sole fault of the Polish Football Association, whose activists do not treat women’s football seriously, to put it mildly’. But undoubtedly the institutionalization of women’s football had begun to work towards this ranking. In 1980, at the popular Święto Trybuny Ludu (Trybuna Ludu Festival), a women’s football match – between the Czech team from Olomouc and Polam from Warsaw – added splendor to the celebrations along with other sports events, such as a car rally, a marathon run, motorcycle acrobatics and a football match of so-called ‘oldboys’.

During the first decade of the existence of the official league, the main rivals of the Zagłębie players were the players of the Wrocław team of the Robotniczy Klub Sportowy Pafawag (Państwowa Fabryka Wagonów [State Railcar Factory], Pafawag Workers’ Sports Club), founded at the time of the establishment of the official competition and disbanded in the 1990s. For ten years, the women athletes of Pafawag managed to triumph in the league twice and stood on the second step of the podium seven times.

Laxity of joints

‘Gazeta Zielonogórska’, 1957, photo: Zielonogórska Biblioteka Cyfrowa

The history of women’s football in Poland reflects all the problems related to Polish women’s overall struggle to achieve political and social subjectivity. In order to depreciate women’s football, Polish journalism used pseudoscientific arguments that supposedly proved that the female body is unsuited for practicing this sport for biological reasons. Reference was also made to the psyche, pointing, of course, to the established dichotomy between the ruthless, brutal and durable man and the fragile, subtle and weak woman. Gazeta Robotnicza even quoted a doctor who pointed to the innate ‘laxity of joints’ in women and argued that... ‘taking a ball on the chest can even cause cancer’. As you can see, in the context of football as well, a discussion was developing around the tension between nature and nurture, the biological and the cultural. Sociologist Honorata Jakubowska writes interestingly about the identification of what is masculine with what is strictly sporty in the book Gra ciałem. Praktyki i dyskursy różnicowania płci w sporcie (Body Play: Practices and Discourses of Gender Differentiation in Sport):

[...] women are predestined, first, for such sports as gymnastics or figure skating and, second, diving or long-distance swimming. However, since these are niche disciplines, there is an impression that men dominate (physically) sports as a whole. […] Masculine values are therefore considered sports values, and the image of an athlete is the image of a man.

At the same time, Jakubowska suggests that in the context of football as well, we could appreciate not only the qualities in which men achieve high results (speed, strength resulting from muscle mass) but also, for example, the finesse of passing the ball.

Ban women from playing

It was in 1957 – when many women’s divisions were established and their matches ceased to be exotic rarities – that such resistance to women’s football from journalists and activists was awakened. It was then that the Wojewódzki Komitet Kultury Fizycznej (Voivodeship Committee for Physical Culture) in Katowice even submitted a letter asking for a ban on women playing football! Why such disagreement in the context of this discipline? It undoubtedly had to be about sharing visibility in the context of the most popular sport in Poland. Back in 1987, in the weekly Odgłosy (Reverberations), in a report on women’s football in Łódź, Bogdan Madej wrote regarding the future creation of a women’s Champions League:

[…] I’m afraid that masculine pride will create numerous and various obstacles here. Well, for what an embarrassment it would be for men if it turned out that young women were better and ranked higher, for example, in cup competitions?

But at that time women’s football had just been incorporated into the official structures of the Polski Związek Piłki Nożnej (Polish Football Association), which happened pursuant to a resolution of October 1985, and it seemed that no protests, bans or expressions of reluctance could hinder its development. In the same year, the first final of the Puchar Polski Kobiet (Polish Women’s Cup) was held (a tournament held simultaneously and independently of the league matches), the winners of which were, of course, the footballers from Sosnowiec. Then the national cup would go to them twelve more times. In 1989, at the Górnik Knurów stadium, the Polish women’s team played its first competitive match – a qualifying match for the European Championships, lost to the French 1:3.

Written in Polish by Marcelina Obarska, 13 June 2024

Translated by Michał Abel Pelczar

Language English

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