By Jaroslaw Adamowski
January 30 – In a bid to increase the club’s following in various parts of Poland, Legia Warsaw has launched a countrywide advertising campaign employing billboards, press and the internet. But the campaign may have backfired after fans of other clubs took insult at the ads appearing in the their cities.
Legia, which plays in the Ekstraklasa, the top tier of the country’s professional football league, won Poland’s 2013 Championship and the 2013 Cup of Poland. Drawing on these successes, the club is aiming to attract new supporters from outside of the Polish capital. In addition to Warsaw, the billboards are expected to appear in other major Polish cities including Lodz, Krakow, Poznan, Wroclaw and Gdansk.
“Legia has fans throughout Poland, they are numbered in millions both in Poland and abroad,” said Jakub Szumielewicz, a member of the club’s board. “We are determined to use the campaign to show how big and countrywide this group is.”
The campaign’s slogan is set to appear in various local variants using the names of the Polish cities. For instance, the billboards in Poznan will say, “You can even be from Poznan if you’re a supporter of Legia.” The ad also claims that Legia is “the champion of entire Poland”.
The use of the word “even” has fuelled accusations of the campaign insulting inhabitants of the five cities, suggesting these cities are somehow inferior. In Poznan, local bi-weekly Nasz Glos Poznanski denounced the ad as “shocking”, while Lodz-based news site MMLodz.pl called it “controversial”.
In each of the cities targeted by the campaign there is at least one club playing in the Ekstraklasa, with Krakow having two such clubs. Moreover, none of the six clubs’ supporters enjoy good relationships with the supporters of Legia.
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