| Andres Martinez
The day I arrived in Wroclaw, Poland, my WhatsApp and email blew up on account of news from back home. The Big 12 conference had announced that our ASU Sun Devils would be playing our American varietal of football against the University of Kansas at London’s iconic Wembley Stadium next year. “It’s coming home,” I teased a friend who works in an English Premier League club.
The news felt timely for my Polish mission, as the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw had organized a weeklong series of lectures and meetings for me on the overall theme of our Great Game Lab – on how, thanks to sports, the United States is connecting in new ways with the rest of the world.
I spoke at five different universities across the country over the course of a week, on topics ranging from how a “A Tale of Two Footballs” explains America’s emergence as a global player to the convergence of sport and media and nations’ pursuit of geopolitical and cultural soft power through sport. Along the way I also met with three different Polish professional American football teams and officials at the Polish Olympic Committee.
Some of the students I addressed were English Studies or Political Science majors little interested in sport; others were Sport Management students less focused on international relations, and so I had to remind the former that sport is the most influential form of popular culture and media these days and the latter of the transnational geopolitical and business forces shaping sport’s future. I also made the case to all my Polish audiences that the U.S. is an increasingly relevant global player in sport, much like I constantly remind my students in Arizona that the rest of the world looms large in determining the future of all pop culture, including sport. Often my American audiences are surprised when I point out that Taylor Swift held twice as many concerts outside the U.S. than inside it on her Eras Tour, but in Poland some of the students seemed incredulous that she would devote as many as a third of all her shows to the U.S. It’s as if neither America nor the rest of the world fully grasp the scale of the other, and hence our interdependence.
At a time when politics in much of the world are signaling a retreat from globalization, it’s refreshing to engage with students about our converging and increasingly shared sports cultures. By a show of hands in the various auditoriums I spoke in, the English Premier League was by far the most followed sporting league, but the NBA registered solid minorities, and everyone seemed aware that the NFL is determined to take its games to a growing number of European countries (Will Poland be next, I kept being asked). Students had many questions about how and why our American colleges take sports as seriously as we do, to the point of developing some of Poland’s top track & field stars, and about how America’s FIFA World Cup will go next summer.
As is always the case when I talk to audiences outside the U.S., the story of how Title IX helped end America’s footballing isolationism was a source of much surprise and fascination. The fact that a law intended to create more equality of opportunity for women in educational programs ended up taking the foreign edge off soccer in America is a riddle that explains much about this country, and something about the wonder of serendipitously unintended consequences.
Poland, incidentally, is an astonishing success story. Few nations have suffered as much throughout history (to the point of having its nationhood denied for much of it) and few have benefited as much from the oft-derided neoliberal order (especially European integration) of the past 30 years. One stat that Poles are excited to share is that in 1995 the nation’s GDP per capita was 36% that of Britain’s; today it’s 81%. Cities like Wroclaw, Gdansk, Krakow and the capital of Warsaw are growing and growing wealthy, bustling with an energy that is absent in the more settled and complacent cities to the west of where Europe’s Iron Curtain once stood.
There is considerable talk and concern about the war next door and the influx of Ukrainian refugees and their needs, but overall, it is a bit surreal that normalcy prevails under those conditions. Life goes on, especially on days when no errant drones drift into Polish airspace; this is a nation that does not seem in the least cowered. Given Poland’s history, these are still the best of times.
If Poles are self-deprecating and pessimistic, it’s about the state of their national football team, which peaked back when the Communists were still firmly in charge. “We’re a country of close to 40 million football-crazy people, but only one Robert Lewandowski,” one of the students at Wroclaw University of Health and Sport Sciences bemoaned, suggesting the math doesn’t add up. Yet the Barcelona star and Iga Swiatek, the world’s best women’s tennis player over the last few years, are huge global celebrities that confer upon brand Poland a healthy dosage of soft power.
I’ve long been in awe of how sport facilitates engagement and understanding across borders, but on this trip to Poland I was reminded of how sport accomplishes the same across times and generations. Communism in Poland was always a hostile occupier imposed from the outside, and there is nothing legitimate, nothing to celebrate, about the politics and regimes who governed the country before the workers at a famous dockyard in Gdansk gave birth to the national Solidarity movement in the Cold War’s waning days.
But sport is different. On my visit to the National Olympic Center in Warsaw, I saw proud displays of the copious medals Poland raked in during those Cold War Olympics, when all Soviet satellite states leveraged their command-and-control systems to maximize sporting glory and prove their worth against the capitalist West. At the Montreal 1976 Summer Games, Poland finished sixth in the overall medals count, ahead of countries like Japan, Great Britain, Italy, and France. There is no asterisk attached to those medals or the pride people still feel about them and the great Polish football teams that finished third at the 1974 and 1982 FIFA World Cups, even if the political system of that era, and the coercion it asserted over all aspects of society, has long been discredited.
Times change, as do nations, and not just Poland. Another bombshell related to America’s increasing global connectivity through sport occurred while I was still in Wroclaw. Taylor Swift dropped a new album with a song that mentioned a football team. But it wasn’t her fiancé’s, or another American sports team few people outside our country would know much about. It was Real Madrid, Lewandowski’s nemesis in the Spanish League.
Plenty of the Polish students I came across, some wearing Barcelona jerseys, were not happy.
But we had something to talk about.