Everything suggests that after relegation from Ekstraklasa, Arka Gdynia is about to start a new chapter in its history and it doesn't have to be sad. Unofficially, we have learned that the Yellow-Blues will soon form a close partnership with Slavia Prague, a club that has become a model in our part of Europe in recent years. The Czechs will be involved in Arka as owners, but Marcin Gruchała will still have control over the club. He will remain the majority owner. The first tangible effect of this partnership will be the appointment of Czech Marek Jarolim, a former Slavia player, as the new coach. After the relegation, the club realized that they would be on a turning point. The team will lose many players, the sports director, and the team will have to be rebuilt - and the funds from Ekstraklasa will be lacking. This coincided with the negotiations over the transfer of Oskar Kubiak to Slavia. During these negotiations, the sports directors of Slavia got to know Arka, gathered information about the Polish league and the city. They were looking for a club with which they could form a closer partnership. So far, they have been working with MFK Karvina, a Czech Ekstraklasa club that has just won the Czech Cup. For several seasons, the cooperation has been based on Slavia loaning players to Karvina who did not fit into their squad. Others signed contracts with Karvina, but Slavia guaranteed themselves the right to buy them back at a preferential price. In addition, coaches were sent from Prague to the border with Poland - Karvina is a border town - to train players according to the methodology adopted by Slavia. Martin Hysky was the coach in Karvina last season and in the autumn, he led the reserves of Slavia and its youth teams. In Karvina, he achieved very good results and at the end of last year, he was taken over by Viktoria Pilzna - their current coach, Miroslav Koubek, became the selector. Hysky's successor was Marek Jarolim. He was a former Slavia player and one of his last clubs in the Czech Republic was Slovan Liberec - this happened when Jan Nezmar was the sports director there. At the end of 2017, when Slavia was bought by the Chinese (today they are no longer in the club, from December 2023 it is a billionaire Pavel Tykač), Slavia hired Nezmar as sports director. His task was to build the entire sports structure of the club, the scouting department, etc. Nezmar took with him from Liberec the coach Jindřich Trpišovský, who has been working there successfully to this day. He also hired Jarolim as an assistant in the under-17 team. Jarolim quickly learned and in 2020 he took over the reserves of Slavia and led them for three seasons. Then he worked in Mlada Boleslav, Jihlava, and finally ended up in Karvina. It is very likely that he would have stayed there, especially since he had just won the Czech Cup, but the club from northern Czech has serious problems. In the spring, the affair of betting on matches shook Moravia and the Czech part of Silesia. One of the players of Karvina and its president, who is also the mayor of the city, which is the owner of the club, was involved in it. It is not yet clear what consequences will be drawn, but a very likely scenario is relegation to the third league and exclusion from participation in cups. This, among other things, means that Slavia will no longer have a close partnership with Karvina. And when their leaders learned that Arka was forming a partnership with Slavia, they realized that they had to do something more to stay in Ekstraklasa.