Although there is an ongoing discussion in the Ekstraklasa about the number of foreigners, few look the other way. Meanwhile, Polish footballers have scattered all over the world – from Germany, through Iceland, to San Marino and Japan. We checked where they play, how many there are and which destinations they choose most often. The result? See for yourself!
I recently created a piece about how many foreigners play in our Ekstraklasa. Here you can read - Invasion in Ekstraklasa But what if we reversed the situation and looked at how many Poles play in foreign leagues?
Today I have tackled this topic, taking into account all league levels above amateur level in each of the countries below.
It turns out that the greatest expansion took place in the western direction. As many as 653 of our representatives run on German pitches. There is a huge gap between our neighbors, because second place is occupied by English pitches with "only" 62 of our players, and the podium is closed by sunny Italy, which has 55 players with Polish passports.
Just off the podium was probably the biggest surprise – Iceland. It is in this country that our colony has 47 competitors. Moving on, we have Austria (46), the United States (35), Norway (25), Spain (17), Cyprus (17), and the top ten is closed by Scotland with 15 citizens.
Our players play in a total of 50 leagues, in which – apart from those mentioned – there are also leagues such as Gibraltar and Luxembourg, where each has 4 players, Malta and Lithuania – 2 players each, and we have one representative in the leagues of Monaco, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Japan, San Marino and Estonia.
To sum up – our potential representatives are eager to choose European destinations, but we will never hear about many of them. The main destination we are taking is Germany, but having at least one player in 50 out of 211 leagues from all over the world can be proud in some way – especially since there is no shortage of them in the strongest ones.