A club from a village of 700 people is causing a stir in the Polish top flight thanks to an ambitious owner, drones and a strong female presence
The village of Nieciecza in southern Poland is not a place you would expect to find a top-flight football team, surrounded as it is by rural cornfields, the pretty river Dunajec and a huge factory that manufactures paving slabs and building materials at its northern end. But up at the north-eastern corner is the home of Bruk-Bet Termalica Nieciecza, a club that are defying all expectations by occupying fourth place in the Ekstraklasa, where they sit just six points behind the leaders, Jagiellonia Bialystok, before the league resumes on 10 February.
Their recently renovated stadium is an incongruous sight, with its modern shiny facade and newly built car park set against a village that consists of no more than a handful of streets and just over 700 people. But it is also a source of great pride for a group of people who can now safely say they hail from the smallest place in Europe to host a major nation top-tier football team.
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We train as much using our heads as our feet. This is, as the Americans say, total immersion, total immersion
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