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The most dangerous ultras I’ve ever met

Strap in for one of the most ridiculous, scary and bizarre football travel stories you’ll ever hear…

The most dangerous ultras I’ve ever met

Images:

Getty Images & James Young

It was roughly a year ago when Legia Warsaw played Molde in the Europa Conference League second leg playoff round—the type of game that is normally reserved for half-watching with a post-work can of continental lager. TNT Sports 3, world feed commentary, check on the ready meal halfway through the second half. “I swear he used to play for Everton.” You know the drill. 

Except this wasn’t any Thursday night game resigned to the 10:35 highlights show and never thought about again. There’s a good chance you remember it, but not for what happened on the pitch. The following week, the story was all over social media and being discussed on your favourite podcasts. Legia’s ultras, who saw their section close for the game, held up a sign saying “SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKERS” just moments after another reading: “THIS TIME YOU WON UEFA” was packed away. Fireworks, pyro and chaos ensued as men in balaclavas started to snarl and jump around like fleas. Now, imagine being in that mob by mistake. Well, for 90 minutes, I had to pretend to be a Legia ultra. Here's the story of how it happened. 

You get mad ideas as a student. A mixture of having money that you don’t really know what to do with and too much time means that harebrained schemes often aren’t properly thought through. Manchester United had gone out of the Champions League in the group stage that year and I was pissed off. It would have been the perfect stage in my life to do all the knockouts with no responsibilities and, in turn, climb up the slippery credit ladder. I still wanted a Euro fix, though, and scanned fixtures in those classic, cheap Ryanair cities … Warsaw? City I’ve not been to before, tick. Game on that week, tick. Perfect, I thought. I’ll tell my lecturers I’m on placement. I then discovered there is a magic bus you can get to the Polish capital from Eindhoven that takes nearly 19 hours. Well, it felt rude not to. 

So I set off from Chorlton St in Manchester on Monday night and took the National Express to London. Eurostar over to Rotterdam, changed trains to Eindhoven and braced myself for the longest coach journey I’d ever been on. Some of my fellow passengers didn’t have the correct paperwork to be allowed on, and there was angry shouting in Polish. We hadn’t even set off yet. The bloke sat next to me, after the conversation naming Polish footballers dried up, just played very loud Polish dance music through the speaker on his phone for two hours. Fair enough. What can you do? 

I listened to Stephen Fretwell through the Polish countryside, not really knowing what I’d got myself in for

We’d get woken up in the middle of the night to go to a services somewhere in Germany, and all have to get off, then change coaches randomly in Dortmund, where I wasn’t fully convinced I’d got on the right one. I listened to Stephen Fretwell through the Polish countryside, not really knowing what I’d got myself in for. We broke down an hour outside Warsaw in Wloclawek, the most deprived city in the country, and had to get the train for the remainder. Everything was closed in the middle of the day, and the train station had no platform to stand on. I don’t think it makes the Lonely Planet guidebook. It was a city of rubble. It was like a Soviet Slough with huge slabs of concrete that had paintwork peeling off rotten buildings. The place is famous for the largest hydroelectric power plant in Poland and for making Wloclawek Ketchup. A review on Amazon describes it as “The poorest excuse for tomato sauce I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.” Kujawiak Wloclawek, the most well-known side from the city, folded in 2008, and there’s several abandoned stadiums to choose from for a wander. It feels like it’s given up on itself. 

Nearly 24 hours after I’d set off from my flat in Salford, I was in Warsaw. A city of contrasts. Stag dos on one side, underground war tunnels on the other.

In the city, Legia fans were visibly excited by the prospect of knockout European football; the last time was in 2017 against Ajax. Despite being 3–0 down from the first leg v Molde, a slim chance of progress remained. The game was a sell-out at the Stadion Wojska Polskiego, translated into English as the Army Stadium. There’s a very strong link to the Polish Armed Forces, who owned the ground, and the club were formed during World War I on the Eastern Front. 

A branded shooting range exists next to the stadium alongside a tennis and a golf club, Legia are a proper European sports club that we don’t really have over in the UK. Bits of metal point out on each corner, and green light bounces off them. It’s a 30,000 den of noise that feels like its own “Operation Conference League” on a European night. 

I walked over from the nearby Ujazdowski Park, past all the cafes serving dumplings and cheap hot dogs for five zloty. The smoke from the generators mixed with the Polish breath in the sky. There was so much security, 3-4 stewards on each turnstile in luminous green UEFA vests with “respect” printed into them, a staple of any European fixture.

It was one of those sharp, harsh nights in February. I’d bought a ticket in the opposite end to where the ultras normally sit, and the rumour was that they were going to replace them with children instead. Crowd trouble in an away fixture against Aston Villa meant that they’d already been banned for away games, and the ultras section for this game was also “closed.”

I took my seat in the upper tier opposite the banner that read, “THIS TIME YOU WON UEFA”. It was, as predicted, beneath a bunch of schoolkids all sat down trying to make an atmosphere by screeching in their high-pitched voices an hour before kick-off. Gradually, my end started to get more fans trying to climb into it. Problem was, I couldn’t move as huge corrugated bits of metal separated us from the away fans. Something was definitely happening, and 15 minutes later, I was in a headlock.