Great news from Africa: Ethiopian futsal is finally going to be developed in the African country.

Yonas Hagos, Sport Journalist and Futsal promoter from Addis Ababa, and his collaborators have been making good steps regarding Ethiopian Futsal in the last four months. Their first job was to establish an association. The good point, as reported by mr. Hagos, is that the Addis Ababa city administration sports committee fully accepted the idea.

Yonas Hagos added: "Especially the commissioner Mr. Zerihun Biyadgilign loves the sport and gives us all the necessary things to establish the association and launch Futsal.
On Saturday, April 8, 2006 the first inaugural meeting was held in the Arat Kilo Sport Center Hall and the Association's establishing committee was formed. As the countries top soccer players, coaches, journalists and other invited guests were the participants, they formed a committee, which will be responsible for launching and developing of Futsal in the city.

The news was all over the media including the National Television and Radio Stations. We gave some explanation about the sport. People talked about it a lot.

In the meeting, a seven-member committee was formed by the participants. And they elected Mr. Yonas Hagos as President, Mr. Gizachew Eshetu as Vice-President and Ibrahim Shafi as Secretary General of The Addis Ababa Futsal Association Establishing Committee.

This new committee made its first game show on saturday may 6, 2006 at the Arat Kilo Sport center gymnasium here in Addis Ababa. In the event, two Futsal exhibition matches were played between young trainers of Addis Ababa Soccer Training Project and other teams of ex-top players who were playing 5-a-side games for the past few years.

On the first match, the Arada sub-city and Bole Sub-city youth teams draw 6-6. The main event was between two teams formed by the former well known soccer players Mulugeta Kebede and Asegid Tesfaye.

Each of them invited their friends on the teams. This exhibition match also finished with no winner. They held an 8-8 draw.

Dr. Ashebir Woldegiorgis, Ethiopian Football Federation president, Mr. Zerihun Biyadgilign, Addis Ababa Youth and Sport Committee Delegate, and Mr. Afework Ayele, Addis Ababa Football Federation Vice President, were among the 2-thousand
football fans attending the show.

The event was sponsored by BGI Ethiopia, local brewery factory and International Medical Corps, an NGO works on social issues.

Our Next Plan is to organize a half day Futsal tournament on June 4, 2006.

There will be seven Matches between eight teams. The event will take place at the Tinishua Stadium (The Small Stadium) near the national stadium. The winner team gets a cup 2-thousand birr money prize.

The committee will also organize a first Futsal tournament with 16 or 20 teams on mid July, which may take about two weeks. We hope this can promote Futsal and many teams could register.

Our committee, who has three Sub-committees, is now translating the laws of the game into Amharic, the national language; searching for venues of the matches and looking for sponsors.

Finally, our association asks FutsalPlanet.com to post news, give information about our tournaments and other ways to help us. We are ready to give everything we can for the development of Futsal"


Note from Futsalplanet.com: we will do our best to help Ethiopian Futsal, as we (try to) do for every single country of our great futsal world!!


Here are some photos from the first Futsal exhibition matches between two former top players' teams on May 6, 2006.
































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