Soccer Poker

Laguna was a good footballer once; when injury ended his playing career he spent years working his way up to become an international referee. He sees everything around him: the arrangements between clubs, the fixed matches, the money passing under the table. In the end he decides to finish his own career with something extraordinary and plans to script the league’s final round himself, taking bribes from the interested clubs, writing the results in advance and staging what he calls a miracle Sunday. Janusz Zaorski’s film is not really about football. It is about Poland at the end of the eighties, a rotting system described in the costume of a sports comedy, dressed that way on purpose to get past the censors. Janusz Gajos takes the lead. It opened in Warsaw in March 1989 and became a cult film in Poland.