Courtesy: InsideWorldFootball.com

David Owen: Why it would make sense to introduce a Winter Olympic futsal competition

Wednesday, 05 February 2014

by David Owen

"Just arrived in Sochi," Joseph Blatter tweeted on Tuesday. "Looking forward to meeting my friends and colleagues from the Olympic community before Sochi 2014."

The FIFA President is an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member. So he will attend the IOC Session that precedes the Winter Olympics, the first to be chaired by Thomas Bach, the recently-elected IOC President.

There will no doubt also be opportunities to catch up with Russian officials, including perhaps President Putin himself, on preparations for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, to be hosted for the first time by the world's biggest country.

But what if his flit to the shores of the Black Sea also took in a football competition? What if Sochi 2014 were to incorporate a Winter Olympic football tournament?

The idea is not as preposterous as it probably sounds.

Unlike its older Summer cousin, the Winter Olympics leaves much of the world, well, cold. If you live in one of the many countries where water scarcely ever freezes, it should hardly come as a surprise if you take little interest in, say, the skeleton, the slopestyle, or other frosty delights on the Winter Games programme.

I have long advocated addressing this, and enhancing the event's global commercial appeal, by shifting some indoor sports from the Summer Olympic programme to the Winter.

Switch volleyball, for example, and you could expect to drum up interest in the Winter Games in the likes of Brazil and Cuba. Move boxing and you might get Thailand and Ireland hooked. Track cycling and it seems reasonable to assume that more Brits and Aussies would tune in, or tune in for longer.

Revamping the sports programme in this way would have the additional benefit for the Olympic Movement of making the Summer Games, now a gargantuan undertaking for any host, less unwieldy.

The Winter Games could also usefully be used to 'blood' new Olympic sports and disciplines – squash, say, or three-on-three basketball – rather than endeavouring to shoehorn them in to the bursting-at-the-seams Summer programme.

It is hard to imagine, though, that any of these sports, popular as they are, would broaden the appeal of the Winter Olympics quite as much as introduction of a football tournament.

It would not be feasible to move the existing Summer Olympic football competitions for men and women to winter. For a start, games are usually played outside which, while not a problem for Sochi, would challenge more wintry Winter Games hosts. More importantly, it would be all but impossible to prise any top Europe-based players away from their clubs in February, when many of the game's most glittering prizes are starting to build towards their respective climaxes.

But why not initiate a Winter Olympic futsal, or five-a-side, competition?

Such a move could lift the profile of what, when all is said and done, is a terrific game in much the same way as the addition of rugby sevens to the Summer Olympic programme for Rio 2016 is set to achieve for this short-form version of fifteen-a-side rugby union.

Glancing at the men's futsal rankings, meanwhile, I note that countries with little or no Winter Olympic tradition in the Top 30 include: Iran, Argentina, Paraguay, Portugal, Thailand, Costa Rica, Libya and Egypt. This suggests that the sport could be used to expand interest in the Winter Games quite significantly.

The Olympic Movement appears to be on the point of exiting a golden period, stretching back two decades or more, in which revenues simply defied gravity, and embarking under its new leader on a phase of more sluggish growth.

I suspect the outlook would, nonetheless, need to darken considerably before such radical proposals as these start to be seriously entertained by anyone who matters. But while this sort of innovation probably would steal a portion of the limelight from the traditional winter sports we will be watching at Sochi, I can see little downside to its implementation.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.






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