Club Stories: the rapid rise of Raków Częstochowa
Words Neel Shelat
2022/23 seems to be the season for first-time title winners in Europe.
Seven such champions have already been crowned across the men’s top flights, including Farul Constanța in Romania, Aris Limassol in Cyprus, Swift Hesperange in Luxembourg and Struga in North Macedonia.
Many of these have been surprise successes where these teams have put together incredible seasons while the traditional top sides have slipped up, but the same cannot be said of proceedings in Poland.
In the Ekstraklasa, Raków Częstochowa won their first top-flight league title in their 103-year history, but it has been no fluke. They finished as the runners-up in the last two, when they also won their first major honours in the form of the cup, so this league success has been coming.
But it has only been coming for the last few years. Before that, not even the most ambitious of Raków fans would have so much as entertained the thought of getting anywhere near the top-flight title. At that time, they were kicking about in the third tier of Polish football, where they were on a run of lower mid-table finishes.
In fact, no Raków fans would’ve ever thought of winning the top-flight title at any point in their history. Perhaps the only time such an idea wouldn’t be met with complete ridicule was the mid-1990s, when the club was promoted to the Ekstraklasa for the first time ever.
Prior to that, there only are a couple of highlights in Raków’s history. The first is their foundation in 1921 as Racovia by members of a youth organisation associated with the Polish Socialist Party. However, they were not granted registration in nearby regional associations and disbanded in 1925.
A couple of years later, the club was revived as RKS Raków Częstochowa. They still didn’t get registration in any major regional association but performed well locally. They experienced some financial difficulties at a time of political instability, but the onset of World War II meant that none of that mattered. Of course, the club’s operations completely stopped during the German occupation, when a number of people affiliated with the club were killed.
In the post-war period, Raków was initially hindered by the rapid development of Częstochowa largely thanks to its steelworks industry, as their pitch was taken over and used for construction. Slowly, though, facilities for the club were built too and Raków’s football team started to rise to national prominence.
The other big highlight in Raków’s pre-Ekstraklasa history is the 1967 cup final, which they reached as a third-tier team. They held Wisła Kraków to a goalless draw for 90 minutes, but conceded twice in extra time. They came close to replicating this run five years later when they reached the semi-final of the cup before being eliminated at the hands of Legia Warszawa.
In terms of silverware, Raków’s under-15s’ success at a national youth tournament in 1985 was the best they got. Their first senior second-tier title and promotion to the Ekstraklasa came nine years later, with a squad containing some of the youth tournament champions.
Their stay in the big time didn’t last long and just four seasons in the Ekstraklasa, with one top-half finish later and it all came quickly crashing down. After their relegation from the top-flight in 1998, they just missed out on immediately winning promotion but then suffered back-to-back relegations and plummeted to the fourth tier.
Around this time, one Michał Świerczewski was studying at the Częstochowa University of Technology. He was born and brought up in the Southern Polish city and was a fan of Raków like most kids his age who followed football in Częstochowa. Like any fan of any club, he wanted to lead his team to glory, but it was always clear to him that he would not be able to do so on the pitch.
Świerczewski founded consumer electronics company X-Kom in 2002, when Raków Częstochowa completed their first season down in the fourth tier. The club stagnated and made it no further than the third tier after their promotion in 2005. The exact opposite was true for X-Kom, who capitalised on a boom in demand and was one of the first to venture into the online market. The company’s turnover crossed a million euros in 2005 and has only gone from strength to strength since.
Today, X-Kom is one of the biggest electronics suppliers in Poland, and Świerczewski is among the country’s wealthiest individuals. He put some of that wealth to use for the betterment of his boyhood club, starting in 2011 when X-Kom became their main sponsor. Then, in 2015, Świerczewski completed a full takeover of the club.
His shrewd business brain helped make him his millions and seemingly proved very useful in charge of Raków too. He is credited with modernising the club’s administrative approach and developing infrastructure. At the same time, he hasn’t been afraid to take risks.
Raków’s first managerial appointment after the takeover saw Marek Papszun take charge in 2016. This certainly was an eyebrow-raising decision, as the then-41-year-old had no experience in professional football. He had done a fair bit of work at some small lower-league clubs, but was making his living as a school teacher after studying history and physical education.
Papszun didn’t even arrange for permanent accommodation and lived with some of his assistants immediately after moving to Częstochowa, as he was unsure how long he would last at the club. His tenure didn’t get off to the best of starts and was met with he was met with dissatisfaction from the fans, but soon enough, he turned things around.
At the end of the 2016/17 season, Raków won the league and promotion to the second tier. They finished a comfortable seventh in their first season, before going on to win that league too and seal a return to the top flight. At the time of the takeover, Świerczewski proclaimed that he would get the club back to the Ekstraklasa by 2019 and he delivered.
Papszun and his coaching staff certainly deserve a lot of credit for that and what followed too. They stuck by a very attractive brand of football that has been great to watch and has consistently delivered results through the divisions, while also developing players both from the youth academy and those signed for relatively cheap fees from elsewhere.
After comfortably staying up in their first season back in the big time, Raków got right in the mix with the big boys. They were runners-up in 2019/20 and finished just five points behind Legia Warszawa, winning a spot in the UEFA Europa Conference League qualifiers. Meanwhile, they finally won their first major trophy, staging a late turnaround against second-tier Arka Gdynia to win the cup 2-1.
That was followed by another season where they narrowly missed out on the league title and won the cup again, beating league winners Lech Poznań in the final this time. Raków were consistently performing at the level of the best sides in the country and so their first Ekstraklasa title seemed inevitable.
It finally arrived in 2022/23, in a season in which they dominated the league. After establishing a lead at the top in early October, Raków never looked back and maintained a healthy gap to the chasing party, which became mathematically unassailable just a few days after they lost the cup final to Legia on penalties.
This could well be the first of many Ekstraklasa titles for Raków, but it certainly will be the end of an era. Very recently, Papszun announced that he would be leaving when his contract runs down at the end of the season after rejecting various extension offers. No one knows where he is headed next, but his signature will certainly be in high demand.
So Świerczewski and Raków have a big decision to make while the title party goes on, and it shouldn’t end anytime soon. Given how well they have been functioning so far, though, it is hard to see their success came to a sudden stop. Don’t be surprised to see Raków Częstochowa go on a European conquest next season as they enter the UEFA Champions League qualifiers.
Image courtesy of RKS Raków Częstochowa’s twitter
