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Two matchdays into the new Ekstraklasa season, the map looks strange.
Nothing in the north. Only two of the 18 clubs are in the North, Pogoń Szczecin on the far western edge and Jagiellonia Białystok on the far eastern one. Between them, nothing. Gdańsk is Poland's second-biggest city (~920k) and it has no top-flight club at all, because Lechia Gdańsk and Arka Gdynia went down together last season. The whole Tricity, roughly 1.5m people, is unrepresented. Every other city in Poland's top 12 by population has a club.
Meanwhile, Kraków has three. Wisła Kraków came back up after four years, Cracovia are already there, and Wieczysta Kraków were promoted for the first time in their history. Wisła and Wieczysta will actually share a ground. Wieczysta's own stadium doesn't meet top-flight licensing, so they're playing at Wisła's Stadion Miejski.
Add Katowice, Zabrze, Gliwice and Częstochowa and you get eight of the eighteen clubs packed into the southern belt, most within an hour's drive of each other.
Is this just how the promotion cycle fell this year, or is Polish football's centre of gravity permanently shifting south?
Source: https://www.stadiumsofeurope.com/
Data: club/stadium locations, capacities and 2026/27 league composition compiled from Wikipedia and Transfermarkt. Coordinates cross-checked against Wikidata (P625).
Basemap: satellite imagery © Esri - World Imagery (Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics). Country boundaries from Natural Earth (public domain).
Tool: rendered server-side in Python with Pillow, a custom map-export renderer I wrote (projection, label placement and leader lines are all custom; labels are auto-placed into left/right columns so they never overlap the markers).
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Who's the most hated and what is the best rivalry?
Most hated Legia for sure, the best rivalry this season Cracovia vs Wisla Kraków
Center of gravity of Polish football has pretty much always been in the south. Just look at the Upper Silesian-Dąbrowa basin metropolis (Katowice area): Ruch Chorzów - 14 titles Górnik Zabrze - 14 titles Polonia Bytom - 2 titles Szombierki Bytom, Piast Gliwice - 1 title Zagłębie Sosnowiec - 4 FA Cups (4x runners-up in the league) GKS Katowice - 3 FA Cups (4x runners-up in the league) We are speaking of an area you can travel through by tram or bus. 32 league titles, spread among 5 clubs, in the area you can pass through by car in 30 minutes. Then there's Kraków: Wisła Kraków - 14 titles Cracovia - 5 titles Even despite rather bad last three decades for Silesian clubs, the south remains the place with the biggest clubs, with huge fanbases. Anything north of Silesia and Lesser Poland, or simply Kraków, that's worth mentioning is Legia Warsaw and Lech Poznań.