Futsal fever is currently beginning to grip the UK but the game owes a
great deal of its popularity and most of its appeal to the streets and
playgrounds of South America where it was first concieved.
Keen
to emphasise the South American roots of a sport that the likes of
Ronaldo, Denilson and Roberto Carlos all grew up playing, Futsal was
the name chosen by FIFA for the only version of 5-aside football that
it supports, when it took over as the governing body of the sport in
1989.
After the first FIFA Futsal World Championships that
took place in the Netherlands in the same year, Futsal began to
increase in stature as more and more Associations began to adopt the
sport, keen to take advantage of it’s benefits in developing players
for the bigger game. Individual close ball skills are developed through
an increased number of touches during the game, whilst players are
nearly always placed in reduced space situations and are constantly
forced to make decisions demanding speed of thought and quick reflexes.
Brazil
are the current FIFA Futsal World Champions, having finally beaten
Spain in their own country in 2008. It was the Spanish who had denied
the Selecao in both the finals of 2000 and 2004. |
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