The state of the Ekstraklasa as the 2025/26 season kicks off

Image via Mikolaj Barbanell/Shutterstock

We usually treat the return of the Ekstraklasa as something as a bit of a joke: widely shared are clips of players making errors or otherwise sloppy pieces of play.

However, this doesn’t really ring true this year. The league is perhaps, at least in terms of attracting interest it normally wouldn’t, the strongest it has been for some time. There are new TV rights deals in North America, Spain and Argentina. The Ekstraklasa is a bonafide top 15 league according to the UEFA coefficient, and yet we’re still all a little shocked with some of the more high-profile transfers and transfer rumours because we’re largely not used to it.

Lech Poznań have secured the return of Robert Gumny, who had carved out a semi-respectable Bundesliga career up to this point, and Mateusz Skrzypczak who has easily been one of the league’s best defenders in recent seasons. Reportedly they are also very close to signing Celtic winger Luis Palma on a loan deal, a technically gifted player with Champions League experience.

Legia Warszawa have broken the league’s transfer record to sign Danish striker Mileta Rajovic, a fully-fledged quality international in Petar Stojanovic and are supposedly near to finalising a deal to bring former Polish international Arkadiusz Reca back to the Ekstraklasa.

If we look at the promoted teams, it’s nice that we will have another big derby for the league when Arka Gdynia play Lechia Gdańsk, and speaking purely personally here I’m happy to see Wisła Płock back in the top flight too, as they were the first Polish team I saw play a domestic fixture on TV several years ago now.

There used to be a prevailing train of thought that for Polish football to be healthy and in a good place, you needed to have the three biggest clubs (namely Lech, Legia and Wisła Kraków) as strong as possible. Clearly the last few seasons have proved this is not the case.

Okay, Lech are still very strong and Legia fluctuate between decent and not very good, but Wisła Kraków have been languishing in the 1. Liga for three years at this point. In that time Raków Częstochowa, Jagiellonia Białystok and dare I say even Pogoń Szczecin have seen their fortunes rise in tandem with a better quality league which now regularly has clubs in the latter stages of European competition, attracting more investment, better players and in turn more attention.

Whether this upward trend continues almost doesn’t seem a question at this point, because we can recall a time not even five years ago when the Ekstraklasa was well outside the top 20 leagues of Europe, and in just under three years has gained over ten places on that ranking.

I’m pleased that the Ekstraklasa continues to get the attention it now more than warrants, and I’m looking forward to tuning in later as Jagiellonia and Bruk-Bet Termalica get the season underway. 

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