ThreeMatchBan
When Lech Poznan met Zalgiris Vilnius in a Europa League qualifier in the summer of 2013, the trouble that followed came as no surprise to anyone who had been watching relations between Poland and Lithuania. The two countries had once been bound together in a long union, but by 2013 their dealings were dogged by diplomatic discourtesies and thinly veiled needling at ministerial level. Football simply put it on a bigger stage.
A banner in Poznan
Expectations were high before a ball was kicked. Ahead of the first leg in Vilnius, the county police warned through the club website that any crowd trouble would be dealt with swiftly and forcefully, and in the hours before kick-off footage circulated online of groups of visiting supporters roaming the city centre. No violence was reported, but plenty of people turned up ready to film any ethnically charged incident for a global audience.
A week later in Poznan it happened. Home fans unfurled a 50-foot banner that read, in translation, "Lithuanian cad, kneel before your Polish master". Local commentators described it as a carefully organised hate protest rather than a spontaneous outburst. Valdemar Tomaševski, leader of the Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania party, went further, claiming the banner could not have entered the stadium without specialist help and pointing the finger at the Lithuanian Special Services, which amounted to an accusation of state-sponsored sabotage.
The foreign ministries of both countries condemned the display, with Poland adding a brief apology. Then both closed the book. No internal investigations followed.
UEFA's €5,000 response
UEFA responded in its usual way. Lech were fined €5,000, a drop in the ocean for a club of their size, and part of their stadium was closed for their next European home game. It did nothing to change the impression that the governing body was remote from any real solution to racism in European football. The disciplinary committee did not even manage a verbal condemnation of what had happened, and within weeks the affair had dropped off the radar of the football and state authorities alike. The listlessness of the response was obvious even from a distance.
The same summer, Budapest Honved were sanctioned for similar behaviour in Serbia, part of a wider pattern of ethnic tension spilling onto terraces in Central and Eastern Europe that is explored further in a look at the decline of Hungarian football.
Poland Loves Lithuania
What happened next came from below. An online campaign organised by Mykolas Majauskas pushed the authorities' insipid statements off the news sites and gathered a network of grassroots activists promoting friendship between the two countries. The movement's simple emblem, the two national flags side by side inside a heart, began appearing everywhere, on social media and on the streets, reclaiming public space in the name of brotherhood in a way neither the state nor the sport had managed.
The underlying dispute was not about football at all. It had grown from arguments over the spelling of Polish surnames among the Polish minority in Lithuania, a row that politicians on both sides had allowed to fester until it poisoned public life. "Although we can't change the opinions of others, we can choose how we respond to them," read a statement from the campaign. European football might look rather different if UEFA worked to the same principle.
What came after
Instead, the disciplinary process stayed much as it was, built on small fines and partial closures rather than any serious attempt to educate. Michel Platini, UEFA president at the time, could have learned something from the activists in Vilnius and Poznan. He left office in 2016 after being banned from football over a payment from FIFA.
Relations between Warsaw and Vilnius did improve in the years that followed, pushed together by shared security worries on NATO's eastern flank, and in 2022 Lithuania's parliament finally allowed letters such as w to be used in personal names on official documents, easing the very dispute that lay behind the banner.
Further commentary on the football politics of the region is collected on this blog and discussed regularly on Twitter.