Moving is the easy part. What comes after is hard: you have the job, you have the flat, and at 7 pm there's nobody to text "playing tonight?". In a big city you can live for a year without a single person you see regularly.

That isn't a personal failing. The WHO Commission on Social Connection's 2025 report puts loneliness at roughly one in six people worldwide. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre found 13 % of EU residents feel lonely most or all of the time — and people who have changed city or country are over-represented, because their whole old network stayed behind.

The good news: this is a problem with a known fix. The bad news: almost nobody uses it.

How long a friendship actually takes

Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas measured it, in a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships: about 50 hours of shared time to become casual friends, about 90 hours to become friends, and over 200 for a close friend. And the kind of time matters — shared activities and unstructured conversation count; task-based interactions at work barely register.

Now do the maths. Coffee every two weeks is 25 hours a year. A Friday bar is three hours, with people you'll probably never see again. A meet-people app is one date, after which both sides have to "want to meet again".

A weekly game is 60–90 minutes with the same 10–14 people. After a month you have six hours with one squad. After three, nearly twenty. After a year you're past Hall's threshold with room to spare — and without a single awkward conversation about the weather, because on a pitch there's always something to talk about.

Why sport, not bars or networking

Three things a game has that a night out doesn't:

  1. Repetition. Friendship is built on seeing someone again without having to arrange it. A regular Wednesday 7 pm game is a meeting that "just happens".
  2. A shared goal. You don't have to invent a topic. For 90 minutes the score connects you; afterwards, arguing about it does.
  3. No pressure. Nobody came to the pitch to make friends. Everyone came to play. The friendships happen on the side — which is exactly why they feel natural.

There's a health argument too. In a study of 1.2 million adults published in The Lancet Psychiatry (Chekroud et al., 2018), team sports were the activity most strongly associated with better mental health — more than running or the gym. The authors put it down to precisely this social component.

Step by step

Week 1 — join an existing group. Don't start your own. Every larger city has open games you can join for a single session. Pick one with a "spot free" and turn up. Rule: for the first two or three games, don't judge the level — judge whether the same people come back.

Weeks 2–4 — one fixed slot. Choose a group that plays at the same time every week, and don't skip. Consistency is the whole secret: someone who shows up every Wednesday is "one of us" within a month.

Month 2 — invite someone somewhere off the pitch. A beer after the game, watching a league match. That's the moment "the guy from the game" becomes a friend.

Don't speak Polish yet? It doesn't matter. Football has a small vocabulary: "podaj" (pass), "mam" (mine), "lewy" (left). Many groups in Warsaw and Kraków are linguistically mixed, and in the app the match details — pitch, time, price, spots left — are in English, Ukrainian and Polish.

Where to start in your city

On amator.app you see the games with open spots, the level, the pitch price and who's organising. You sign up — and you turn up.

And if a regular squad forms around you after a few months — here's the tool for running your own group without chat chaos.

Frequently asked questions

I haven't played since school. Is that a problem? No. Open amateur games are mixed-ability. Mention in your request that you're coming back after a break — organisers usually balance the teams so everyone plays.

How much does it cost? Usually the pitch fee split between everyone — in the big cities most often 15–35 PLN (about €4–8) per spot. The price is visible before you sign up.

What if the group isn't for me? Try another. Three different games in two weeks tell you more than one — and it's still less time than a single bad app date.

Sources

  • Hall JA, How many hours does it take to make a friend?, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 2019;36(4):1278–1296: journals.sagepub.com
  • Chekroud SR et al., Association between physical exercise and mental health in 1·2 million individuals in the USA, The Lancet Psychiatry 2018;5(9):739–746: thelancet.com
  • WHO Commission on Social Connection, From loneliness to social connection (2025): who.int
  • European Commission, Joint Research Centre, EU Loneliness Survey (2022): joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu