The Polish Ekstraklasa has been, over the last five years, one of the most interesting championships in European football. The quality of the league, in general, is actually very high, with some impressive technical players on the top sides. Still, the most interesting aspect in recent seasons is that no dominant team exists. Legia Warsaw are traditionally the giant of Polish football, but Lech Poznan and Rakow Czestochowa have been impressive lately. The fact that the league has been more competitive than we may otherwise have seen means that player development has also been more interesting, and as a result, it has emerged as a more interesting market from a recruitment perspective.
Polish players have a reputation for being physically capable and having a strong technical base. Indeed, the Estraklasa is typically one of the most physically demanding leagues in Europe, and as such, players from Polish clubs are seen as capable of playing at a high level and in leagues that are more intense in terms of the pace of play and the speed required.
The purpose of this article is to shine a spotlight on some interesting players who are currently playing in the Polish top flight. In order to do so, we will perform a data analysis using data and statistics as the initial tool to cut through the noise and identify the players for this article. We will then drill down into those players specific performances this season using performance data and visualisations showing their quality and tendencies. However, we will not focus only on young players in this article as there is a tendency when writing player recruitment articles to concentrate on young players. Instead, we will provide an analysis of four players who are all around their prime and that we believe will be interesting clubs from outside Poland.
To balance our article, we have identified one striker, one central defender, one central midfielder, and one winger.
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Erik Exposito, 27 years old, Striker, Slask Wroclaw and Spain
Lets start with the striker position. The above scattergraph is designed to showcase interesting players who are performing well in terms of non-penalty goals per 90 but also who have stronger outputs in terms of xG per shot. In other words, we want to identify players who are scoring goals at a decent rate but who are also taking their shots from positions that yield a relatively high xG.
Erik Exposito is a 27-year-old Spanish striker who is currently playing for one of the less high profile teams in the Ekstraklasa in Slask Wroclaw. The Spanish striker is a product of the youth academy in Malaga, Spain, although he moved on a free transfer in 2016 to Las Palmas. He played for second teams in the Spanish lower leagues and had a loan spell at Cordoba before leaving Spain on a free transfer in 2019 to join Slask Wroclaw. So far this season, the Spaniard has had 14 goals and three assists in 24 league games.
