Futsal Way

Paul Challen, Sergio Gargelli

Description

Success in elite football demands both mental and physical excellence. Players must make decisions at lightning speed, and execute those decisions with perfect technique, combined with an ultra-clear understanding of where others - their team-mates and their opponents - are at all times. In The Futsal Way, world-renowned futsal coach Sergio Gargelli and veteran writer Paul Challen make the case that today's elite football clubs require futsal coaches on their staff to take their teams to the next level - as many have already done. With photos, diagrams and clear explanations, they demonstrate how top-level coaches can use futsal to produce exceptional players in the 11-a-side game - as seen in the amazing technical ability of many Brazilian and Spanish players who grew up playing futsal. With a foreword by Euro 2020-winning manager Roberto Mancini, this book is a must for any team or coach looking to keep pace with modern training techniques and tactical developments. It combines in-depth instruction with real-life examples.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 24 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781801502900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Paul Challen and Sergio Gargelli, 2022
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Print ISBN 9781801502030
eBook ISBN 9781801502900
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Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Why futsal?
2. Player roles and the need for flexibility
3. Futsal and decision making
4. Feints and losing a marker
5. One on one offensive and defensive phase
6. Two-player combinations in the finishing phase
7. The finishing phase, from micro to macro
8. The third player: An extension of the concept
9. Watching football through futsal glasses : The 3-1 and 4-0 systems applied to football
10. Transitions: From attack to defence and defence to attack
11. Pressing: An essential part of the modern game
12. The goalkeeper: The 11th outfield player
13. Attention, concentration and defensive responsibility
14. Set pieces: Futsal concepts to create winning solutions
15. Corners in futsal: The set-piece advantage
16. The futsal coach: An essential member of the modern elite football staff
The Futsal Way: Videos referenced
Acknowledgements
I WOULD like to say thank you to my friend and companion on the adventure of this book, Paul Challen. Without his effort and support this project would have been really complicated.
Thanks to La Liga Nacional de Futbol Sala (LNFS), especially president Javier Lozano and Maria Rodrigo, for allowing me to use the images from LNFS matches to express graphically many concepts in the book.
Thanks to RTSW ( https://rtsw.co.uk/ ) for their support with their incredible advanced tactical software, always a faithful companion as I edit my videos and presentation.
Thank you to the Finnish Futsal Liiga, for allowing me to use game photos to express my concepts in the book.
Thank you to my friends and coaches David Campanha and Miguel Rodrigo, for their support in writing the book.
Thank you to Marco and Stefano of Tirogiro Shoes for your technical support and much more.
And thank you to my family for always being at my side.
Sergio Gargelli,
April 2022
1
Why futsal?
The new undiscovered tool for football coaches
MAKE NO mistake about it - I love football, or soccer as it is called in some parts of the world.
Although I have spent just about all of my coaching career as a futsal coach, my first love was most definitely the 11-a-side game. From a very young age in my home country of Italy, I followed professional teams and played passionately on the big pitch like many kids. To this day, you can often find me in front of the TV, or my laptop, watching a league or international football match in my spare time.

And as an ancient Italian proverb says: your first love is never forgotten!
But life has a funny way of introducing new loves into a person s life, and it was not long after those early days in Italy before I began to develop a passion for futsal - what we call calcio a cinque (or 5-a-side) in my home country.
Here I should note an important point of reference for this book: by futsal , I am referring to the official FIFA-sanctioned indoor version of football/soccer - using a small, heavier ball, played on a hard, 40m x 20m court without walls and with some very specific rules. For full details, search Futsal Laws of the Game on fifa.com .
I started to play futsal, with my group of friends, but this was more mini soccer than real futsal. At that time the best team in Italy was Furpile Prato, which trained and played about 30 minutes from my home. So when I went to see them play, I discovered another sport, more tactical, faster, with lots of goals. If I had fallen in love for football, futsal made my heart beat even faster! I had the great fortune to learn so much about the game in Italy from one of my great mentors, the Spanish genius Jes s Velasco, who was the coach of Prato in that period.
I also have to confess something about my past: being a coach is almost a vocation for me. I have had clear ideas about the game since I was young, and I felt the passion since the first time I touched a ball. My mother reminded me that from the age of four until I was almost eight I always slept with my favorite Adidas Tango ball. But more and more I became attracted to tactics and the ideas of coaches. For example, for my eighth birthday I asked my parents for a book by Nils Liedholm, at the time the guru of AS Roma, where he won a Serie A title and lost the European Cup Final to Liverpool. Yes, you could say that I had a clear idea of my future since my youth.
Due to an injury, but more because of this passion, I began devoting myself to coaching from a relatively young age - and soon I was combining another of my great passions, for Asian life and culture. This led to coaching positions in Japan, and later in Vietnam.
It was in this latter country that I experienced what is perhaps my most famous futsal moment as the coach of the Vietnamese national team, when in 2013 we defeated Brazil - the all-time world powerhouse of futsal - in a tournament match, becoming the first (and until this day, only) Asian team to beat Brazil in an official FIFA-sanctioned match.
My coaching career has also taken me to the Middle East; to the role of head coach of the national team of Norway; to China where I have coached at club level, and as that nation s national team coach; and now to Finland where I have also coached at club level and now with the national team. I guess it is no surprise that some have called me the globe-trotter of futsal - a nickname I do not mind at all!
During these coaching adventures around the world, I have of course developed a lot of ideas about futsal - and one of them forms the basis of this book.
Along with my partners in the company Futsal Solutions ( https://futsal.solutions/ ) - the Spanish coaches Miguel Rodrigo and Jose Maria Pazos Mendez (known in the futsal world as Pulpis ), and the Italian Silvio Crisari - I truly believe that futsal provides an amazingly effective way of training football players.
This is not the time or place to engage in a lengthy debate about whether futsal should be a specialist sport unto itself, or a means to contributing to the success of footballers. I ll leave that one to others to argue about - and just say here that in three decades of coaching futsal, it s hard for me not to see the many ways the game can help in the development of football players.
In the pages that follow, I will take a look at how this futsal/football transfer can take place, with a focus on helping coaches of higher-level competitive teams understand how the one sport can help the other. Many of these ideas are also applicable to lower-level, youth-oriented teams, but to be clear, much of what I am discussing in the pages that follow relates to high-level players, focusing on the benefits for a professional team coaching staff in having the contribution of a futsal coach.
I also expand on the idea that, given its smaller playing space, faster pace and unique rules, futsal can be an ideal training ground as a speeded-up version of football, with technical and tactical benefits for attackers and defenders alike.
Of course, I am not the first person to make this connection. Ask any super-skilled Brazilian or Spanish player and they will probably tell you that their early days were spent playing futbol salao or futbol sala in their homelands. As well, at the time of writing, many top football clubs have begun to incorporate futsal training into their youth development schemes, again demonstrating an understanding of futsal s ability to help young footballers. But I do hope this book will provide coaches with many new ideas about how the one sport can help the other.
Finally, I should state that this is a very personal book, in the sense that much of the methodology I talk about is based on exercise I have experimented with and developed over the years, and tactical observations I have made through watching thousands of matches. To be sure, I have taken many coaching courses, up to the highest one available in futsal, the UEFA Pro Licence. But I am very much a proponent of trying things for oneself, and learning through that process of self-discovery.
With that in mind, I encourage other coaches reading this book to do likewise. I have done my best to pass on my experience on the futsal-football relationship , but I encourage the reader not to take everything I have written here as the absolute truth.
Only by finding your own effective way of working with your players will you truly have learned how to be a coach.
I hope you enjoy your reading and, as always, I am eager to hear your feedback.
Sergio Gargelli
http://www.sergiogargelli.com/
2
Player roles and the need for flexibility
FOOTBALL HAS changed profoundly in the last 30 years. Significantly, the AC Milan of Arrigo Sacchi and the Barcelona of Pep Guardiola have made two important revolutions in playing style: the role of pressing (see Chapter 11 ) and the importance of attacking, high-tempo football. Along with this has come one of the most important aspects of m