The 'Bad Girls' of AKS Zły are also doing well this season, 2018. All rights reserved.It's a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-August and fans crowd the Don Pedro Arena of Kawęczyńska street. Thirty minutes ahead of the preliminary round of the Polish Cup, the 200 tickets printed for the first match of the season of the home team have already sold out. On the proudly uncovered stands of the little stadium sit a heterogeneous mix of people. We're in Warsaw in the former working district of Praga by the eastern bank of the Vistula River. It's on this peripheral football pitch, nestled between social housing blocks and an abandoned factory, that AKS Zły play.
The Don Pedro Arena sits one and a half miles from Warsaw's National Stadium as the bird flies. It's in the parking lot of this stadium that on November 11, 2017, up to 60,000 Poles gathered to celebrate Poland's National Independence Day. Thousands among them did so by marching behind banners and flags of far-right European movements (from Poland's ONR to Hungary's Jobbik and Italy's Forza Nuova) as well as chanting anti-Islam slogans. It was a show of force of local nationalists believing in an all-white, catholic, no-LGBT, migrant-free country.
First half
The 'Alternative Sport Club Zły’ (meaning 'Bad') is miles away from such discourses. “Our history began in August 2015 with twenty football enthusiasts who wanted to create their own independent club,” Dominik – known as 'Ariel' and among the founders of Zły – says: “In doing so we took inspiration from supporters-managed clubs such as AFC Wimbledon in England and HFC Falke in Germany. We met with the founders of the latter, saw how they ran it and came back to Warsaw to try the same.”
