Władysławowo and Sarajevo Awarded the 2028 European U13 and U21 Championships: Two Addresses, One Development Pipeline

I still remember an afternoon in a junior hall where the sound of a ball bouncing on the table came so steadily that you could count the breathing of the whole room. No stage lights, no big screen, no livestream. Just about thirty children aged twelve and thirteen, each holding a paddle longer than their own wrist, and a few adults scattered across the stands — mostly parents, the rest people who work in the trade like me. Then, on another morning, I opened my inbox and read a short notice from the European Table Tennis Union. Władysławowo, Poland would host the 2028 European Under-13 Championships. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina would host the 2028 European Under-21 Championships the same year. Two lines, two addresses, one year. Not a single player was named. Not a single scoreboard was offered. The contrast between those two scenes made me sit with it longer than usual. On one side, children learning to count the rhythm of the ball with their whole bodies. On the other, an executive board deciding where and when their future would unfold. Those two worlds are joined by one thin thread, and that thread is called a system. A young player does not need a spotlight; they need someone who knows how to flip the switch. But for someone to flip the switch, there first has to be a room, a table, a tournament, an address written on the international calendar. That is why a notice that looks dry on the surface deserves to be taken apart to the bone. CONTEXT: ONE BOARD, TWO ADDRESSES Before discussing meaning, some background facts are needed for readers unfamiliar with the European table tennis system. The ETTU — the European Table Tennis Union — is the continental body governing table tennis in Europe. Its Executive Board holds the authority to allocate European championships, including the youth tier. The decision just announced fits exactly that mould: one Executive Board meeting, two hosting rights awarded, and a target date more than two years away. The first notable detail is how the two events were split and handed to two different countries. The 2028 European Under-13 Championships go to Władysławowo, a seaside town in northern Poland. The 2028 European Under-21 Championships go to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Same year, two addresses, two countries, two age tiers. This is an allocation model I have observed across many youth seasons: continental organisers rarely concentrate a whole year in one place, instead splitting events so more member associations share the hosting benefit. One clarification matters to avoid confusion. This announcement contains no competitive data whatsoever. No player names, no rankings, no technical metrics, no concrete match schedule, no prize structure. It answers exactly one question: in 2028, where will these two continental youth championships be held. Any deeper analysis must proceed from structure and context, not from match data — because quite simply there are no matches to discuss yet. For someone in my line of work, the value of such a notice lies elsewhere. It is a marker on a timeline. It tells you what the organisers are thinking about the near future of the sport, which tier they want to invest in, and which regions they want to pull the sport toward. Reading a hosting notice is like reading the foundation plan of a house not yet built: you cannot see the living room, but you can see where they intend to put the house. WHY WŁADYSŁAWOWO — AND THE NAME CETNIEWO Władysławowo is not a random name. The town is linked to Cetniewo, a sports training centre widely known in Poland, which many sports have used as a training and event base. For an Under-13 event, choosing a location tied to a training centre carries very concrete meaning: the facilities for training already exist, accommodation for teams is available, and there is an ecosystem used to receiving youth sports delegations. I have passed through centres like this in many places. Their common feature is that they are not flashy. No ten-thousand-seat arena. But they have what large halls often lack: many tables placed side by side, lighting even enough that a twelve-year-old is not blinded when looking up, and enough quiet that the sound of the ball becomes the dominant sound. For the Under-13 tier, those details matter more than any light show. Under the pressing layer, there is a gem no one has picked up. But to pick up that gem, someone must place a sieve in the right spot. An Under-13 championship held at a training centre is such a sieve. It does not create talent, but it gathers talent into one place, lets them meet, lets them measure their rhythm against each other. For a twelve-year-old leaving a local hall for the first time to reach a continental event, that trip may be the first time in their life they see where they stand on the world map. Poland, by tradition, is a country with relatively stable sporting infrastructure in general and table tennis in particular within Europe. This is not a risky choice. It is a safe choice in organisational terms, yet open in developmental terms: an Under-13 event in Poland can pull youth training programmes in the region forward across the two-year build-up. The organisers are not just giving Poland a tournament. They are giving Poland a reason to invest. What I want readers to remember here is the time window. Hosting rights were awarded more than two years before the event. In those two years, a locality will have to upgrade facilities, train staff, and build a talent-identification programme strong enough to field a competitive home team. If they do it right, the event leaves behind a new generation. If they do it for show, it leaves behind a poster. The difference between those outcomes is not in today's decision but in the two years that follow. SARAJEVO AND A BALKAN SEED Sarajevo is the more interesting choice. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not among the traditional European table tennis powers such as Germany, Sweden or France. It is a smaller sports market with fewer resources and a particular history anyone who has visited the city can feel. Awarding the European Under-21 Championships — the transition tier to senior national teams — to such a country is a signal worth analysing. Arena Hills is the named venue. At Under-21 level, facility demands are higher than Under-13: more competition tables, a warm-up area, technical meeting rooms, stands for spectators and media. An Under-21 event is a far more serious test of organisational capacity than an Under-13 event. Giving this to Sarajevo means giving the city a chance to prove it can stage an event close to professional level. I saw that speed once, in Kazan, in 2026. Not the speed of a table tennis stroke, but the speed of a young generation running through the defensive lines of old assumptions about where talent must come from. When you stand in the stands and feel the ground tremble under your feet because a crowd reacts at once, you understand that context can change how talent is perceived. Sarajevo in 2028 may not shake like Kazan in 2026. But the same mechanism operates: place an event in a new context, and that context starts generating new stories. Regionally, the Balkans is an area European table tennis has long wanted to penetrate more deeply. Countries here have strong sporting traditions but lack even investment and international hosting opportunities. Giving an Under-21 event to Sarajevo is a way to create what I call an infrastructure seed: a major event forces a hall into being, forces people to be trained, forces coaches to appear, forces a local generation of players to be gathered. None of that grows by itself. It is planted by a decision. People call it fate; I call it a system already waiting. When a continental event comes to a region, it does not come alone. It brings standards, expectations, and the pressure to field a home team that is not eliminated in the group stage. And that very pressure can turn an administrative decision into a genuine development programme. U13 AND U21: TWO ENDS OF ONE PIPELINE The most important thing in this announcement is not the names of the two cities, but the two age numbers: 13 and 21. These two tiers are the two ends of a development pipeline, and the ETTU operating both simultaneously shows how it views the future of the sport on this continent. Under-13 is the starting point. This is the age at which technical foundations — grip, footwork, the habits of the first three shots of every rally — are formed and largely fixed. A twelve-year-old who learns to rotate their body the wrong way will still have to fix it ten years later. A continental Under-13 event therefore means far more than its results: it is an occasion to standardise foundational technique across a generation, because member associations are forced to prepare squads to a common standard. Under-21 is the transition point. This is the age at which a young athlete must decide whether they have what it takes to go professional. Results at Under-21 are the signal European national teams typically use to promote a player to the senior side. In other words, Under-21 is a gateway. Not everyone who passes through it succeeds professionally, but almost everyone who succeeds has passed through a gateway like it. The fact that these two tiers are held in two different countries in the same year says something structural: the ETTU is running its development pipeline as a continuous chain, not as discrete events. A child competing in Władysławowo at twelve could, eight years later, return to the same system in Sarajevo as an Under-21 player. Those two addresses are not just two cities. They are two legs of one journey. From the perspective of someone who has followed youth events for years, I consider this two-tier structure a genuine strength of European table tennis. Asia, with China and Japan at the top, has a more centralised and more closed development system, which allows talent to be pushed upward very fast but also risks missing those who do not clear the first selection round. Europe, with its network of independent nations and continental events like these, creates more entry points. More entry points means more chances for late developers, slow bloomers, or those from places without tradition. One detail I always watch when analysing youth events: the quality of the Under-13 cohort usually determines the quality of the Under-21 cohort six to eight years later, not the other way around. If Władysławowo 2028 is well run and draws in exactly the children who need to be seen, then Sarajevo and the Under-21 events of the 2030s will have a better resource base. That is how a development pipeline works — not through leaps, but through steady accumulation across age groups. 2028 AND THE SHADOW OF THE OLYMPICS One structural detail deserves its own section: 2028 is an Olympic year. The 2028 Summer Olympics take place in Los Angeles. This places the two European youth championships in a year when the entire attention of the world sports media will be pulled toward the host of the Games. The first consequence is about attention. Youth events are already lightly covered by mainstream media. In an Olympic year, that attention shrinks further. A European Under-13 event in Władysławowo will struggle to earn a slot in the evening sports bulletin when hundreds of stories about athletes preparing for the Games compete for the same space. This is a reality youth table tennis organisers must accept, not to complain about, but to compensate for through narrower, deeper media channels. The second consequence is about the calendar. An Olympic year usually has a dense event schedule, and national federations must balance preparing Olympic squads against sending youth squads to continental competitions. For countries with both Olympic athletes and promising youth players, resources — from coaches to travel budgets — get split. This is a low-level systemic risk, but not one to ignore when assessing the quality of an event held in an Olympic year. The third consequence, perhaps the most positive, is about legacy. Youth events held in an Olympic year are sometimes used as a channel to keep a sport present in the news cycle. When media talk only about the Games, having a youth event running alongside is a way to remind the public that the sport is still alive, still nurturing its next generation. For a sport like table tennis, which does not enjoy large media reach in Europe, that presence has its own value. I have witnessed how a small sports event gets swallowed by a bigger one held at the same time. No audience came. No press wrote. The athletes still gave everything, but outside the hall, the world barely knew what was happening. That was not the organisers' failure. It is the law of the attention flow. Understanding that law is the first condition for a youth event to create real value, wherever it is held. ALLOCATION POLICY: SPREADING TO BROADEN Back to the governance question. Who decides, and on what basis? According to the announcement, hosting rights were awarded by the ETTU Executive Board. This is a centralised governance action: one board, one decision, two hosting rights. Notably, the announcement names no evaluation criteria, mentions no rival candidates, and refers to no public bidding process with quantitative scoring. This is common to many hosting-allocation decisions in sports federations: they are the discretionary act of a governing body rather than the output of a transparent formula. What does that mean for the observer? It means we cannot fully trace why Władysławowo and Sarajevo were chosen over other locations. We can only infer from the allocation pattern. Awarding two events to two different countries — one with stable sports infrastructure, one smaller — fits the logic of rotation and broadening the talent base. Continental organisers have an incentive not to concentrate events in traditional powers, since doing so would leave the rest of the continent ever further behind. This model has a strength and a weakness. The strength is that it stimulates development in many places. A country awarded hosting rights gains an incentive to invest in facilities and youth programmes, because it does not want to lose face at home. The weakness is that it can lead to dispersion: resources get split, and organisational quality varies between editions. An event at a long-established training centre differs from one in a city hosting a continental event for the first time. I would add a note on transparency. Over years of following sports governance decisions, I have noticed that federations often publish the allocation outcome without publishing the basis for the decision. This does not necessarily mean anything is hidden. It simply means fans and media lack the tools to assess the reasonableness of a decision. For a youth event, the consequences of this opacity are small. But it is a pattern worth noting, because the same pattern can apply to far more important decisions. On the balance of interests, awarding hosting rights creates winners and losers. Władysławowo and Sarajevo win. The unnamed unsuccessful candidates lose. The announcement does not say how many other candidates there were, or who they were. That is an information gap, and like every information gap in sport, it will be filled by speculation if it is not filled by data. LOOKING AT ASIA TO SEE WHERE WE STAND To judge the importance of a decision like this properly, it must be placed in the larger picture of world table tennis. China remains the dominant power at professional level. Japan, South Korea, Germany, Sweden and France form the next tier, with Japan and France particularly strong in youth cohorts in recent years. Players such as Sweden's Truls Möregårdh or France's Felix and Alexis Lebrun are examples of how a European development system can produce players capable of competing with Asian rivals. But here is the point I want to stress: the emergence of a few elite talents does not mean an entire continent has a solid base. Europe can produce a Möregårdh, but the more important question is how many lower-tier players are being nurtured. European table tennis does not need another star. It needs a network thick enough that it does not depend on a few individuals. From that angle, holding Under-13 and Under-21 events in different locations, including a smaller country like Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a step in the right structural direction. It will not immediately produce a world-class generation. No administrative decision can do that. But it adds more nodes to the network, and the network is what determines a continent's long-term strength. I once sat at an Asian youth event and watched small teams eliminated in the group stage because the gap in level was too wide. I have also sat at a European youth event and watched matches where the weaker team could still win a game through tactics and preparation. That difference does not come from innate talent. It comes from opportunity. More tournaments, more chances for a young player to learn how to handle opponents at their own level. And sometimes, that is exactly what builds maturity. From frost-covered pitches to the podcast studio, I tell the stories no one hears. Among them are many stories about youth events no one covers. The children competing there have no fans, no sponsorship deals, no one analysing their technique. They have only a paddle and a chance. A notice like today's, with two city names and two age numbers, is how the system says those chances will continue to exist. THE COUNTER-INTUITIVE ANGLE: HOSTING DOES NOT CREATE TALENT Now to the part I always want to say, even when it unsettles the reader. A decision to award hosting rights is an administrative decision. It can create facilities, create competitive opportunities, create an event. It does not create talent. Talent is created by smaller, harder-to-see things: a patient local coach, a family able to send their child to train every day, a child with the physical and mental capacity to endure years of repeated failure. No administrative decision replaces those things. If a country receives hosting rights but has no talent-identification system at grassroots level, the event will take place and close leaving nothing but a few photographs. This is the blind spot I see in many announcements of this kind. They are presented as good news, and to a degree they genuinely are. But behind that good news lies a gap in accountability: no one commits that the two years of preparation will be used well. There is no public mechanism to assess whether the host country actually invests in youth development or merely in decorating the hall. I also want to raise a question about the closed-ecosystem model. When a youth event is held within a system where opportunities mainly go to those already inside it, it can become a self-reinforcing circle: children with early access keep receiving opportunities, while children on the margins drift further away. An Under-13 or Under-21 event does not automatically break that circle. Sometimes it reinforces it, by giving more data and opportunity to those already advantaged. A transfer fee is only a number; real value lies in the first lesson. The same holds for youth events: the number of tournaments is only a number; real value lies in what a child learns from each appearance. If behind a tournament stands a serious preparation system, that tournament has value. If behind it stands only an administrative decision and a poster, it has no value beyond a line in the annals. There is another rarely mentioned risk: the gap between a host country and the rest of the continent can widen rather than narrow. When a small country receives hosting rights, it must concentrate resources on a single event. If that event is not tied to a sustainable development programme, the country may invest once and then abandon it. The facilities remain, but the people do not. And facilities do not train talent by themselves. I do not write these lines to deny the value of the decision just announced. I write them to place a necessary question beside the joy. The next two years will reveal whether Władysławowo and Sarajevo truly become links in a development pipeline, or merely two names on a calendar. A THOUGHT TO CARRY FORWARD Today's notice gives us two addresses and one year. But the real question is not where the event will be held, but how many children in Władysławowo and Sarajevo will decide, after it closes, that they want to tie their whole lives to a paddle. If the answer is a positive number, this administrative decision has done its job. If the answer is no, we will have one more sports event staged on time, leaving nothing behind but the memory of a fine week of weather.