Extract from a larger report posted by Irish Times


Basketball is easily FC Barcelona’s second most popular sport. Futsal, which is the other sport that Dracs 1991 follow, is one of the other most keenly supported of the club’s sports.

In fact, Spain is the number one-ranked futsal team in the world, ahead of Brazil and, curiously, Iran.

Futsal was consolidated as a sport by Fifa in 1989. Before then, it was surely one of sports’ more peculiar offshoots. Having originated in Uruguay in 1930, it quickly became fashionable in neighbouring Brazil, which dominated the sport for decades.

The standardised name for futsal derives from the Portuguese futebol de salão or “hall football”.

Among some of its more idiosyncratic rules, players were originally forbidden to speak during games; fans, too, at one stage. Players weren’t allowed to play the ball while touching the floor with their hand either, until a medical study in Brazil determined that – due to a large number of broken arms and dislocated shoulders – it was the country’s most dangerous sport.

These days the game has become standardised. It is played with a size 4 ball, which has a reduced bounce of 30 per cent compared to its counterpart from Association Football, an innovation which has made headed goals easier to score.

Two referees oversee play and each team is allowed unlimited substitutions over the 20-minute halves.

FC Barcelona’s outfit, which was founded by a group of former professional players in 1978, have a chequered history. Dissolved for four years in the early 1980s, they won their first cup in 22 years at the start of February in Segovia, a small city in central Spain whose prefix Sego means “victory”.


Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com