Władysławowo and Sarajevo: Two Small Cities Holding the Pulse of European Table Tennis's Future

There is a detail in the ETTU announcement that I read over and over, not because it shocked me, but because it was so ordinary that it was easy to overlook. The governing body of the European Table Tennis Union has just awarded hosting rights for two youth championships to two countries: Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Władysławowo will host the 2028 European Under 13 Championships. Sarajevo will host the 2028 European Under 21 Championships the same year.

Skimming through, one could fold it away and forget it immediately. No athlete is named. No match is mentioned. There is not a single performance figure, a single ranking, a single record. It is a purely administrative announcement, and by ordinary logic, it will pass by without leaving a trace.

But for someone who has spent nine years following this sport, an announcement like this is a place worth pausing. Because the most important decisions in world table tennis are rarely made under the spotlight. They are signed in closed meeting rooms, years before the event takes place, by people the audience never sees.

There was no chair for me in that press room that day, but I brought my own chair. That chair, today, brings me to a question that seems very small: why did the ETTU choose exactly these two cities, at exactly this moment, for the youngest and the most mature age brackets of the European youth system?

Because here lies an interesting contrast. A small town on the Baltic coast of Poland, tied to a training centre that has existed for decades. And a capital that has been through war, where memory is still etched into every wall. The two places have nothing to do with each other geographically, historically, or in sporting tradition, yet they are placed side by side in a single decision.

To understand this announcement properly, it must be placed in its frame. The ETTU - the European Table Tennis Union - is the continental governing body. Its Executive Board is where the final decision on allocating hosting rights for continental championships is made. This is not a process based on publicly available points that anyone can look up and verify. It is a subjective decision by a governing body. When the ETTU announces a host city, it announces the result, not the path to it.

The two championships sit at the two ends of the youth system. U13 is the earliest age bracket to have structured international competition. U21 is the last bracket before entering the senior arena. Placed side by side, they draw a pipeline: from early talent identification to transition into the national team. And the ETTU has just decided that this pipeline, at its two end points, will run through Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

What stands out is the timing. The year 2028 is not an ordinary year. It is the year of the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics. Any sporting event falling in an Olympic year has to compete for attention - and a European youth championship, by ordinary logic, would be at the back of the queue.

This is where I need to be clear about the limits of the information. This announcement contains no player data, no technical data, no tactical data, no equipment information. It contains only seven discrete facts, all revolving around the question of which city hosts which championship. Therefore, the analysis here cannot be an analysis based on competitive data. It must be an analysis based on context and institution - and I will make clear whenever I am inferring rather than citing facts.

Let us begin with the two locations themselves, because a location often tells a story that the press release does not.

Władysławowo is a coastal town in northern Poland, on the Baltic shore. The competition venue mentioned is Cetniewo - a sports training centre that has existed for a long time, one that has hosted generations of Polish athletes across different eras. This is not a flashy arena with a capacity of tens of thousands. It is a training facility, a place people go to work rather than to perform. Choosing Cetniewo for the U13 bracket carries an implicit message: this championship is seen as part of the training process, not a showcase event.

This fits the development logic of youth table tennis. At U13, what matters is not who wins. What matters is how a child holds the paddle, how the child moves the feet, how the child forms habits in the first three shots. This is the stage when the technical foundation is set in concrete, and small deviations here will follow the athlete throughout a career. A championship at this age is not about finding the best on the day, but about creating a next generation. And a training centre like Cetniewo is a more fitting environment for that goal than any urban arena.

At the other end, Sarajevo. Arena Hills is the venue mentioned for the U21 championship. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a table tennis powerhouse. It is a country with a sporting tradition but not among the European leaders in table tennis. Awarding the hosting rights for a U21 championship - the bracket closest to the national team, the one federations place the most expectations on - to such a country is a signal. It shows that the ETTU is thinking about broadening the base, not just concentrating on the traditional centres of power on the continent.

If one looks at the map of countries hosting European youth championships in recent years, a pattern emerges. Hosting rights tend to rotate, rather than being concentrated in a few countries. Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, two countries with very different foundations, both receive rights in the same year. This is a sign of an allocation policy aimed at stimulating local development, rather than maximising commercial benefit in large markets.

But there is another factor, less noticed, and in my view more important than all the rest: 2028 is an Olympic year. This means the two youth championships will take place in a year when the entire attention of the table tennis world is directed at Los Angeles. The pressure of the calendar, the scattering of media attention, and even the availability of young athletes are all affected by this reality.

With a U21 championship, this is especially sensitive. Many athletes in the U21 bracket are on the boundary between the youth team and the national team. Some of them may be competing for an Olympic spot or preparing for the next cycle. If the European U21 championship falls at an unfavourable point in the Olympic preparation calendar, some member federations may face a difficult choice between sending their best athletes to Sarajevo and keeping them for larger goals.

This is the point where institutional analysis touches competitive reality. An administrative decision - choosing a host city - can quietly shape the quality of a championship. If the calendar is not arranged skilfully, the 2028 U21 championship in Sarajevo could be missing the strongest European players in that age bracket. And when that happens, the value of the championship as a measure of development diminishes considerably.

I once sat in the Luzhniki stands during the 2026 World Cup final, watching Luka Modrić complete 63 passes with a 91 percent accuracy rate despite being surrounded by three players. The lesson I drew that year was not in the goals, but in this: the true value of a match lies in the gaps between the passes. In table tennis, the equivalent gap lies in the distance between an administrative decision and a 19-year-old athlete wondering whether to go to Sarajevo.

Now let us talk about the pipeline structure. The existence of both a U13 championship and a U21 championship in the same year shows that the ETTU operates a continuous development system. U13 is the starting point: talent identification. U21 is the point near the finish: transition into the national team. Between those two points is a span of eight years, enough for a 12-year-old child to become a 20-year-old athlete, enough for an unknown player to become a name that federations must reckon with.

Numbers do not lie, but they only tell stories when someone is willing to listen. Here, the only number is 2028. But behind that number is a preparation period of more than two years, counting from the moment of the announcement. Two years for Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina to build facilities, train personnel, organise logistics, and most importantly, to cultivate a generation of young athletes who will compete at home.

This is why I argue that the true value of this announcement is not in itself, but in what it will trigger over the next two years. A country granted the right to host a youth championship tends to invest in infrastructure and youth development programmes during the preparation period. That is the ripple effect the press release does not mention, yet it is the most important part of the story.

For Poland, a country with a solid training tradition, the U13 championship at Cetniewo could reinforce its position as a training hub of Europe. For Bosnia and Herzegovina, the U21 championship in Sarajevo could be an opportunity to reposition the country's sporting image, and to spark a new wave of interest in table tennis across the Balkan region.

But caution is needed. The commercial scale of a continental youth championship is small. There is no big prize money, no big broadcasting contract, no market pull like the senior events. Its value is developmental and structural, not commercial. Anyone expecting this announcement to change the face of European table tennis in the short term will be disappointed.

Here I want to turn in a different direction, because there is something in the way the ETTU announced this decision that makes me pause.

The announcement does not mention any competition to win the hosting rights. No evaluation criteria are published. No names of rejected candidates appear. The ETTU announces the result, and stops there. This is common practice for sports federations, but it raises a question about transparency.

As someone who was once questioned about her competence solely because of gender, in a press room with 19 male reporters and only me as a woman, I have a certain sensitivity to closed decision-making processes. In 2026, I prepared a spreadsheet on 47 off-ball runs by a central midfielder and was asked bluntly by a senior colleague: "Are you sure you understand tactics?" I did not argue back. I simply put all the data on the table. That weekend, my analysis piece was shared by three senior editors.

I tell that story not to talk about myself, but to talk about a principle: a decision is only trustworthy when people can verify how it was reached. With youth championships, the evaluation criteria matter even more, because that is where small countries have a chance to compete fairly with large ones. If the process is not transparent, that chance can be distorted from the start.

This leads to a paradox. European table tennis is striving to broaden its base to compete with the dominance of Asia, especially China. Awarding hosting rights to Bosnia and Herzegovina is a step in that direction, an effort to bring table tennis to regions that have not been fully tapped. But if the awarding process itself lacks transparency, then the goal of broadening the base could be undermined by the very way it is carried out.

There is one more point that must be faced squarely. While senior championships receive media attention, youth championships - where the technical and tactical foundation is truly formed - remain almost invisible. I once went through an empty summer in 2026, when the pandemic postponed 27 interviews and stadiums closed. The empty summer taught me that sport is the heartbeat of society. And that heartbeat, in table tennis, beats loudest in places the cameras do not point at.

At youth championships, there are no packed stands, no lucrative sponsorship deals, no flashbulbs. There are only the children, the coaches, and the parents sitting in the top row. If we look only at the senior events, we will miss most of the story of this sport. Because every world champion was, at some point, a child standing in a nearly empty arena.

So what happens next?

In the base-case scenario, both championships will proceed as planned in 2028. Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina will prepare, member federations will send athletes, and the ETTU will fulfil its development and rotation objectives. This is the most probable scenario, and it is also the least attention-grabbing one.

But there are other scenarios worth watching. If one of the two locations fails to meet the ETTU's technical or organisational standards, or runs into financial and logistical trouble, the hosting rights may have to be reallocated closer to 2028. This is the execution risk inherent in any hosting decision made far in advance. And for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country with more limited resources, this risk needs close monitoring.

On the other hand, if all goes smoothly, these two championships could create a lasting effect. A generation of young Polish and Bosnian athletes inspired by competing at home. Facilities upgraded and continuing to be used after the event. And most importantly, a signal sent to other small countries that European table tennis has room for them.

There is one thing I want to emphasise here, and it concerns how we view sports news. We tend to notice only what happens on the table: the rallies, the points, the victories. But much of what shapes this sport happens long before, in decisions no one remembers by name. A city chosen to host a U13 championship in 2028 today could be the beginning of a twenty-year journey of an athlete whose name we do not yet know.

When the stage lights go out, I still hear my own question. And that question, today, is not who will win the 2028 European U13 championship. The question is: among the children who will train at Cetniewo and compete in Sarajevo, how many will still be standing at the table ten years later? And will we, the reporters, have the patience to follow the answer, or will we simply return to the scoreboards and the already-famous players?