Futsal: springboard for playing 11-a-side football?
Futsal has certain specificities which make it a very different sport from 11-a-side football. Futsal is played with 5 field players, with a smaller ball and less sensitive to rebound, during two 20-minute halves and on a land with a length of 25 to 38 meters maximum, for a width of 15 to 18 meters.
In addition to these technical particularities, Futsal also has its own refereeing rules, including the ban on sliding tackles and the authorization of offsides. This has the effect of reducing downtime and therefore making this sport more fluid and lively than 11-a-side football . Futsal players therefore generally present qualities of speed, liveliness, technique, movement, and game intelligence that are more developed than the average of footballers in the same division. Although the Futsal player is often reduced to his technical quality, mobility and intelligence of movement are also at the heart of the game, since the creation of space is essential on these reduced pitches.
With all his qualities, you may wonder what prevents a professional Futsal player from making a career in 11-a-side football?
The answer is quite simple: It's not the same sport. This is the admission made by the Danish Futsal players, who had been called by the national federation to replace the football players then on strike. As Kevin Ramirez, defender of the French futsal team, explains, the tactical and physical parameters of the two disciplines are very different. Contacts between players are, for example, more regular in 11-a-side football, particularly due to aerial duels.
This explains why there are very few defenders among futsal players who have converted to classic football. Indeed, they are generally offensive players, recruited for their liveliness and their ease of playing in small spaces. We can thus cite Brazilian legends who were fired from futsal, like Ronaldo or Robinho. In France, Wissam Ben Yedder was able to make a place for himself on the big green square thanks to his performances in Toulouse, Seville and even Monaco, to the point of finding a place in the group of Didier Deschamps' French team. Numerous examples which undoubtedly prove that you can have a great career on both fields.
