[OC] The Ekstraklasa's 2026/2027 geography

What This Visualization Shows

This data visualization displays "[OC] The Ekstraklasa's 2026/2027 geography" and provides a clear visual representation of the underlying data patterns and trends. The visualization focuses on Two matchdays into the new Ekstraklasa season, the map looks strange.

**Nothing in the north.** Only two of the 18 clubs are in the North, Pogoń Szczecin on the far western edge and Jagiellonia Białystok on the far eastern one. Between them, nothing. Gdańsk is Poland's second-biggest city (\~920k) and it has no top-flight club at all, because Lechia Gdańsk and Arka Gdynia went down together last season. The whole Tricity, roughly 1.5m people, is unrepresented. Every other city in Poland's top 12 by population has a club.

**Meanwhile, Kraków has three.** Wisła Kraków came back up after four years, Cracovia are already there, and Wieczysta Kraków were promoted for the first time in their history. Wisła and Wieczysta will actually share a ground. Wieczysta's own stadium doesn't meet top-flight licensing, so they're playing at Wisła's Stadion Miejski.

Add Katowice, Zabrze, Gliwice and Częstochowa and you get eight of the eighteen clubs packed into the southern belt, most within an hour's drive of each other.

Is this just how the promotion cycle fell this year, or is Polish football's centre of gravity permanently shifting south?

**Source**: [https://www.stadiumsofeurope.com/](https://www.stadiumsofeurope.com/)

**Data:** club/stadium locations, capacities and 2026/27 league composition compiled from Wikipedia and Transfermarkt. Coordinates cross-checked against Wikidata (P625).

**Basemap:** satellite imagery © Esri - World Imagery (Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics). Country boundaries from Natural Earth (public domain).

**Tool:** rendered server-side in Python with Pillow, a custom map-export renderer I wrote (projection, label placement and leader lines are all custom; labels are auto-placed into left/right columns so they never overlap the markers)., which allows us to understand complex relationships and insights within the data through visual storytelling.

Deep Dive into the Topic

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