Courtesy: AFC.com

Kuala Lumpur: A lot of hard work lies ahead in the effort to further develop Asian futsal, participants of a FIFA/AFC Futsal Seminar on the Futsal World Cup 2012 legacy for Asia were told on Thursday.

The main objectives of the seminar are to analyse the performance of Asian teams at the 2012 FIFA FUtsal World Cup Thailand, compare their show with that of the top teams, discuss new trends in futsal and exchange information on latest trends.

The head coaches of the national futsal teams who took part in the AFC Futsal Championship 2012 finals and qualifiers and AFC Elite Futsal Instructors are taking part in the seminar.

“There’s no doubt that there are lots of challenges that await you,” said FIFA Head of Education and Technical Development Jurg Nepfer who officially opened the seminar in the Malaysian capital.

“Futsal has to receive a priority in the MAs, be integrated in the long-term development of the federations, given better awareness of and as always at the end, given enough financial resources.

“But sometimes we need to work on ourselves as well, that is, we need to have enough proactive attitude, better promotion of the game, higher insistence and better innovation for the game.

“In all these challenges lies an opportunity to play on the world or confederation level or to host such competitions,” he said.

Nepfer has also stressed on the importance of leagues and player development for Asian futsal.

“There can be only top futsal if there is a futsal league or leagues in the country,” Nepfer continued. “It is the same for football and it is impossible to compete on the top level without this. We should make this clear to the federations.

“On player development, futsal is an ideal tool to develop football players. Most if not all the big players in Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Portugal and others went though the futsal school. This is the reason why we took futsal as part of our development programme.

“We should stop saying ‘futsal or football’. Futsal and football should belong together. Futsal should be fully integrated into the football family,” concluded Nepfer.





Posted by Kevin Hartwell