Poland v Brazil (1938)
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| Date | 5 June 1938 | ||||||
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| Venue | Stade de la Meinau, Strasbourg | ||||||
| Referee | Ivan Eklind (Sweden) | ||||||
| Attendance | 13 452 | ||||||
Poland v Brazil was a football match held during the 1938 FIFA World Cup in France and still remembered by Polish fans of this sport as the one in which Poland national football team debuted. To qualify to the tournament Poland had to beat only one team - Yugoslavia. In the first leg, on October 10, 1937 at Polish Army Stadium in Warsaw, Poland won 4-0 (goals by Leonard Piątek - 2, Jerzy Wostal and Ernest Wilimowski). In the second leg (at Stadion FK Partizan, Belgrad, April 3, 1938), Poles lost 0-1 (goal by Blagoje Marjanović) but, due to better goals difference, the white-reds qualified.
It is quite obvious that Józef Kałuża, manager of the National Team, and trainer Marian Spoida, decided to choose almost the same players who had beaten Yugoslavia. There was only one difference - injured Wostal (AKS Chorzów) was replaced by Warta Poznań's Fryderyk Scherfke.
To Strasbourg, France, where Poland was going to play its first game versus Brazil (June 5, 1938), Kałuża and Spoida took 15 players:
On the roster, there were two athletes who had never before put on a white-red jersey - midfielder Stanisław Baran and goalkeeper Walter Brom (who was then 17 years and 4 months old - up to this day Brom is the youngest goalkeeper on FIFA’s World Cup list of participants).
In Poland, on stand-by reserve, seven players stayed behind. Those were:
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