Cesc
Fábregas plays futsal with a children’s team during a promotional event
in Jakarta this week. Photograph: Beawiharta/Reuters
The FA is finally embracing futsal, with the game growing on these shores and clubs implementing it into their academies
The
passing was crisp and incisive, the movement restlessly purposeful; the
relentless pace of the game and ambitious dribbling on show were
yielding goalscoring opportunities continuously. It was, by common
consent, a feast of technical excellence, gladdening the heart of anyone
keen to witness controlled creativity on a pitch.
This was last weekend – but the venue was not the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, where Andrés Iniesta and the tiki-taka brigade were pulversing Andrea Pirlo’s Italy in the Euro 2012 final.
It was 1,600 miles away in the Birmingham Futsal Arena, where a bunch
of 10-year-olds from East Hull Saints were up against Whiteknights
Toffees from Reading in the national youth futsal finals.
They
were among the 80 junior futsal teams – boys and girls aged 10 to 16 –
who had qualified for the finals of the sixth annual tournament of the booming football offshoot.
Born
in Uruguay in 1930, futsal is the indoor version of five-a-side
football officially sanctioned by Fifa and Uefa and has become
synonymous with Brazilian flair – from Pelé to Ronaldinho’s dancing toe-poke goal against Chelsea in 2005.
More recently, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and the Spanish rondo
matadors have all paid tribute to the beneficial effects of playing
futsal in their youth.
The merits of the game itself are
undeniable. It’s five-a-side on amphetamines, played on an indoor court
with hockey-size goals. Goalkeepers and players taking corners and
kick-ins get only four seconds to distribute the ball. Technique, speed,
ball mastery and possession are all vital.
The English FA is,
unsurprisingly, a latecomer to the party; but now that it has turned up,
kicked off its Dr Martens and hung up its duffle coat, it’s actually
starting to get down to the samba beat.
This year’s national youth
futsal tournament was easily the biggest in its brief six-year history.
More than 1,200 teams were whittled down through 25 county FA
competitions and eight regional finals. Played against the backdrop of
the latest biennial outburst of introspection triggered by the England team’s display in an international tournament, the timing of the finals in Birmingham was particularly apt.
“The
growth of futsal fits perfectly with the way that our new developments
around the young player are going,” said Peter Sturgess, the FA’s head
of development for 5- to 11-year-old players, who doubles up as coach of
the England men’s futsal team. “The planets are aligning and futsal has
come on to the radar just as there is a real focus on technical
development, possession-based games, real game understanding and
tactical nous. I think the two – technical development and futsal – go
hand in hand,” he added.
The usual culprits for English football’s
failings have been brought before the court yet again in the past 10
days. At the top of the game, it’s either the lingering influence of the Charles Hughes POMO obsession of yesteryear,
or the similarly prevalent tactical straitjacket of 4-4-2, or the
Premier League clubs’ obsession with foreign imports snuffing out the
chances of homegrown prodigies.
Down at the grassroots it’s either
too few decent grass pitches and the foul weather; or the army of
grassroots parents and “coaches” bludgeoning eight-year-olds into winning at all costs, or too few qualified, progressive coaches working with young players,
or too little funding for Charter Standard clubs. And don’t forget the
socially and culturally complicated demise of street football over the
past 30 years.
The one aspect that appears to be changing,
however, is the FA’s acceptance of a need for a revolution in coaching
youth footballers. Two years ago we had the publication of the Future
Game, an imperfect template for development of players that contains
much to admire but arguably lacks a philosophical paradigm. A year
earlier the FA launched its Youth Awards to end the embarrassing absence
of age-appropriate, child-centred coach education.
Then six weeks
ago the long-awaited proposals to overhaul grassroots football –
smaller pitches, smaller-sided games, child-centred competition – were approved
in an attempt to dispense with the obsession with winning at the
expense of development in youth football. And, of course, we’ve got the
symbolism of the imminent opening of St George’s Park, the putative crucible of training for a new generation of progressive coaches.
It’s not just at the grassroots where smaller-sided games have made an impression. A pioneering year-long study
of the benefits of four v four games at Manchester United’s academy in
2005 revealed it threw up many more opportunities for dribbling,
passing, one v ones and goalscoring.
The Premier League clubs now
include futsal in their winter games programme for academy players.
Everton’s academy began experimenting with it at the start of last
season. After initially playing on indoor artificial grass pitches at
their Finch Farm training complex, they decided to fully embrace the
game.
“We really wanted to do it properly,” said Neil Dewsnip, the
head coach at Everton’s academy. “So we contacted a local school and
now once a week, we take our Under-nines, Under-10s and Under-11s over
to the school hall and let them play futsal. We have a futsal player,
Ray Redmond, who coaches them. And it’s a case of putting them on the
pitch with a futsal ball, telling them the rules and letting them get on
and play. We’ll do a few futsal-specific drills but essentially it’s
playing time.
“It really slides in nicely to their games programme
and we believe it can improve the allround technical ability of our
players. It’s played at such a high tempo that every player is
constantly engaged. This can only be good for their development.”
Everton
were among the five English clubs whose academy teams reached the
finals of the Premier League futsal tournament, where they took on the
might of Barcelona and the renowned Madrid-based futsal club Inter
Movistar. Manchester City triumphed in the Under-12s competition. Barcelona clinched the Under-15s title.
Back
down at the grassroots, many Charter Standard clubs will cite the
burden of extra cost and lack of indoor facilities as barriers to fully
embracing futsal. For Sturgess at the FA, however, the case for more
indoor futsal is unequivocal because it wins on two counts: technical
development and the weather.
“A typical seven-year-old doesn’t
have the biological or physiological capacity to deal with extremes of
heat and cold,” he said. “So bringing them indoors to a fairly even
temperature works. From a technical point of view, they are going to get
so many more touches of the ball. But it’s not just the number of
touches, it’s the situations they occur in: they are nearly always going
to be under pressure; there will always be constraints on time and
space.
“Grassroots junior clubs are increasingly taking kids
indoors so their football development can continue in the winter
months,” he said. “Futsal is the vehicle for this change.”
The
scale of these changes are difficult to estimate. In the world of FA
coaching, another development over the past few years has been the rise
of the buzz phrase: “Let the game be the teacher.”
The message is
clear, the practical implications less so. But while the FA tries to get
to grips with educating a new generation of coaches, it could do much
worse than ensure that as many young players as possible are left in the
capable hands of the great teacher of Ronaldo, Messi, Iniesta and more:
futsal.
Jamie Fahey
The Guardian
5th July 2012
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