Young Poles Say ‘Nein’ To Germany.

I already signalled the problem of partially Polish players choosing to play for other national teams. We all suffered watching Klose, Podolski or Trochowski play for Germany. Finally, Polish FA officials seem to become aware of the problem as they organised a conference for young Polish talents in Cologne.

At last the Polish FA shows the ability to learn from past mistakes. As some of us remember a lot of Poles were forced to emigrate from their homeland in the eighties and nineties. Their most common destination was our Western neighbour, Germany. Some of them returned to Poland afterwards but a large number decided to settle abroad. You may ask what does it have to do with the Polish national team? It’s quite simple really, the children of Polish emigrants are now in their teenage years and a lot of them are playing in German clubs youth teams. The list of clubs include Schalke, Dortmund, Kaiserslautern or Arminia Bielefeld. A lot of those players were already offered to play in the German youth team. That’s why there was a need to create a professional scouting team that would observe those players and convince them to play for us. Marek Chorazyk, the main coordinator of the programme, has observed young Poles for a year and a half now. However, as far as I remember from an interview with him I read, the beginnings were very hard as the Polish FA didn’t support the innitative enough (they didn’t even refund the phone and gas bills).

Nowadays it seems that we’re on a good way to create a professional scouting department. Jerzy Engel (pictured above with Tomasz Waldoch and his son Kamil), a former national team coach, took part in a Cologne based conference that was to convince young players of a Polish origin to choose the Polish national team. It is reported that the forty most talented youngsters took part in the meeting. They listened to a very patriotic and emotional speech by Engel and were given Polish national team jerseys afterwards. The response of the players was very positive; a lot of them already play in our youth teams and plan to do so in the future, even though they encounter problems in their German clubs because of that. Some of the players went as far as to accuse Podolski of choosing the German national team only for the money (they also find him irritating and call him stupid; the Engel speech had to be very poweful).

One of the most interesting players that took part in the conference were Przybylko twins from Arminia Bielefeld. The fifteen year olds are described as hot prospects, both by Bielefeld coaches and the Polish U-15 coach Radoslaw Mroczkowski. Luckily they’ve already declared that they can’t imagine playing for other national team than Polish. It seems that this is a viewpoint of the most of the youngsters. Now it’s up to the scouting department to carefully watch their progress and even if only four or five players will make it to the senior team the whole programme will be a success. It’s just good that we’re finally sending a message to those youngsters that we remember about them and that they are welcome. Let’s hope that they will start a golden era of Polish football in the future.

If you want to learn more about Polish talents around the world check out the pilkarskietalenty site (it’s in English).