Mad league: promoted side top, record champions struggling | OneFootball

In the Bundesliga, Bayern have already pulled nine points ahead of the competition once again. A real title race is not on the horizon. Absolute high tension in the fight for the championship—actually, throughout the entire league—can be found instead in Poland. There, a newly promoted team is leading the table despite a dry spell, and the record champions are performing worse than ever before.

Since matchday 18 last weekend, the Ekstraklasa is on winter break until the end of January. That’s probably just as well for some fans of the top-flight teams, as their heart rates can hardly be in a healthy range anymore.

The Polish top division has been known for its unpredictability in recent years; in the last three years, there have been three different champions. But the current season takes things to a whole new level.

Wisla Plock will spend the winter break as league leaders—even though the promoted side is far from playing stellar football. 30 points, a goal difference of 21:12, which last year would have only been enough for sixth place. That position would also reflect the recently mediocre results of this surprise team.

Wisla’s last five games all ended in draws, but the snail’s pace was enough to secure the autumn championship on the final matchday. Poldi-club Gornik Zabrze, league leaders until then, suffered a 5:2 thrashing at the hands of the third-to-last team in the table.

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Which brings us to the new territory for Legia Warsaw. The record champions, for whom nothing is going right at the moment, are sitting in that very third-to-last spot and thus in the relegation zone. Across all competitions, coach Fredi Bobic’s team has not won in their last eleven matches. Such a winless streak has never before occurred in the club’s more than hundred-year history.

"This is shameful. The fans, the board, the coaches—we have failed," said midfielder Rafał Augustyniak after the recent 0:2 defeat against bottom-placed Piast Gliwice, delivering a devastating interim assessment and adding, almost in desperation: "This break is the only positive thing we can take with us. Maybe we need some time apart now, and this nightmare will finally come to an end."

That is, if things don’t get even worse beforehand. Tomorrow, Thursday, Legia will play in the Conference League against Lincoln Red Imps FC. A win against the team from Gibraltar should actually be a walk in the park. But that’s not the case for Polish teams. On the first ECL matchday, Lech Poznań suffered a stinging 1:2 defeat to the red imps. 

Legia Warsaw still has enough time to turn things around—and in this case, that’s really not just an empty phrase. "The table situation—in terms of points—is not that bad. We’re eleven points behind the leaders, and the table is very tight," Augustyniak summed up on the club’s website.

Just to remind you: this is the third-to-last team speaking in a league with 18 teams! "We will work hard starting in January. In the spring, there will be no more excuses," Bobic declared after the Piast debacle on Sunday in an interview with 'Canal+Sport.' At the same time, it seems just as possible that Wisla Plock could win the championship for the first time in their club’s history. Such a first has already happened three times in the past twelve years in Poland. The Bundesliga can only dream of that. 

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.

📸 PONTUS LUNDAHL - AFP or Licensors