Polish football fan completes 100 km charity walk to meet goalscoring keeper

A football fan has walked over 100 kilometres to honour a pledge and pay homage to a goalkeeper who achieved the rare feat of scoring a goal during a top-flight Polish league match.

He documented his journey on social media and raised 14,000 zloty (€3,243) for a boy in need of heart surgery.

In February, Jan Jurek vowed to complete a walk to the stadium of any team whose goalkeeper scored in that round of matches of the Ekstraklasa, Poland’s top level of men’s football competition.

And the joke was on him on 1 April, when Gabriel Kobylak of Radomiak Radom beat his opposite number from just outside his own area in a match against Puszcza Niepołomice, the first goalkeeper to score from the field of play since the Ekstraklasa’s inception.

Jurek, a fan of his hometown team Wisła Sandomierz as well as Real Madrid, decided to honour his pledge, and set off on the walk from Sandomierz to Radom, a journey of over 100 kilometres (60 miles).

He documented his four-day-long journey on social media, encouraging people to donate money to a fundraising campaign for a boy in need of heart surgery.

“Donating for Krzyś is definitely easier than walking on stones,” he wrote on his profile on X.

Having reached his destination, Jurek attended a match between Radomiak and Zagłębie Lublin. After the match, he posted a photo with Kobylak, who did not add to his goalscoring exploits as his team were on the wrong end of a 4-3 scoreline.

Confirming the sum of over 14,000 zloty raised for the heart surgery, Jurek wrote: “This money will help save the life of a little boy. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”

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Main image credit: Radomiak Radom

Agata Pyka

Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.