Published 07:00, 04 Aug 2025
And the Most Valuable Player of the men’s Volleyball Nations League 2025 is… Jakub Kochanowski!
The captain of the Polish national team was announced as the winner of the most prestigious individual award of the competition on Monday, a day after his team triumphed on top of the podium in Ningbo, China. Earlier on Monday, the Polish athlete was also named on the Dream Team of the tournament as the best middle blocker.
In the absence of injured Bartosz Kurek and Aleksander Sliwka, 28-year-old Jakub Kochanowski took on the responsibility to captain Poland and led them to the VNL 2025 crown, himself landing a spot on the VNL Dream Team for the third consecutive time, after 2023 and 2024. This time, however, the talented middle blocker also earned the MVP honors.
Kochanowski appeared only in the last seven games of the squad on the way to the crown and, in addition to his charisma, he chipped in with 55 points, including 14 kill blocks and 5 aces. In offense, Kuba registered an impressive average success rate of 69% across the competition. He was one of the key players in Poland’s emphatic shutout of Italy in Sunday’s gold medal showdown, in which he shined with a 71% success rate in attack and two kill blocks towards a total of seven points.
“We went from victory to victory, and with such style that in each match we played better and better," Jakub Kochanowski commented for Polsat Sport after Sunday’s final. “Lifting the trophy as a substitute captain feels fantastic, because this team deserves it so much. With the way we built ourselves from the match against France in Gdansk to these Finals here, getting better and better with each game, we grew in confidence. And today we played so brilliantly that no one in previous editions deserved this trophy as much as we did in this one.”
The 1.99m-tall middle blocker was the third Polish volleyballer to claim the MVP recognition in VNL history. Before him, opposite Bartosz Kurek shared the honors with Brazilian legend Wallace de Souza in 2021. Two years later, libero Pawel Zatorski was named MVP, when Poland celebrated their first trophy in the competition.
Poland has now been on the VNL podiums for six editions in a row since 2019 and Kochanowski has played his part in every one of these six campaigns, collecting two gold, one silver and three bronze medals. His collection also includes an FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Championship gold in 2018 and silver in 2022, as well as an Olympic silver from the Games in Paris last year, where he made the Dream Team too. He was part of the Polish squads that picked up silver at the last edition of the FIVB Volleyball Men’s World Cup in 2019, and gold at the 2023 CEV Men’s Volleyball European Championship. Young Kuba was also a two-time world champion with Poland’s U19 and U21 national teams in 2015 and in 2017, picking up the MVP award in the second case.
Kochanowski has had a brilliant club career as well. He has always stayed true to his country and played for Polish clubs. He is currently a member of 2025 PlusLiga bronze medalists PGE Projekt Warsaw. In 2021, he won Europe’s Champions League with Grupa Azoty ZAKSA Kedzierzyn-Kozle and made the Dream Team of the most prestigious continental club competition. In 2024, as a player of Asseco Resovia Rzeszow, Kochanowski lifted the CEV Cup trophy as well.
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