To understand the specific nature of Polish fandom it is crucial to analyse its history. Some particular phenomena and social processes of the past decades have had an impact on the formation of the fan movement, both in terms of the internal dimensions (bottom-up mechanisms) and external imperatives (legal regulations, the state apparatus of violence, media influence, etc.). This is why it is very important to look at the historical development of football fandom in Poland and to adopt a multidimensional perspective.
Fandom in Communist Poland
As can be seen from its history, the fan movement in Poland is subject to transformation and cultural modernization and is far from a one-dimensional phenomenon. It dates back to the early 1970s, when fans of a number of clubs (ŁKS Łódź, Polonia Bytom, Lechia Gdańsk, Legia Warsaw) started to organize support for their teams. At the time, Polish stadiums were visited by clubs taking part in the European Cup games (such as Feyenoord Rotterdam and Saint-Étienne) and the behaviour of their supporters provided inspiration for Polish fans. Legia fans, for example, were greatly impressed by the Dutch supporters who arrived in Warsaw:
For football supporters in Warsaw the greatest sensation was the Feyenoord fans who followed their team in their thousands. The guests presented something that was completely new in Poland, something that could be seen here for the first time. Almost all of them wore white-and-red club t-shirts and scarves, they had trumpets and flags, different sorts of pipes and rattles, and (…) they wore huge top hats with “Feyenoord” written on them. The sight was really impressive and the atmosphere they created during the game was something incredible, something that was bound to be remembered for years to come.1
This influence, however, was only superficial. Indeed, restricted access to information (subject to control by the authorities) and a lack of elementary knowledge about fandom culture in other countries made it impossible to develop a relationship of ‘interdependence’. Although Polish fans tried to imitate Western examples, it was local animosities that were to function as the main factor behind the formation of ‘firms’ supporting Polish football clubs. They were first organized to protect their ‘own area’ against ‘strangers’, that is, supporters of clubs from other cities. Animosities were further fuelled by the fact that some clubs were affiliated with official state institutions (e.g. Legia was an army club, and Wisła Cracow was a club of the Citizens’ Militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO, the communist police). The editor of a fan magazine explains:
I think that Poles have something like that in their blood. We are different than Slovaks, Czechs, even than Hungarians, who have their hooligan crews. It’s in in the blood, this street aggression, things like beating up a guy at a disco because he’s a stranger, he frowns on us, he picks up our girls. (…) Back in the 70s there was also an important division between ‘git-people’ and hippies. ‘Git-people’ arrived at the stadiums and they brought a lot of this prison element. [Personal interview]
‘Git-people’ (Gitowcy) were people with a criminal background who were familiar with prison culture—they knew its jargon and code of rules. The culture of ‘git-people’ reached its heyday in the first half of the 1970s and was the strongest in large urban areas, where the first and most important fan crews appeared. Although the importance of this subculture began to decline at the end of the decade, its patterns of behaviour evolved in the fan movement. They included hostility to ‘strangers’ and uniformed services, and a strong sense of loyalty to the group and its principles, which was crucial in the case of dangerous trips to other cities. A Lechia fan recalls: ‘In those days, everyone knew each other, you recognized everyone’s face. There were no casual people. There were small groups; you could count on everyone because otherwise there was no chance. It cemented us together’. Another key element was tough character, required in physical combat. These rules are of great importance also in contemporary hooligan groups—they do not tolerate any form of cooperation with the police.
Communist authorities tried to channel the movement by setting up official fan clubs which received state sponsorship for their activity, including organization of social events and trips to away matches. According to the logic of the communist regime, the authorities tried to make fandom a ‘planned’ process, as was the case of centrally planned economy. ‘Planning’ was an inherent feature of the communist system: ‘In the communist countries, the view of history as a structured change of society in a specific direction remains alive. But with it, there survives at the same time the idea that this change is leading inevitably to the realization of communist ideals’ (Elias 2009: 18).
Sport was one of the most important elements of propaganda discourse, as it served as ‘proof’ of the superiority of the ideals of communism over capitalism. Fans and their ‘rebellious’ behaviour tried to break down this discourse. This policy involved the establishment of nationwide ‘fan clubs’ organizing regular meetings of representatives of their local branches. Their activity was supervised by communist party activists. However, the real fan movement was a grass-roots initiative in opposition to the political system of the day. Towards the end of the 1970s, informal groups of football fans were active in nearly thirty clubs (Goksiński 2014: 389). Figurations of fans were formed by young people (students) and workers (the working class). Although they did not differ from the rest of society, as a group they tried to behave spontaneously, or at least made an effort to resist ‘ideological exploitation’ pursued by the authorities.
The policy of communist authorities aimed to create a one-class society dominated by the workers’ movement. The structure of the economy, based on heavy industry, mining and agriculture, was to serve the functional uniformity. The communist party monopolized all aspects of life, but the state monopoly was not the result of a natural process of historical tensions and competition as in the civilizing process described by Elias. The mechanism of centralization served the ‘concentration of all social resources for the implementation of both the target goals of the system and its sub-targets. For these reasons, the system has not only a centralist, but also hierarchical nature. Organizational units located at the lower levels of the organizational structure are subordinated to a higher level’ (Tarkowski 1994: 218). The country was ‘integrated’ by closing the borders and restricting opportunities to discover other cultures and values. At the same time, society was not integrated from the ‘inside’, as there was no development of civic attitudes (except for the underground structures of anti-communist opposition), or a sense of community which would not be imposed by coercion. Indeed, communism stimulated the development of the ‘homo Sovieticus’ mentality (Tischner 1992) based on a conformist attitude, lack of individual initiative and dependence on the system. Although in the 1970s the fan movement began to take on an organizational form, it was not a coherent cultural formation. Hence, it is difficult to talk about a committed ‘social identity’ of the fan.
Many respondents recalling that period, despite their awareness of living under an unfavourable system, emphasized that the MO, the communist police, was much less prepared to deal with fan incidents than modern services. In cases that required intervention, the Militia arranged everything in the simplest ways, and benefited from the fact that militiamen commanded great respect: ‘These were different times; after all, only fifteen policemen were enough to appease everyone because of respect they had’ [Arka Gdynia_supporter]. Also the media, controlled by communist authorities, noticed only positive aspects of supporting. Although one reason for this was the ideology of ‘law and social order’, the fact was that except for some occasional incidents fans were not a ‘problem’ in the 1970s, and they could be seen as a significant part of the whole propaganda project related to social ‘massification’ of sport. Moreover, the level of sensitivity to violence was different, and what today is assessed as unacceptable could be regarded as ‘normal’ at the time.
The 1980s were a period of decline of the communist state. The beginning of the decade saw a social revolution leading to the emergence of the Solidarity movement. At the same time, the results of opinion polls showed that Polish society was aware of the pathological nature of the system, for example overgrown bureaucracy, bribery, cronyism, poor organization of work, and excessive influence of the communist party on the economy (Koralewicz and Ziółkowski 1990). The inefficiency of the system (empty shelves in shops and food rationing were a part of daily life for the majority of people) was manifested in rampant inflation, reaching a level exceeding 70% in 1988. The system which was supposed to bring prosperity in fact led the state to economic collapse and ‘unplanned’ system transformation. Jacek Tarkowski aptly describes the final years of communism in Poland: ‘instead of talking about crisis, we should rather talk about a state of permanent backwardness’ (1994: 205).
In the 1980s, news of the activity of English ‘hooligans’ reached Poland and the level of football-related violence increased. Owing to the official ‘success propaganda’, the scale of the phenomenon was never publically acknowledged. For example, as unofficially reported, in the riots during the 1980 Polish Cup final between Legia Warsaw and Lech Poznań there was at least one dead and several hundred injured. On the other hand, the same period saw the stands become a scene of anti-communist activity. Slogans such as ‘Solidarity’ (Solidarność) and ‘Down with the commies’ (Precz z komuną) were often to be heard in Lechia Gdańsk stadium (Wąsowicz 2006; Kossakowski 2011). Rioting against the authorities and fights with the police have remained a distinctive feature of Polish fans ever since. Official ‘fan clubs’ organized by the authorities perished, and fans organized themselves in their own way, which was usually manifested in mass trips to away matches. Taken on regular trains, the trips were spontaneous and involved binge drinking and fights with opposing fans. Law enforcement officers responded reactively, and there was no special law regulating football matches. The most common ‘strategy’ of the Citizens’ Militia was to punish the most hot-headed supporters by beating them and to release them home. The chaos of the fall of the state system was matched by the lack of any serious structures of the fan movement. The fatalistic mood of the end of an era was dominated by violence between fans, and between the police and fans.
The ‘Decivilizing Spurts’ of the 1990s
The fall of the socio-political system resulted in a phenomenon described by sociologists as a ‘social vacuum’ (Nowak 1981). The term refers to a situation in which there is a gaping hole—no civic communities, associations or grass-roots initiatives—between the level of abstractly perceived nation and the level of individuals focused on family life. The elements of social fabric enhancing the development of functional differentiation in the space of community and citizenship were not formed. As a result, human activity was confined to the private sphere; in other words, individuals ‘withdrew’ to their small groups. At the level of the system, institutional instruments of terror and coercion—at least theoretically—tamed ‘uncivilized’ behaviour of individuals, while ideological censorship blocked the ...