Zaglebie Sosnowiec

The ground at Sosnowiec carries a steelmaker's name — ArcelorMittal Park, on what was built and opened as the Zagłębiowski Park Sportowy. It holds 11,600. The industry on the signage is not a stranger here: the club's whole line of descent runs through the works and the pits around the town.

The first version of it was put together in 1906 by workers at the ironworks in Milowice, on the edge of Sosnowiec, under the name Union — a branch of a club of the same name in St Petersburg. What survives today, though, is really the postwar body: after 1945 former members of Unia formed a workers' sports club, which absorbed Hutnik, Huta Katarzyna and Czarni in 1948, took the name Stal a year later under the patronage of the steel industry, and in 1962 passed to a colliery and became Zagłębie. That last change of owner stuck. So did the name, through a confused stretch in the mid-1990s when it was briefly Stal again, then MOSiR, then STS, before Zagłębie came back.

The colliery years were the good ones. Four Polish Cups, the first two in 1962 and 1963, arriving in the same seasons the side was finishing third in the league; second place four times, and never the title. Andrzej Jarosik played through the best of it — top scorer in the Ekstraklasa in 1970 and again in 1971, 25 caps, and an Olympic gold in 1972 — before leaving for Strasbourg. Włodzimierz Mazur took the scoring title in 1977, the year the cup came back.

The fall was long: fifth tier in 1995, the second division reached in 2000, the Ekstraklasa again by 2007. The red, green and white have been climbing and slipping between the divisions since.