Stalled futsal
Fans of the indoor sport must wait
The 2020 CONCACAF (that’s “short” for Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football — and that’s “everywhere but here” for soccer) futsal championship, which would have taken place between the first and 10th of May, has, like every other sporting event this year, been postponed indefinitely.
I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking a grievous spelling error had gone into the title and opening paragraph of this article. Futsal has only been around since the 1930s, so it’s like a newborn baby in comparison to the other sports we all know and miss. Plus, it was played almost exclusively in South America until the 1980s, when FIFA decided it was about time it got its hands in the pie (look into that story for an interesting mess of oddly-political sport colonialism).
Futsal, while described in the simplest terms as “indoor soccer,” is actually a bit of a frankensport. Juan Carlos Ceriani Gravier developed the game at a
YMCA in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Soccer was all the rage at the time, since Uruguay had just won the 1930 World Cup, and Gravier wanted to create a sport that was similar but could be played no matter the weather.
By harvesting rules from other indoor sports — basketball’s team size, water polo’s goalkeeping, handball’s court dimensions — he edited the soccer rule book with just the right amount of tweaks, and futsal began to spread through YMCAs in South America like wildfire. When a Spanish television station decided to film the second Futsal World Cup from Madrid in 1985, the sport caught the attention of FIFA organizers across Europe, and the rest, as they say, is “la historia.”
It would have only been the seventh CONCACAF futsal championship, so the sport’s short history hardly offers enough reruns to get through quarantine. Perhaps new fans will be able to get into the sport by the time it returns — but maybe don’t let the kids in on it until this is all over. Most people’s living rooms won’t hold up if used as a futsal field.