Courtesy: Inside World Football


Futsal EUROs close with broken records and the passing of an era

Wednesday, 12 February 2014

by Paul Nicholson

UEFA closed its most successful Futsal EUROs to date on Sunday night with Italy beating Russia in the final in front of a near-capacity 12,000 spectators in Antwerp's Sportpaleis. The match ended Spain's recent dominance of the Championship that has now been held nine times and move on to Serbia in 2016. Football's small sided game is finding its place on a bigger stage.

The 12 team 2014 Championship in Antwerp, Belgium, was watched by more than 90,000 people. 20 games and 121 goals (Russia's Eder Lima was the top scorer), saw the Championship take the next step in terms of competitiveness and public awareness.

Russia's dramatic win over Spain - 4-3 with a winner by Robinho with just 66 seconds left on the clock - ended a Spanish winning run of 3,726 days since their previous defeat against a European team, 3-1 in the UEFA Futsal EURO 2005 group stage versus Italy on 17 February that year.

Spain had reigned as European Champions for nine years, winning the last 4 editions of the competition in 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2012. The 2014 final was only the second in the Championship's history that hadn't featured the Spanish.

This is only the second final that had not featured Spain, who had to settle for third place.

As Spain's record was being broken, new records were being set. Up to the final two matches, the competition has had a total attendance of 66,063 in 18 matches.

The group stage of the tournament saw attendances of over 3,000 per match with 78.6% stadium capacity filled.

The record attendance for a Euro Championship match is 14,300 for Croatia v Russia in 2012.

In terms of broadcast coverage not all the audience figures are in, however Belgium vs Romania highlights scored a 17.7% share on VRT's Canvas channel, while in Portugal, Netherlands v Portugal attracted an audience of more than 330,000 on state broadcaster RTP (7.2% audience share).

The tournament was broadcast live by Eurosport as well as Belgian channels, the French-language RTBF – all Belgium matches live or delayed as well as one semi-final live and the final live – and the Flemish-language VRT, which showed all Belgium matches live.

The event had 12 commercial partners. There were 10 global sponsors in adidas, Carlsberg, Coca-Cola, Continental, Kia, McDonald's, Mondo, Socar, City of Antwerp, ProvInce of Antwerpen.

Futsal is starting to take a stronger hold in Europe, not least because of the huge growth of organised 5-a-side tournaments on dedicated nd commercially run small-sided pitches throughout Europe's cities. In 1996 there were 18 UEFA countries playing Futsal. 45 countries participated in UEFA EURO 2014.

And for the 11-a-side purists who tend to rubbish the small-sided format as a distraction, it is hard to argue with testimonials from Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa all saying that the game was crucial to their own development as players.







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