FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

             Glasgow Herald tribute to Futsal & the Futsal Premier League

           .........Throw away those thongs and ditch the bikini wax

  Glasgow Herald May 23 2005
 

Reporter: TEDDY JAMIESON, Glasgow Herald	May 23 2005
What's the sexiest thing about Brazil? Well, where do you start? The beach at Rio, the dental floss masquerading as thongs sported on said beach, Rio tans, ice-cold mohjitos, the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, the samba, Caetano Veloso's singing voice, Fernando Meirelles's movie City of God, Leonardo DiCaprio's some-time girlfriend Gisele Bundchen, Brazilian waxes – they all undoubtedly carry an erotic charge. But not one of them, not even the admirable charms of Ms Bundchen, can really match up to the sexiest thing about Brazil: the country's talent for football. Bra-zil. Say the word, preferably stretching out the syllables like a South American football commentator, and it conjures up images of golden shirts and golden summers, of Pele dummying hapless goalkeepers and holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy. It might have been Ruud Gullit, a Dutchman, who coined the term "sexy football", but the Brazilians have long since claimed copyright on the concept. What all of this has to do with Battersea Youth Centre on a Sunday morning might not be obviously apparent. Just south of the Thames, and just a little bit further south of Stamford Bridge, on first sight this rather plain sports hall couldn't seem further away from the golden sands of Rio de Janeiro. But every weekend it is invaded by a select band of players from London's Brazilian community – a population that numbers somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 – keen to show off their tricks and flicks and feints. Today it is high noon and, dressed in Brazilian blue (their country's second colour) the members of Helvecia are warming up. Looking on are their coach Cesar, by day a hotel manager in Chelsea, and manager Aldemar, who works in the administration department of the Brazilian embassy and supports the team out of his own pocket. As they watch, the number seven, Vandelio Ribeiro, or Va Vá as he prefers to be known, rolls the ball up the inside of his leg before smashing it into the empty goal. So far, so flashy. But when referee Steve Daley blows his whistle to start the top-of-the-table clash between Helvecia and their Polish opponents Kareda it's quickly obvious this is no five-a-side kickabout. What we are watching is a peculiarly Brazilian version. There are no hulking centre-halfs kicking seven shades of boot polish out of the opposite sides' attackers; instead contact is minimal, the pace frenetic, the ball control impressive. This is, some would say, Brazil's secret weapon when it comes to "sexy football". This is futsal. Until recently, if you said futsal to most people in the UK, they would have answered: "What?" But suddenly the sport is gaining itself a profile. As you read this there will be a Tennent's poster near you extolling the game's virtues, or a television advert playing on the sport's innate Brazilianness (you know the ones: think artificial tans and Brazilian waxes). The reason is Tennent Caledonian Breweries' plans for a huge summer futsal competition, and hopefully an opportunity to kick the game on to another level in this country. Scotland is, as usual, coming a little late to the party (or in this case the carnival). Futsal has been around since 1930, there are now some 25 million players in more than 100 countries around the world, and the sport is recognised by the football governing bodies Fifa and Uefa. There are professional futsal leagues in South America and Europe, and there are stories that a couple of years back one futsal professional in Brazil was earning the equivalent of £123,000 a month – not quite Chelsea wages, but not to be sniffed at. Futsal was actually invented by a Uruguay-based Argentinian, Juan Carlos Ceriani, but quickly became indelibly linked with Brazil – the Brazilians were the first futsal world champions in 1999. Such stars as Pele, Zico, Bebeto and Socrates all played futsal, as did more modern names such as Ronaldo and Ronaldinho (currently world player of the year). Zico, a World Cup winner in 1982, has credited the skills that made him a world champion to playing futsal, and Ronaldo has said much the same. This afternoon in Battersea there is nobody quite on that level, it should be said. Va Vá is the afternoon's star turn, scoring four of Helvecia's five goals (they win 5-3), each of them a spectacular strike, and each followed by a gleaming smile turned to the small but appreciative group of Brazilian onlookers. In between cheers, these supporters sip chimarrao, a slightly bitter tea from southern Brazil that is served up in an earthen cup topped with herbs. "It's quite dangerous drinking this here," explains one of them. "The police get funny ideas about it." Va Vá obviously likes playing to the crowd. Even when he misses – and his misses are often just as spectacular as his goals – he turns to the supporters with a dopey grin. His four-goal tally takes his total this season to 25. "Not bad," he says in mock humility after the game. He admits that he likes futsal better than the 11-a-side game. "It's different," he says. "You have to be quick and clever, and you have to make space when you don't have space. In 11-a-side you have time to think. Here you just have to do." Watching futsal, it's also obvious how different it is to the traditional five-a-side game which is the obvious comparison. There are no wall passes, for a start. The ball is smaller – and so are the players. There is no need for brute strength in futsal. Tackles from behind are barred, and so is swearing. Skill and speed are the essentials. "It's all about your movement," agrees Helvecia's number nine, Pedro Pesqueira. "It's completely different." Pesqueira isn't actually Brazilian. He's Portuguese – he once got a trial for Benefica – but he is Va Vá's cousin, and has a Brazilian girlfriend. Portugal, he says, is as keen on futsal as Brazil. "At school you start playing futsal because they can't afford the big pitches to play 11-a-side. So all the kids come from playing futsal and they go on to the 11-a-side." He doesn't say it, but he could also have mentioned that Figo, Real Madrid's Portuguese "galactico", is also a futsal graduate. Va Vá, a 27-year-old English student who works as a motorbike courier in London (it's nowhere near as bad as Brazil to drive in, he says) only started playing with Helvecia last year. But then so did the rest of the team. The London futsal league – a cosmopolitan mix of Brazilians and eastern Europeans – only started last September. The league's organiser, Gary Macbeth, is sitting on the benches at the side of the hall, pen in hand, keeping score and counting fouls (if a team commits five fouls, the opposition wins a penalty). As his name would suggest, Macbeth is a Scot by birth. Born in the Partick area of Glasgow and raised in Cumbernauld, he has a background in IT: he spent 15 years in California working in software development, but has given that up to pursue a dream. It's a dream that extends a little further than an eight-team league in Battersea, too: Macbeth wants to take futsal national. The game already exists in pockets up and down Britain: in Tyneside, Essex, Grimsby and most notably Perth. Macbeth has set up the Futsal Premier League as a vehicle to pull it all together. "We're trying to harness everybody's part-time effort into something a little bit bigger," he explains. To this end the FPL is setting up a coaching programme for the sport, and is seeking to launch a tournament that brings together teams from all over the country. It has had to have the right-sized goalposts manufactured, as well as trying to get the English FA on board and seeking sponsorship and partnerships (the Brazilian sports company Dal Ponte may be interested). The hope is that, come this autumn and a new football season, the first British national futsal league will accompany it. Give him the chance and MacBeth will draw a picture of a game growing to encompass international competition and perhaps even attention from the professional game. It already happens abroad, he points out. "You have teams in Europe like PSV Eindhoven and Barcelona: they have a handball team, they have a netball team and they have a futsal team, all under the corporate banner of their brand." In Britain, all that is some distance in the future, and futsal is still far from being a commercial venture. "There's no money in it," Macbeth admits after the afternoon's final whistle has blown. "I'm investing in this right now. This is a passion of mine – the business of sport." Macbeth discovered futsal when he was researching sporting possibilities for women (he runs a performance-wear company called Girls4Sport) and fell in love with it. A broken leg – a legacy of Saturday-morning kick-and-rush football – means he's not playing at the moment, but his enthusiasm is undimmed. He believes he has discovered something that offers a platform for improving the skills of the nation's footballers, and that could provide an entry point for kids who otherwise might not thrive in the knockabout culture of the more familiar five-a-side game. "There is no reason to play five-a-side in this country any more as far as I'm concerned," he says. "Why should you just get together and knock lumps out of each other when you could play a competitive sport that has the opportunity to play at national and international level? You don't have that in five-a-side." True, you don't have it in futsal just yet either, but Macbeth is out to change that. And he's not the only one. Just over 24 hours later and some 462 miles north of London, Fair City Santos – Brazilian in name if not in nationality – are getting ready to kick off against Perth Youth Futsal in the town's Bell Sports Centre. "They'll annihilate this lot," predicts Mark Potter, who organises the team. They do. The final score is 12-4 (and one of Perth Youth Futsal's goals comes from a dazzling own goal from FC Santos's number 11, a chap who goes by the name of Rats). FC Santos are faster, better organised, more accurate in their passing and more certain in their movements. Even so, Potter says, his side have played well within themselves. Potter was one of the first people Macbeth contacted when he came up with his idea of a national futsal league. Whippet-thin and sporting a number-one haircut, the 38-year-old is a veteran of the sport in the UK, masterminding one of the longest-running leagues in the country. A leisure manager at the Bell Sports Centre, Potter first became aware of futsal eight years ago when he was invited to take a five-a-side team down to Burnley for a tournament. Realising it was actually a different game, he invited the organisers of the tournament to come to Scotland, play his team and show them the rules. When they did, Potter says, they gave his side "a spanking". So, before going down to Burnley, Potter changed the team. "It was apparent our centre-halfs weren't going to be good enough," he says. "And that's how we've basically based teams ever since. We've always encouraged teams to bring in younger players, fast and skillful." The team that came back from Burnley were buzzing about the experience and soon set up a little four-team league, which has since sub-divided and sub-divided until now the Perth league numbers 18 teams playing in three divisions with a waiting list. And the league is working hard to cultivate even greater interest. "There are as many kids who go to our two-hour coaching session on a Friday night as go to Saint Johnstone's coaching on a Saturday morning," says Potter. "It is that popular." Mark Caldow – or Coisty to his FC Santos team-mates, meaning you can probably guess who he supports – has also noticed the greater interest in futsal. "I've been playing it for four years and a lot of my pals are still playing five-a-sides, but they're gradually coming over to it. I play in the fives league and the fives league is going down while the futsal is going this way," he says, his hand tracing an upward line in the air. There is certainly no shortage of signs that futsal's time may have come. Potter has been appointed as a consultant to the Scottish Football Association, and futsal has been taken under the auspices of the amateur game north of the Border. "Anything that promotes the game and anything that promotes the technical development of the game shouldn't be ignored," says Tommy McIntyre, who, besides being head of youth development at the SFA, is its futsal co-ordinator. The current Tennent's promotion hasn't hurt. There is, truth be told, a conspicuous lack of tans on show in the FC Santos ranks this evening. Nor, if captain David Hughes – a plumber by trade – is to be believed, is there any conspicuous lack of body hair. "I've done some daft things in my time," he says with a laugh, "but nothing like that." But no-one seems to have a problem with the jokey tone of the adverts. "They're quite funny," admits Hughes. "Bottom line is, the first thing everybody says to me is, 'What's futsal?'" argues Potter. "I'm sick fed up of trying to explain it, so if Tennent's come in and do the groundwork and they get people interested …" And if nothing else, Tennent's – whose parent company InBev, perhaps coincidentally, is about to introduce a Brazilian beer, Brahma, to the UK market – has put its hands in its pockets. "Other leading footballing nations have put their complete support behind the sport and, as passionate about the game as Scotland is, we've invested to champion its growth here," the company's spokesman says. "Futsal is hugely popular throughout the world, and we're sure that our football fans will be no different in getting behind it." The result of the company's involvement, over and above the adverts, will be a national five-a-side competition using futsal rules that will see the winners flying out to Rio. Mark Potter isn't convinced that everyone who enters will actually take to the game: "You've got hundreds of teams who will participate in the summer events, but you'll be lucky if ten per cent of them continue in the future," he says. But then ten per cent is still a good enough start. "We'll go in and we'll make sustainable leagues for that ten per cent to play in," he explains. "The rest of them are all going to be big centre-halfs kicking lumps out of people. They'll spend five minutes getting pulled up by the referee, they'll not like it, and they'll go away. But there will be specific futsal players. You generally find futsal players don't like five-a-side because they get kicked up and down. And bear in mind it's an amateur sport. We all have work to go to. You don't want to go down on a Sunday night and have lumps kicked out of you and not be able to go into work on Monday." Still, he hopes the Tennent's competition could be another catalyst in pushing futsal to a more prominent position. "Just now there's enough people all pulling to make the game work," he says. "I've got a sneaking suspicion that within the next ten years there will be a serious increase in it." Well, you might argue, he would say that, wouldn't he? But we've been here before. It is just three years since the SFA announced it was adopting the sport in a high-profile launch attended by then manager Craig Brown, yet it has taken Tennent's involvement to really push the game into the public consciousness, in Scotland at any rate. "Possibly it's not been as promoted as well as it could have been," concedes Tommy McIntyre – who also points out that Scottish football's financial climate has hardly been helpful either. But then again, he argues, you can't promote a sport without the sportsmen, and a few teams in Perth and Inverness (Scotland's other powerbase for futsal) run by a few enthusiasts don't yet make for a powerhouse league. "There has to be a base there," he says McIntyre. "Now there is a sponsor for the consumer tournament. It will raise awareness." The question is, will it cultivate better football players? As Walter Smith attempts to salvage the national side's World Cup qualifying campaign (and what remains of its reputation), Scotland in particular could do with an injection of players who know you can do more with a ball than thump it as hard as possible. Are futsal skills transferable to the beautiful game? The game's advocates have no doubt. Just look at the calibre of professional players who have cut their teeth playing futsal, they say. "All Brazil's young stars have been playing futsal," argues David Hughes. "Ronaldinho and that. Ronaldo and Figo and Raul all played futsal at school level before they were moved into 11-a-side and they swear by it, saying that's what gave them their skills." Tommy McIntyre doesn't sound totally convinced yet. Asked if he can see futsal feeding into professional football, he says: "It's too early to say. Let's not get carried away. I would imagine futsal wasn't solely responsible. It's a learning tool that can possibly lead you into developing technique and skill." "Nobody's going to say this is the be-all and end-all," admits Mark Potter. "What it is is an alternative. All the wee boys who can't get a game in 11-a-side teams because they're not good enough can come down and play this and within a year they'll be miles better because they get touches of the ball and start thinking for themselves. They learn spatial awareness." What would they be doing otherwise, he asks. Playing PlayStation? Well, yes, probably. And this may be the real challenge for futsal's desire to improve the skills of British players: getting youngsters playing in the first place. And maybe, Gary Macbeth argues, even PlayStation will help the growth of futsal. "They might be playing PlayStations but in [the video game] Fifa 2005 soon there will be an option to play futsal," he says, showing an impressive grasp of the concept of positive spin. "You already have the chance to play street soccer. There's a lot more interest in skills that you typically associate with the Brazilians, and there's a generation of kids in Britain beginning to grow up with that." "If we try it and it doesn't work – well, we tried it," concludes Mark Potter. "If we try it and it does work – ya beauty." That's as good a reason as any to hope futsal takes off. How else do the Scots get to be as good as the Brazilians? Somehow it's hard to imagine an artificial tan and a visit to a waxing salon is going to be enough.   For more information visit www.thefpl.com and www.totalfutsal.com.

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