The Numbers That Left Him Speechless
A journalist had raised the findings of a study conducted by the University of Physical Education in Warsaw, known as AWF, which revealed that 86% of children in their first three years of primary school struggle to control a ball bounced off a wall. For Lewandowski, Poland's national team captain, the figure was hard to process. "Dramatic results," he said, before repeating "I'm in shock" three separate times. The 38-year-old striker, who now plays for MLS club Chicago Fire following a decorated career at Bayern Munich and Barcelona, admitted he had no idea things had gotten this bad. "It looks terrible. I didn't know it was that bad," he said, adding that his concern wasn't really about competitive sport, but about basic wellbeing. "Sport is health. Sport affects our posture, how we think and how we feel." He called for reform starting from the ground up, insisting that young children need to be encouraged to move more, warning that inactivity was already translating into more doctor visits among kids.

A Pattern That's Been Building for Years
This isn't a one-off finding. The data comes from "WF z AWF," a government-backed initiative run by AWF Warsaw that has been monitoring the physical fitness of Polish schoolchildren since 2021. When the program's most recent results came out earlier this spring, Professor Bartosz Molik, the university's rector, publicly stressed the need for trained physical education specialists to work with young children on developing basic motor skills. The broader picture painted by the research hasn't been encouraging at any point. Among children aged six to nine, currently in grades one through three, 89% are unable to skip rope properly, and 86% can't manage the wall-and-catch ball exercise. On top of that, researchers have noted a clear drop in cardiorespiratory fitness among Polish schoolchildren over the last ten years.

Lewandowski's Personal Take
The topic came up again this week when Professor Molik discussed the findings in a broadcast interview, which is what prompted the question to Lewandowski ahead of Poland's upcoming Nations League matches. Given that both his parents worked as PE teachers, Lewandowski said he understood all too well how easily children get excused from physical education classes and how loosely they're graded. "Let children be assessed fairly," he urged. "As a parent, I can't imagine my children being anywhere near these statistics. I don't want them to be athletes, but I want them to be healthy, so I want them to play sport." He credited his own lasting fitness to having played a variety of sports as a kid and encouraged more people to simply walk or cycle more often. Even as he walked away from the table, he kept muttering, "86%. A disaster."