Italian women’s futsal knows no shame.
They dream of a UEFA Women’s Futsal Champions League but, to win an international invitational tournament, they invite three teams of laughably poor sporting quality just to shout into the void of their own bubble: “Champions of Europe.”
This year’s opponents? The winners of the German university league, a team of Portuguese immigrants in the Netherlands, a French team (from a country without a league), and Polish and Hungarian squads whose technical level resembles a Zumba class more than futsal.
This sport demands credibility but is run by amateurs and charlatans with no cultural or sporting foundation. The FWEC 2024 is likely the lowest point yet for a discipline that has seen nearly every league champion collapse financially over the past decade.
This is a sport that once had two “champions” tournaments running at the same time and even organized a fake one. Yet, even those fake events included Spanish and Portuguese teams—representing Europe’s most respected leagues.
no credibility
What credibility can a sport claim when its flagship tournaments are less competitive than summer beach leagues, designed solely to declare themselves “Europe’s best”? The future of Italian futsal doesn’t matter—not even to those throwing money into this bottomless pit.
They invoke UEFA, play the Champions League anthem, and then field teams chosen purely to guarantee the organizer’s victory. But the worst is yet to come.
The worst part will arrive when other Italian clubs publicly congratulate the winners, even offering a pasillo de honor to a team that triumphed in what is essentially a winter beach tournament. Complicity is the real cancer of Italian futsal, driven by the hope that someday they too can organize and win their own sham “champions” event.
All of this is sanctioned by the Divisione Calcio a 5, which endorses a tournament that is more theater than sport. December 2024 paints a bleak picture of Italian futsal: a discipline controlled by those who spend the most, shout the loudest, and tell the biggest lies—over and over again.
