It is mid-September but the clock is already ticking on the countdown to the inevitable rainy season that routinely plays havoc with the grassroots youth football calendar around the country. So it was timely for the FA to announce on Monday that it is trying to dismantle the barriers blocking access to school halls to allow young footballers to seek refuge from the cold and try the game that formed a legion of footballing superstars: futsal.
Grants from the Football Foundation totalling £300,000 will be made available for schools, colleges and youth football leagues. The aim is to create 200 futsal hubs, exposing at least 12,000 more children to the fast-paced five-a-side game that Neymar, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and the Spanish rondo brigade credit with honing their impeccable skills as youngsters.
“Futsal in schools needs to happen,” says Michael Skubala, the FA’s futsal elite performance manager and head coach of the England team. “Until we start doing futsal properly, we probably aren’t going to win a football World Cup like Spain and Brazil. These nations are all doing it on a massive scale, all their kids are doing it. And the constraints of the game are showing us that it gives us huge football returns later down the line.”
With a fair wind most of the hubs could be up and running by the time the mercury plummets. County FAs will oversee the centres, ensuring supply meets demand. The schools and colleges taking part will in turn have a futsal-ready hall for their pupils to use. In the age of austerity in the state school sector it also offers an income stream when hired out for community use.
It is a win-win, according to Skubala. It takes children inside while exposing more youngsters to the game renowned for developing the skills that make turbo-charged decision-makers on a football pitch – the sort of abilities England’s elite footballers are often accused of lacking with every passing tournament debacle.
“All kids should be doing football and futsal,” says Skubala. “Even with the 3G pitches cropping up around the country, they don’t stop the wind, the rain or the snow.
“For me, though, futsal is not just for Christmas but, as a culture, it fits better than anywhere as a start for developing players of tomorrow in futsal and football. It makes total sense for kids to go indoors in the cold months. I remember playing myself as a youngster and being told I was soft for wearing gloves in the snow! So, if we can make these indoor facilities futsal-ready and bring down the barriers, we can get more people playing the game in the winter and throughout the year.”
Skubala is in the first year of his role, having been head of football at Loughborough university and England national team assistant coach. He is intent on pressing the reset button on how the sport of futsal is perceived. “It is a football development tool. There’s no doubt about that – but it needs to be a sport in its own right to give it true football development value over the long term. It’s about people understanding what futsal is and what it gives you.”
All too often dismissed as five-a-side with a funny ball, futsal is the only Fifa- and Uefa-sanctioned version of five-a-side.
Born in South America in the 1930s, it has been threatening to explode as a mass participation sport on these shores for nearly a decade. Premier League football club academies embraced it as part of their games programme. The FA led the way with the growing national youth futsal festival and the rollout of coach education courses up to Uefa B.
But after the first ever bespoke futsal coaches conference at St George’s Park in 2014, the futsal engine seemed to stall. Changes of emphasis at St George’s Park and at county FA level slowed the game’s surge. The youth game was booming and bespoke futsal-only venues were popping up nationwide. But then many coaches and young players bitten by the futsal bug were left wondering where the sport goes next.
Skubala says the FA’s failure to capitalise on the boom at youth level over the past few years was due to a “lack of understanding” of the sport in the English football culture.
“When it boomed, everyone focused on the coaching,” he says. “But what we didn’t do was try to have an impact on the infrastructure or put a strategy in place.
“I think we’ve been confused in the FA over the past few years about what the pathway should look like. The missing link in our culture is that we at times don’t see it different from five-a-side or three-a-side or flicks and tricks whereas in countries like Brazil and Spain they see it as it is: futsal.”
With every passing eulogy to its skill-developmental powers by myriad Brazilian, Spanish and Portuguese football superstars, the game has been cited as a panacea to all the traditional technical deficiencies of the English game, although it is interesting to note the Germans have not done badly considering they have no futsal pedigree. The German FA introduced its first futsal coaching course in 2012.
Skubala’s view on what futsal offers footballers is unambiguous: “Better decision-makers in tight areas, quicker and more accurate passers better in one-v-one situations – attacking and defending – and adaptable players who can rotate and be fluid tactically.”
He lists five vital principles to differentiate true futsal from hybrid versions of the old-school five-a-side with huge bouncy tennis balls, letter-box goals and walls or boards instead of touchlines.
Futsal must, he insists, involve the bespoke ball (heavier, smaller with a reduced bounce), the goals (3m x 2m), the faster surface (indoor hall), the touchlines (not walls) and the laws of the game (four-second rule on kick-ins, set plays and goalkeeper distribution).
“It’s the constraints of the game that are crucial for skill development,” he explains. “So the surface is a constraint, it makes the game quicker. So if you don’t play indoors on a hard surface and instead play on grass, the constraint is gone because it has slowed the game down. The goals, by being smaller, are a constraint. They’re more difficult to score in. So you have to pass more to get the ball closer to the goal to score.
“Not playing off a wall means you’ve got to keep the ball on an island, not just booting off the wall. The laws of the game: four on-court players – not five, six, seven or two – is an optimum number for combinations and passing.”
A recent study focusing on the differences between football and futsal using Barcelona youth players backed up the claim of futsal as a “laboratory” of intensive perceptual skill development. It cites “the higher game intensity, higher opponent pressure, an easier-to-handle ball and a lower number of players” as crucial to the game’s benefits.
In this country it is the obvious solution to the foul winter weather. Last year the FA estimated that more than 10,000 children were being brought indoors in charter-standard leagues to play futsal for a winter break.
The impact on the players can be enormous, says Harry Prestidge, chairman of the Reading and West Berkshire youth football league, which tried the winter futsal break for the first time this year. “They loved it, absolutely loved it,” he says. In total 65 boys and girls teams aged from under seven to under 11 played throughout January and February in school and leisure centre halls hired out by the league. The teams who chose to continue on grass – one third of the league – had most of their games called off due to the weather.
“The previous two seasons were miserable winters, with waterlogged pitches, frozen pitches. And kids were just not playing games. So we thought what could we do?
“And it’s one of the best things we’ve ever done as a league. We try to be innovative and progressive but without question this was received so well. All the players and parents were talking about it.”
This year more age groups will be involved and nearly double the number of teams. Prestidge says a big factor for teams, parents and leagues is the cost of buying goals, hiring halls and referees, so help from grants and the FA are critical.
Skubala, meanwhile, is convinced that the dual pathway model of Spain and Brazil – where youngsters play both sports until their early teens, before choosing – is the way to go. “In Spain, every pupil plays futsal in schools. They don’t mess about with the game. It’s proper futsal rules. It’s not five-a-side with letter box goals, they play with futsal/handball goals, they have national futsal tournaments that schools run. Yet in our schools no one plays it.”
So the vision is there. Of course, £300,000 is mere loose change in the rarefied world of Premier League super-salaries. But for futsal it could make a massive quick impression.
It is just step one of Skubala’s strategy to establish a clear identity for futsal in this country. He is looking to the dramatic growth in the Women’s Super League and the grassroots girls’ game for inspiration. “I want people to truly understand what futsal is; an identity for the game. How it is a game in its own right and can help football. We want more youth participation. And a more sustainable model in the adult game.”
Trying to borrow a successful part of Spain’s and Brazil’s culture is an admirable aim in the longer term. One thing that cannot be copied, however, is their football-friendly climate.
Which is why it makes sense to try to kickstart the stalled youth futsal game by simply getting youngsters out of the rain to an indoor sanctuary and letting them play proper futsal.
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