A not-so-short story about the Polish football entanglement
Did you know every citizen of Wroclaw spends approximately 47 PLN (£11) annually on the football club regardless of their preference? The problematic nature of public financing and entanglement.
It’s a story about money, politics, power, and the sad reality we need to face when discussing pretty much anything in the contemporary economy. So I hope you’ll read on, even if football isn’t your usual interest.
In fact, that might be the best reason for it.
In the winter of 2026, Wroclaw, one of Poland’s most dynamic cities, found thirty million PLN (roughly 7 million euros) for its largest football club, Śląsk. The timing was notable, as the club had just been relegated to the second division and, according to its management, it was facing potential financial catastrophe only the city could have resolved. Yet this financial support was nothing new. For years, Śląsk has demonstrated a remarkable, consistent ability to absorb public funds with barely a ripple of opposition from the media or the city’s voters.
To understand why this is striking, some context is necessary. Between 2016 and 2024 alone, Wrocław channelled a total of 172.5 million złoty, approximately forty million euros, into the club. It did so while carrying roughly seven billion złoty in debt.
This is not, however, the story of a struggling municipality. Wrocław is widely regarded by Poles as one of the country’s top cities for quality of life and its vivid culture. It is beautifully located, with mountains and national parks within an hour-two drive. It is ambitious and expansive, seemingly always in the middle of some new investment and something fun to do. And it’s not too big.
Almost a perfect place to live in, one could assume.
However, there’s a catch. Even a successful city must deal with the costly and unexciting realities of urban life. It shares the same everyday responsibilities as any other serious local government. This includes allocating taxpayer funds across various municipal areas such as schools and transport, disability services and social support, street maintenance, staffing and the constant housing pressures.
Essentially, Wrocław shoulders all these responsibilities but also carries a substantial debt – a common issue for Polish towns.
Yet somehow, amid all of that, there is always money for Śląsk.
Karol Michalak’s data journalism has done more than anyone’s to force this comparison into the open. Early childhood development programmes received 44.5 million złoty. Special preschools for disabled children: 36 million. Food assistance for struggling families: 30.9 million. Rehabilitation services for people with disabilities: 19.2 million. Material aid for students: 5.5 million. The total for all of those programmes, together, falls short of what went to the football club over the last years.
Wrocław found more money for professional footballers than for disabled children, food assistance, rehabilitation, student support, and volunteer emergency services combined.
It’s possible to debate the legality and ethics of any municipal budget, considering its costs to taxpayers and the benefits it provides, as well as whether it’s optimal. However, certain expenditures fall into a completely different category. Funding the wages of professional footballers, who operate within the deeply commercialised and globalised world of European sport, is not a serious answer to the question of how to manage a city’s finances. It is not a necessity in any given book.
Yet somehow, amid all of that, there is always money for Śląsk.
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Obviously, Wrocław is not unusual. Consider Płock – about 110,000 people on the Wisla river banks, a compact old town, a refinery operated by Orlen just outside the city limits. Orlen is one of the largest petrochemical companies in Central Europe, reporting revenues close to seventy-five billion dollars last year.
The Polish State Treasury holds nearly fifty per cent of it.
Between 2016 and 2024, the city transferred at least 102 million złoty to Wisła Płock. More than thirty million euros, in a city of 110,000, for a professional football club in the commercial top flight.
Then, in the Upper Silesia, Piast Gliwice and Górnik Zabrze have each absorbed sums around the hundred-million mark. GKS Katowice, ninety-six million. Once the capital land of the Polish industrial development, has become the graveyeard of public funds that – instead of reframing the area’s economic potential – are getting wasted across variety of top-level football organisations scattered around the region.
The question that nags at anyone paying attention is not whether this is outrageous.
Beacuse it clearly is.
The question is what kind of machinery makes it happen.
What makes it happen reliably, year after year, across dozens of cities simultaneously, apparently insulated from the kind of scrutiny that would disrupt almost any other category of expenditure at this scale.
Let's be clear about one thing.
This is not a series of accidents. It is not a collection of random, disconnected events that just happened to unfold in unison across the country, year after year, for the entire thirty-six-year history of Poland's market economy.
No.
This is a system, and a coherent one. Understanding the system requires setting aside the usual dismissal, like ‘it’s just sport’ and ‘there are bigger fish to fry’, and looking carefully at what Polish football actually reveals about how public money moves, and who benefits from it.
And, ultimately, why it is so difficult to stop it.
The Idea of Public Choice
James Buchanan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for applying economic reasoning to political behaviour, spent much of his career on a deceptively simple observation: the people who run governments are human beings with careers they need to carry on. And therefore, they are interested in various forms of political (and economic) incentives, if only, a desire to be re-elected.
Once you accept that, a great deal of apparently puzzling political behaviour becomes straightforward.
Let’s start with those thirty million złoty ‘investment’ for Slask earlier this year.
Did you know that Wrocław’s 30 million złoty subsidy for Slask breaks down to about 47 złoty per resident of this beautiful city?
For the median taxpayer, that is almost nothing. It’s lost in a budget of billions, because it is roughly the price of a meal out for a single person. It’s less than a Classic and fries in a Burger Ltd (Wroclaw, Psie Budy 7/8/9). So why would you care if you are a Wroclaw citizen. It’s not worth it, right?
But let us zoom out and think of the beneficieries of this subsidy, the club’s players, coaches, management, and the entire ecosystem of agents, lawyers, and hangers-on who extract value from its operations. For them, that same 47 złoty, multiplied across a city of ~650,000, pays multiple six-figure salaries.
I am not sure if the sources are correct, but some of them report that Mariusz Malec annual contract alone is worth ~740.000 PLN. On top of that you’d have to add some additional money that Slask had to pay to sign him from other club, some fees they had to share with his agents, and so on.
There are at least several people or organisations involed in the budgeting of the club. Lots and lots of beneficiaries.
But usually when we discuss the budgets of clubs like Slask Wroclaw or Wisla Plock, we talk about the aggregates. After all, some politicians claim, it is only this and that much per year per person in our town. And we will have so much fun and such a promotion out of such public expenditure.
We will get back to the politicians’ claims, let’s focus on the economy first.
This is what James Buchanan termed a concentrated benefit with dispersed costs. A small, organised group receives large, specific gains from a political institution. All, whilst the costs are spread so thinly across a large, unorganised population that they become virtually invisible. Again, Malec’s salary is only 1,1 PLN per year per person. It’s nothing, right?
Most people have better uses for their time than finding information on where does the actual financing of a football club in their town coming from. Surely, they either like the club or not, they follow football or not, but most of the time, they really do not care that much. They work, raise kids, maintain homes, pursue hobbies. They dance, walk, run, scroll through some stupid articles on Substack, and so on.
Mastering the intricacies of municipal football financing offers no material reward for most.
Also, one importa notion here – from the ‘average Joe’ point of view, a single vote cannot change anything. Even if they have noticed something, they often feel like they can’t do anything about it. They feel that the probability that their vote decides an election is infinitesimal.
The expected value of becoming informed is therefore near zero.
What is Rational in Politics?
Anthony Downs calls this rational ignorance. Bryan Caplan wrote a fascinating book on the phenomenon that I strongly recommend you to read.
Politicians understand it perfectly. They don’t fear informed voter backlash because voters often won’t become informed. The information is technically public (satisfying transparency requirements) while remaining practically invisible.
That’s why you have city councillors doing whatever they want in public, as long as there is no reaction from a large number of voters at once.
Rational ignorance protects their election pipeline.
Side note – when a business invests in product development, it creates value that didn’t exist before. That’s positive-sum. When that same business lobbies for subsidies or favourable regulations, it’s fighting over slices of an existing pie. That’s zero-sum at best, negative-sum once you count all the money wasted on lobbying.
That’s essentially what happens in football.
In its essence, Polish football clubs are master rent-seekers (Gordon Tullock’s term for such a phenomenon).
They invest heavily in political relationships. Club officials maintain close ties with councillors and mayors. They orchestrate supporter demonstrations timed to budget deliberations. That is why at some point you will see some media reporting that city this and city that, say that the football ‘investment’ will make enormous returns to the citizens (voters). The municipality orders studies to claim that it will impact local economy, and so on.
Obviously. Any type of public transfer will impact the local economy – the question remains, in what way.
The Chorzów case reveals the mechanism in naked form. The city ran a 4-million-złoty tender for promotion of its image with requirements that only Ruch Chorzów could meet, including mandatory use of the slogan, which happens to be the club’s marketing tagline. They created a legal pretense for a transfer by running a competitive process structured so only one bidder could win.
Multiply this across dozens of municipalities, hundreds of millions of złoty, years of accumulated practice, and rent-seeking becomes normalised.
The people who participate in this, engage in something called fiscal illusion - the true magnitude of government handouts is obscured through multiple fragmented mechanisms. This prevents the citizenry from understanding the cumulative fiscal impact. Slask Wroclaw has been sponsored by so many social institutions that probably even people inside of the city hall might be confused when enumerating them.
I mean, a zoo has been funnelling the money to Slask…
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There is one another instrument that is often used by politicians in such scenarios.
They will use sophisticated ways to present the club ‘investments’ as vital social institution funding. You know, like people (including media!) claiming that spending money on football team is akin to sponsoring hospitals or theatres.
Getting back to Slask case, it is even more interesting because it also involves something that is known in economy as the Baptists and Bootleggers effect.
This one is fascinating. Bruce Yandle, who came up with the idea, describes how policies are often supported by an unlikely alliance of moral advocates (the Baptists) and self-interested parties (the Bootleggers). The Baptists are the sincere fans who view the club as a sacred community symbol. Their passion provides the moral legitimacy for public funding – we really need to support the club, otherwise it will fall. Right? Now, the Bootleggers are the agents, players, and contractors who extract millions from the club’s budget.
Politicians serve the interests of the bootleggers while hiding behind the moral cover provided by the baptists. They somehow understand all of this, whether they have names for it or not. They do not fear a backlash from voters who will not become informed. The subsidy is protected by the very structure of democratic attention.
We’ve seen them in these Twitter discussions over the last few weeks.
And so when the outsiders questions the efficiency of a massive ‘investment’ (and, practially, the public expenditure) the politician and the bootleggers frame the critique as an attack on the fans’ identity and local heritage. In effect, such an identity capture makes political opposition to football subsidies extremely costly, as it is framed not as a fiscal debate but as a cultural betrayal. Team betrayal.
In other words, people feel like opposing the mechanism is wrong.
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You might ask, why is that still working?
Let me begin as simply as possible. The system exists because basic political economy incentives favour it.
Or, in other words, it works because it is worth it for those involved.
We live in a democratic political system. We vote for a group of people who then decide how our tax money is spent across different sectors. But in making those decisions, the politicians we elect interact with various other agents seeking to influence them.
Knowing why the system exists is not the same as understanding how it works.
There is a useful theoretical framework for understanding these interactions. It is called the entangled economy, developed by Richard E Wagner. Its core insight is that market and political exchange interpenetrate – they bleed into one another. And when they do, something interesting happens to the logic of both.
To see how this system operates, we first need to understand a basic distinction. In a pure market, exchanges are voluntary and mutually beneficial by definition. You want to watch a football game, you purchase a ticket, and the club receives money. Simple. Both parties walk away satisfied, or the transaction doesn’t happen.
Political exchange operates on a fundamentally different logic. When a municipality transfers money to a football club, no such bilateral consent exists. The person paying – you, along with thousands of other taxpayers – is often not a willing participant in the transaction. This is not to say you would necessarily oppose sponsoring a football club. The point is structural. In this scenario, the price signal that normally guides market decisions is absent, while the person making the decision bears none of the cost. A city councillor voting for a 30 million złoty subsidy to Śląsk Wrocław does not lose 30 million złoty himself. At best, he might lose some votes.
As we’ve already discussed, rational ignorance makes that outcome even less likely.
Wagner’s insight is that the modern economy is not one or the other.
It is both, tangled together in ways that make the pathologies of each mutually reinforcing. Polish municipal football is, in this sense, a near-perfect specimen.
Follow the money through this entanglement, and the machinery becomes visible.
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Polish local governments have assembled a remarkably versatile toolkit for channelling public funds into football.
The most straightforward mechanism is the equity injection. The city simply purchases shares in the club. These shares are typically difficult to value and essentially impossible to sell. They sit on the city's books as assets, but their worth bears no reliable relation to what was paid. The transaction looks like an investment, but in practice, it functions as a grant.
Now suppose the city later wants to sell those shares to a private investor. This proves difficult, not only because the shares lack a clear market price, but also because any potential buyer knows they would be competing against an opponent with access to virtually unlimited public spending. Private money versus the municipal treasury is not a contest most investors are eager to enter.
Then there are promotional contracts. The city purchases advertising or visibility at prices no competitive market would sustain. These deals are sometimes tendered, but the tender terms are written in a way that functionally selects the club before the process even begins.
Loans and debt conversions could form another layer. Imagine that a club receives liquidity, the repayment date arrives, and the cash is not there. Instead of enforcing collection, the city rolls the liability forward, postpones it, or converts it into new shares. Yadda, yadda. The debt never disappears; it simply transforms, perpetually deferred.
Municipal-company intermediation adds yet another layer of opacity. A city-owned water utility, transport firm, or even the local zoo becomes the paying entity, signing sponsorship deals with the club. The money still originates with the public, but it now passes through a commercially structured intermediary, weakening the already faint lines of political accountability.
Finally, there are the stadiums themselves, perhaps the most elegant mechanism of all. The city builds, owns, and maintains the football facilities. It services the debt, covers upkeep, and often even pays the utilities. The club pays a preferential rent, typically well below market rates, while capturing all or most of the commercial upside, like ticket sales and matchday sponsorship. A public asset becomes, in effect, a disguised operating subsidy.
But – and it is worth underlining – this is at least a tangible asset. Unlike a grant or a never-repaid loan, the stadium remains on the city’s books. When private investment game returns, the city can still try to leverage it – if only by selling it to the club’s new owners.
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Zagłębie Lubin represents the starkest case. KGHM, the copper mining giant majority-owned by the Polish state, has effectively underwritten the club’s entire operation for years. The reported numbers are staggering – cumulative sponsorship reaching nine figures over the past decade. KGHM is not a charity, obviously. It is a publicly listed company with minority shareholders and formal commercial obligations. But it is also a company whose board is politically appointed, and whose management understands that certain expenditures are expected of them.
This is what academic researchers call symbiotic clientelism. State companies fund clubs. Clubs provide political cover and mobilised support to the politicians who control those companies. And those politicians maintain the institutional conditions that allow the money to keep flowing. The loop is closed, self-reinforcing, and nearly impossible to break from the outside.
The second mechanism is fragmentation. Financial relationships are dispersed across enough institutional nodes that no single actor can be held responsible for the whole picture – it was the zoo, the housing company, and so on. It wasn’t the city itself, so we – the politicians – are not accountable for the transfer.
This is not necessarily the result of a coordinated conspiracy. It may simply be the natural accretion of a system where each participant has an incentive to find a new funding channel, and no one has an incentive to add up all the channels together.
The result, however, is fiscal illusion at an institutional level.
Funnily enough, it is not just citizens who cannot see the full picture. Politicians themselves often cannot.
And even journalists who try to reconstruct the total sum struggle to piece it together.
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As we all know, the system is stable across multiple election cycles, through occasional prosecutions and occasional bursts of public outrage.
In preppering to write this piece, I have read articles from mid 2010s, late 2010s, and early 2020s, each reporting the problem and calling for its change.
Yet, the system persists.
Why?
To understand that requires looking at something less visible than budgets and contracts.
Mark Granovetter, the sociologist, spent much of his career dismantling a particular piece of economic fictio – the idea that markets are populated by abstract agents making rational decisions in a vacuum. Real economic action, he argued, is embedded. It happens between people who (most often) know each other, who owe each other, who share histories and favours and grievances.
Obviously we sometimes make transactions with completely random people and organisations, but we most often decide to do it in a trusted environment – or in trusted networks.
The decision to transfer thirty million złoty to a football club is made because the people involved know each other from other settings. In Wroclaw, we would have to look at famous national politician, Grzegorz Schetyna, and his people around the club. At one point, he was responsible for the football division of the club, even though is commonly associated with the basketball part of its operations.
Consider Szymon Michałek, who became mayor of Chorzów. He did not get there through any kind of a back corridor. He won an election with fifty-four per cent of the vote, first round, no runoff required. Super popular amongst his folks. Before politics, he had been a youth organiser for the club’s ultra section. His connection to the club and to the football community was entirely real. When he converted it into political capital, at some point promising a four-hundred-million-złoty stadium and pledging to protect the club at every turn, he was not building pure sentiment but rather redirecting something genuine toward ends that served a much narrower range of interests.
This is what makes the problem so difficult to untangle.
The value created by these networks is real. The collective identity, the shared memory, the sense that your city has something worth caring about on a Saturday afternoon – none of that is fake.
But the financing mechanism that sustains it extracts value from people who never chose to participate in it.
The network creates something worth having, then bills the entire city for it, and pockets most of the difference.
The identity dimension is also what makes political opposition to the subsidies so costly.
When a politician frames continued funding as a defence of the community’s inheritance, they are not entirely lying. The club does mean something to plenty of people.
But the meaning of the club and the identity gets conscripted to defend something quite different. Opposing the subsidy starts to feel like opposing the club itself – and so, the fiscal debate is quietly replaced by a loyalty test.
Let’s get back to the Baptists and Bootleggers concept. The original case referred to the alcohol prohibition. The case was simple. Baptists supported it on moral grounds, bootleggers supported it because it eliminated legal competition and made them rich. The coalition was, in principle, unstable, but in practice durable, because both groups wanted the same policy for entirely different reasons.
In Polish football, the Baptists are the sincere fans. They are people for whom the club is genuinely a symbol of collective memory and local pride. It can be a random person on Twitter, it can be a local journalist like Marcin Torz, or even a local councillor.
The Bootleggers are the people and organisations around the club – often, politicians and their network of people, who capitalise on this entanglement. But also footballers earning six-figure salaries, the agents collecting transfer fees, the executives drawing management compensation, and so on.
Such a coalition is powerful because the Baptists supply moral legitimacy while the Bootleggers supply lobbying muscle and financial resources. Politicians can claim, with a straight face, to be defending community values while effectively serving concentrated private interests.
Critics find themselves framed as cold outsiders attacking something people love.
Nothing like we’ve seen on Twitter over the last two weeks, right?
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This is also why no single city moves first to end such a conundrum.
Consider the position of a reform-minded mayor in Wrocław. Withdraw the subsidy, the club suffers relative to rivals who still receive theirs portion of the public money, and may even be relegated to the lower divisions because of lack of interest amongst the private investors.
Obviously, the fans blame the mayor, and so, the opponent in the next election can run on a single promise, like restore the club to its previous position. Rebuild our local pride.
Make Slask Great Again.
Let’s consider a game in which you have only two outcomes:
Collective withdrawal would benefit everyone in football leagues across Poland.
But unilateral withdrawal punishes the mover (lower chance of competing against privately-owned clubs if the potential investor still feels like there’s no way to compete with the public funding).
This game is brutal but simple – if you don’t want to sink, make a move.
There’s plenty of similar patterns discussed by economists over the last century, mostly associated with the idea of common resources and Mancur Olson logic.
But, back to the discussed game – nobody moves, and the subsidy race continues until the money runs out; which, as several cities are now discovering simultaneously, it eventually does.
By the time the costs become visible, the switching costs have grown enormous. Contracts were signed expecting continued income. Players were promised wages. Stadium debt was structured around revenue projections that assumed ongoing public support.
If there is a clog in the system it can ruin everything and for everyone.
To stop now is not simply to withdraw a subsidy or sell the club; it is to trigger a cascade of defaults and disappointed expectations that will, inevitably, be blamed on whoever pulled the plug – not on the twenty years of decisions that made pulling it necessary.
Remember the saga around the potential selling of the Slask football club in the late 2025? It never happened and people blamed the local governining bodies for it.
But it was revealed over time that the investors wanted the city to continue some form of financial help – to continue some form of engagement. Similar patterns were observed in other Polish clubs over the years - with private money investors coming in and demanding some forms of public expenditure. Otherwise, they said, we will make the club bankrupt. So the local municipalities signed the newly framed contract or bought the club back because of the fear of the above-mentioned political repercussions.
And the circle continues.
The longer the system runs, the more indispensable it has made itself and the more it has built constituencies whose entire livelihoods depend on its continuation.
This is path dependence in its most punishing form.
Over time, the population adjusts its expectations. Citizens develop a kind of learned helplessness – not necessarily because they approve that, but because their preference for change has never found a viable outlet.
We started to normalise the situation in Polish football because no one ever won this war.
It is a lost cause, everyone knows that.
Privately, many of the people admit something is wrong. But publicly, they say nothing, because saying something carries a social cost higher than the expected benefit of being heard.
And so, plenty of politicians who fought against the public spending in sports across the country, are now vocal proponents of the status quo.
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But in December 2025, prosecutors in Katowice charged twenty-four people in connection with illegal transactions in Ruch Chorzów, totalling twenty-nine million złoty, covering the period between 2011 and 2019. The investigation had compiled 160 volumes of evidence and interviewed over a hundred witnesses. Among those charged was Andrzej K., the former mayor, accused of acting against the city’s interests, rigging procurement processes, and violating electoral law.
The mechanisms were textbook. Eighteen million złoty in loans, twelve million of which was routed through a municipal company called Centrum Przedsiębiorczości (Entrepreneurship Centre) to obscure the true magnitude; additional annual share purchases; and that rigged four-million-złoty tender, its requirements crafted so precisely that only one bidder could ever have won it.
Subsidies do not merely distort markets – they distort elections, because the people who benefit most from them are precisely the people most motivated to vote.
The legal picture is more complicated than the scale of the pathology might suggest.
EU law prohibits state aid that distorts competition in ways incompatible with the common market. Whether and how that framework applies to professional football subsidies in Polish municipal settings is a genuinely contested question, turning on issues of selectivity, the distinction between genuine services of general economic interest and commercial entertainment, and the scope of the Commission’s enforcement discretion.
But again, the Chorzów prosecution was brought under criminal provisions concerning abuse of public office and procurement fraud, not EU state aid rules.
My opinion is that – unlike many other similar games – we will observe the fall of the system.
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Here is a useful thought experiment. Imagine you are a reformer.
Not a naive one. You have read the reports. You understand the mechanisms. And against considerable odds, you manage to pass a new transparency requirement. From now on, all money transfers to football clubs in Poland must be itemised and published quarterly. You feel, cautiously, that something has shifted.
Something has. Just not in the direction you intended.
Within two budget cycles, direct grants have decreased. But marketing contracts with the municipal water utility have increased. A new promotional agreement appears, routed through the city’s economic development agency. The zoo signs a fresh sponsorship deal with the club. Dozens of new channels emerge, each one routing around your reform. The total flow of public money remains roughly the same.
You have given the system a workout, and it has returned leaner and more creative.
Nassim Taleb described antifragility as structures that not only withstand stress but also thrive on it. Every attempted reform reveals new weaknesses within the network. Each prosecutorial investigation maps, in painstaking detail, which mechanisms were visible enough to attract scrutiny, so that the next iteration can route around them.
There is also another layer to these considerations – a profound asymmetry of information. The insiders know which budget lines are being watched and which are not. They know, often before new regulations are signed, exactly what the new rules cover and what they do not, sometimes because they consulted on the drafting. By the time an opposition councillor or an investigative journalist has worked out what is happening, the mechanism has already shifted.
Regulatory capture closes the loop. Oversight bodies are staffed by people who live in the same world as the people they are supposed to oversee. They share political assumptions and social circles (if only because they are members of political parties), but since they live in the same city they might have children at the same schools as the people they write about or with whom they will be competing for the municipalities’ positions.
And rigorous scrutiny starts to feel, at some level, vaguely disloyal to their own party, neighbour, or a fellow football supporter.
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I have written at length because I feel that we need a little more understanding of these mechanisms. It saddens me to see people entrenched in their narratives without understanding the quagmire they find themselves in.
And, as I said above, I also believe that this system will eventually almost certainly consume itself.
Why?
Because there is more and more money in Polish football, and more and more of it is private money.
Oh, and also because there was someone who actually triggered the change. Kudos to Jarek Krolewski.
In this context, there will be greater pressure to change the mechanics of financing this – after all – commercial market.
The second issue is that more and more political players will realise that they can capitalise on the reverse of this mechanism – especially those who operate at the national level and who are more often than not deprived of local ties.
And with this in mind, let us enjoy the weekend’s games!