Grbic and Poland Win Nations League Title in Five Sets
Poland beat the United States 3:2 in the Nations League final in Ningbo, rallying from 1:2 down in sets. Nikola Grbic has now won a medal in all nine tournaments he has coached the team.
Fourth set of the Nations League final, Poland trailing 1:2 in sets, and Nikola Grbic gets up from the bench and makes a substitution few coaches would dare in a final. Wilfredo Leon, a player who has spent his whole career as an outside hitter, comes on at opposite, replacing Bartlomiej Boladz. The move had been tested in training before, but never in a match with stakes this high.
From that point on, the Americans never led again. Poland carried the fourth set to the finish, and in the fifth they pulled away to a five point lead and never let it slip. It ended 15:10, and with it came the third title in the tournament’s history.
Turnaround that started in the locker room
After the match, Grbic told Polish reporters in Ningbo that nothing they had seen on court came as a surprise.
“I expected a tough match. What I told the players at the start, in the locker room, was that we had to expect them to play much better than they did in Chicago, that we had to prepare to fight for every single point, but that in the end we had to be patient. If they played the way they ended up playing, we needed patience to get back to our level of quality, which is what had to give us the edge.”
The reference to Chicago wasn’t random. In the group stage of this year’s Nations League, Poland beat the Americans without dropping a set. In the final they lost two, the second and third in a row, with the third going to extra points, 27:25 for the US.
Why did Leon end up at opposite?
Because their natural opposite was out of form, and Grbic said as much openly.
“We had already tried that option several times before. We’re waiting on Kevin Sasak, who isn’t at his level yet. I didn’t want to bring him in at a moment when we genuinely had a lot of problems on the right side of the attack. He can serve and block, but he still has issues in attack, so I didn’t want to put him in a difficult situation. Leo was ready, he’s fantastic in attack, serve and block. He helped us enormously in this match.”
The head coach then added who he felt the title was owed to:
“What Semen, Kamil Semeniuk, did helped a great deal, and so did what Leo, Wilfredo Leon, did, essentially changing his role. When we have players like that, with that kind of quality, it makes it easier for me to make decisions and prepare the team for every scenario.”
Numbers from Ningbo
The match kicked off at 1 PM Central European Time and finished 3:2, with set scores of 25:21, 23:25, 25:27, 25:23 and 15:10.
Poland’s top scorer was Kamil Semeniuk with 17 points, with Tomasz Fornal adding 15. The Americans’ numbers were higher individually, but concentrated in fewer hitters: Jake Hanes scored 21, Matthew Anderson 20, Merrick McHenry 14. That’s the essence of this final. The US leaned on two attackers, while Poland had the depth, and a bench willing to take a risk while down 1:2.
The two teams reached the final by very different roads. Poland eased past Slovenia in the semifinal 3:0, winning 25:16, 25:19 and 25:17, with Leon scoring 16 points. The Americans had played the match of their lives against Japan the day before and only got through in the fifth set, 15:13.
That is exactly why Polish libero Jakub Popiwczak ranks this title above last year’s.
“I’m overjoyed. It’s hard for me to even put into words how I feel. I have the feeling this is exactly the dream way we could have won this match. Images from last year keep coming back to me, when we won all three matches 3:0 and went home mega happy, but with the feeling that nobody had really tested us, because everyone underperformed. Now we’re winning the gold medal by beating the Americans, who played a phenomenal match just a day earlier. The final was also incredibly tough for us, and in the end we pulled it out, we fought for it ourselves.”
Poland also won the title in Ningbo last year, in the same arena. The difference is that back then they went through the final tournament without dropping a single set.
Ninth medal from ninth tournament
This is Poland’s third Nations League title, after 2023 and 2025, and their fourth final overall. With three titles, they are now the most decorated men’s team in the tournament’s history, and they’ve strung together seven consecutive medals. The Americans, even after this final, still have none.
Grbic took over the national team in 2022 and hasn’t finished a single major tournament without a medal since:
- 2022: Nations League bronze, World Championship silver
- 2023: Nations League gold, European Championship gold
- 2024: Nations League bronze, Olympic silver
- 2025: Nations League gold, World Championship bronze
- 2026: Nations League gold
Nine tournaments, nine medals, four golds.
What’s next
The European Championship runs from September 9 to 26, across Italy, Bulgaria, Romania and Finland. Poland will defend its title, and the new European champion earns a direct berth at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. That’s the real reason Grbic didn’t sound today like a man who had just finished something.
If there’s one thing four years of watching this team has taught me, it’s that they’re missing exactly one gold, the one from Paris, where they settled for silver in 2024. Today they showed the very thing that eluded them there: turning around a match that was slipping away. This time, it was called Leon at opposite.
