Urban is the best current option

Jan Urban is not Carlo Ancelotti. And he has never pretended to be. 

But, Urban is the right choice to be the next head coach of the Polish national team. 

Ideally, the best choice would be Maciej Skorza or Marek Papszun, but both are currently leading successful clubs. Skorza just finished the Club World Cup with Japanese Urawa, is a coach who has job security and a good paying job for a prominent Asian football club. To leave that, for a team half-way through qualifying for the World Cup, which Poland has small odds of making, just wouldn't make sense.

Rashford had to leave Manchester United

Things are not always as great as they seem. Marcus Rashford, a homegrown talent, a boyhood supporter of Manchester United and statistically one of the best producers ever at the club. Rashford scored 138 goals in 426 matches for Manchester United, that's 15th all-time on the clubs scoring list. 

But things got shaky at United following Erik Ten Hag's first season as manager when the club finished 3rd with 75 points, and Rashford was the catalyzed scoring 17 goals. The following season, Rashford scored just 7, in a downward spiral season which United just wasn't able to find any chemistry. Fans quickly used Rashford as a whipping boy. 

Wolfsburg has the most wasted potential in the league

Wolfsburg just missed a Europa league spot by one point last season after the team dropped their final two matches to Freiburg and Hertha Berlin. A finish like that would normally ring an alarm bell. But for Wolfsburg the season was still seen as a positive one. Wolfsburg had one of the youngest teams in the league and the club was ready to invest in Nico Kovač's team to make a push forward and contend for a top-6 spot this upcoming season.

However, this season hasn't gone the way anybody could've predicted. 

Tomczyk is betting on himself

It was supposed to have been Spain? Or a club from England? Or maybe a move to Belgium? The options available to Poland U17 star striker Oskar Tomczyk last summer seemed endless. Labeled as potentially one of the players who could eventually fill Robert Lewandowski's national team void after he retires.

Tomczyk was one of the key players for one of the most successful age groups in Polish youth football history. In U16, he scored 11 goals in 9 matches. For the U17, he scored 12 goals in 14 matches, including a goal in the U17 European championships. 

The American Dream

The football landscape is always changing and the destinations and routes players take are also constantly changing. United States' Major League Soccer, for years seen by many as a retirement league, has more accurately become a transition league. The league has made a lot of money by signing notably young South American talents and selling them for a big profit margin to Europe. 

This path has also recently been used by Polish players looking to find a bridge deal into Europe's top-5 leagues. These players are essentially too good to stay in Poland but also not good enough yet for a top European league. A report from Meczyki on Wednesday said Legia Warszawa's Bartosz Slisz is close to a deal with Atlanta United.

Plain and simple: Santos won't be missed

It had the makings of a great journey similarly to the time when Leo Beenhakker became the Polish national team head coach. Poland needed a boost, and the teams style of play left nobody impressed at the winter's World Cup in Qatar. The team advanced, by some miracle, despite being rated as the worst team at the tournament with the worst style of any of the 32 teams. The team needed help and someone with the resume of Fernando Santos who not only can get results but also play with a style that Polish fans and players can be proud of.

On January 24, 2023, it seemed like a perfect match. Santos was hired to guide a aging Polish team, fix their issues on the fly and not only make it to Euro 2024, but also make a run and play a attractive style of play at the same time. He said all the right things at his opening press conference. He'll be living in Poland, he will attend Polish league matches, he will work with youth coaches and in player development, he said maybe the Portuguese do some things different then in Poland and he can help close the gaps.

Champions on the bench

On paper it would look like Poland's defense might be the strength of the team. Jan Bednarek and Matty Cash regulars in the Premier League, Robert Gumny a regular for Augsburg in Germany, Kamil Glik a reliable veteran who had a glorious career in Seria A and Ligue 1 and always is a impact player for the national team, and two, soon-to-be league champions in Jakub Kiwior with Arsenal and Bartosz Bereszynski with Napoli. 

Except, the games arent played on paper. Glik is 35 and past his best. Bednarek also has seen his form drop in the past year and Kiwior and Bereszynski, play on clubs who have much better options ahead of them and are there for depth purposes.