‘The Whole of Poland Saw It, and You Gentlemen are Blind’: Match-Fixing in Polish Football – A Case Study from 1993

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the most famous match-fixing cases in the history of Polish football – when in 1993 the Polish Football Association decided to subtract points due to match-fixing in the last match round of the season, an action which meant that Legia Warsaw were stripped of the Polish title. The paper initially presents a brief overview of the history of match-fixing in Polish football and then moves on to an informed narrative of the 1993 case. Two primary analytical focuses are adopted: first the 1993 case study is analyzed in the light of a typology established by criminologist Declan Hill explaining why corruptors decide to fix football matches. Second societal reactions to the 1993 scandal are analyzed. The paper questions to what extent reactions to the 1993 match-fixing scandal were affected by the profound social, political, and cultural transformations of the immediate post-communist period. To do so, the sociological concept of ‘cultural trauma’ is scrutinized in the context of football match-fixing. It is argued that the 1993 scandal was a ‘trigger’ which allowed cultural trauma to emerge and that reactions to the scandal were heavily influenced by wider societal events.