Poland’s first football-club map! DZPN and Koleje Dolnośląskie promote rail travel

The Lower Silesian football map is a joint initiative of the Lower Silesian Football Association and Koleje Dolnośląskie.

– The map will help more than 700 teams reach their opponents’ grounds, while fans will be able to get to every football venue in Lower Silesia where senior football competition is held at all levels – says Andrzej Padewski, president of the Lower Silesian Football Association.

The map also includes all railway stops where the regional carrier’s trains—Koleje Dolnośląskie—stop.

– We encourage teams at every level to use Koleje Dolnośląskie services whenever possible. The Łużyce Lubań team travelled by train to one of its IV Liga matches. We are very pleased that KD is developing on a scale unseen in Poland, because this allows us to reach an increasing number of places where clubs play their football matches – adds

No other Voivodeship Football Association in Poland has yet created a similar map.

What interesting features does the map offer?

The map marks the locations where 709 senior teams participating in competitions at all levels play their matches, from Ekstraklasa to B-Klasa, the lowest division in Lower Silesia. It also marks the locations of teams participating in women’s competitions.

Map users can select any icon on the map and click the “get directions” button; in Google Maps, they can then choose their mode of transport to that location. This also includes routes using Koleje Dolnośląskie, as the carrier’s trains are visible in Google Maps.

– Everyone can find a football event in their area, most often held once every two weeks. We invite everyone to football venues—not only those hosting matches at the central level – says Adam Michalik, director of the DZPN office in the Legnica subdistrict.

Take the train to a football spectacle!

In addition to more than 700 team locations, the map includes 286 railway stops and stations where Koleje Dolnośląskie trains stop.

– Many fans from around the world attend football matches, regardless of the level of competition. The idea for the map also partly arose from personal experience: it is often difficult to find the locations where teams play at all levels. That is why we undertook this initiative with the Lower Silesian Football Association – says Andrzej Padniewski from the press office of Koleje Dolnośląskie.

The map is available at: bit.ly/MapaDZPN

The map offers numerous features—for example, when opened on a mobile phone, it can be added to Google Maps so that users can always see the clubs playing nearby.

Nearly 1,000 points on the map!

– In total, we added nearly 1,000 records to the map, so it is natural that a small number of locations, division groups or even new pitch locations may not match those from last season. We kindly ask clubs and fans to submit any comments; we have prepared a special form for reporting inaccuracies, and its link can be found on the website of the Lower Silesian Football Association – adds Łukasz Czajkowski, DZPN vice-president for organisational and financial affairs.

This type of map has been created for the first time—neither the PZPN nor any Voivodeship Football Association has so far published all locations where senior football matches are held in every competition in a given region.

– We invite residents of Lower Silesia, as well as groundhoppers—stadium tourists—from across Europe to use the map – says Bartłomiej Rodak, press spokesperson for Koleje Dolnośląskie.

The map’s authors emphasise that if other associations wanted to join the initiative, so that a map covering other voivodeships could eventually be created, the data can be exported to other projects.

Koleje Dolnośląskie is a company of the Marshal’s Office of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship and has operated regional services for 16 years. Over the past several years, it has reached new towns that had been cut off from rail services for years and are home to around 200,000 residents of Lower Silesia. Passengers themselves consider KD Poland’s best regional carrier, according to a survey by the Transport Economics Association.

The Lower Silesian Football Association, in turn, is an organisation affiliated with the PZPN that runs competitions involving thousands of female and male players throughout Lower Silesia.