Zagłębie Sosnowiec is shuffling its coaching bench again. The club has announced that Marek Gołębiewski, a 45-year-old coach who has signed a two-year contract, has become the new head coach of the first team. Will this be the beginning of a rebuild, or another change for the sake of change?
Gołębiewski is a figure known primarily for his work at the Legia Warsaw academy, as well as a short stint as Legia's head coach in the 2021/22 season, when the team was in deep crisis. He later coached Legia's reserves and Chrobry Głogów, among others. Although he is not yet a recognized name in the Ekstraklasa circles, he is considered an ambitious, hard-working coach who copes well with youth.
In Zagłębie, however, he has a completely different challenge ahead of him – to pull the club out of second-league nothingness and at least try to build a team that will be able to return to the Ekstraklasa. Let's recall: the Sosnowiec team finished the 2023/24 season as the last team in Fortuna 1. Liga and fell lower with a bang. In the last dozen or so months alone, there have been several coaches – Marek Saganowski, Bartłomiej Bobla, and now Gołębiewski. The fans are already losing patience.
Is this a change that will bring anything? Gołębiewski will have to rebuild the team from scratch. Many players will leave, some have failed, and the mood is terrible. In Sosnowiec, they don't want another team without an identity - they want fight, character, ambition. The coach must put it all together and still find a way to score points from the start of the season.
Today, it's a big risk - a new coach without spectacular successes, with a big challenge at the start and in a club where the wind of history has recently blown more often than the ball hits the goal. And yet, he is the one who is supposed to initiate changes. The first weeks and transfer moves will show what his plan is. Will he reach for the young ones? Will he trust experienced league players? Time will tell.
One thing is certain – there is no margin for error. If it doesn't start right away, Zagłębie could be stuck in the second league for a long time. And then even the most patient fans might say: enough.