England futsal: mixing it with the big boys
Mike Skubala talking tactics with the England team before the futsal World Cup main round qualifiers in 2019 – the last round of qualifiers before the FA axed the team in 2020 Photograph: Jamie Fahey
England’s men’s futsal team is back after a five-year absence imposed by the Football Association’s swingeing cuts to the sport as the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. The return to competition comes weeks after the long-promised England women’s team made their debut in qualifiers for the first Fifa Women’s Futsal World Cup.
In 2022, England Futsal – founded by former national team head coach, Mike Skubala – was handed the contract by the FA to run futsal. The men’s team returns with two group games in main round qualifiers for the 2026 Uefa Euros against Bosnia away and then a historic home tie (the first competitive international tie on home soil) three days later against Switzerland.
To mark the historic return, here’s an EXCLUSIVE extract from Futsal: The Indoor Game Revolutionizing World Soccer featuring insights from inside the final training camp the last time England were in main round competition qualifiers in late 2019
MIKE SKUBALA’S eyes darken.
‘It’s the simplicity that kills,’ declares the England coach. Four rows of heads nod in unison as murmurs of agreement and snorts of acceptance fill the air. The challenge is clear.
England’s futsal players are summing up after a bout of video analysis of their opponents in the 2020 futsal World Cup main round qualifiers. It’s the final training camp before their chance to make history. England have never got beyond this stage.
I’ve been with the team at St George’s Park for the day. Exactly four years earlier, I spent a whole weekend with them at the equivalent stage in the qualification process for the 2016 tournament in Colombia. England’s forthcoming nemesis in 2015 was Ukraine, the overriding focus of the weekend being how to escape the suffocating high press of the powerful eastern Europeans.
England may have crept up a few places in the world ranking since then, but their status against the stronger teams is unchanged: they are still the underdogs.
Most teams in the top fifty will press them high, fully expecting their suspect technique and tactical rigour to break down often enough to make the potentially perilous full-court press well worth the risk.
In the lecture room of the All England Suite, the players are issued with the challenge of watching edited clips of two of their three forthcoming opponents, Italy and Belarus. They sort themselves into two groups.
Russell Goldstein, a schoolteacher by day, makes for the door, heading for a different room to study Belarus while joking that he’s not staying here with ‘someone from the Guardian in the room’. I resist the urge to man-mark him and instead stay put. The Italy clips appeal more anyway.
Skubala’s only intervention is to ask for ‘one or two seniors to go in each group’. Doug Reed stays, along with the veteran captain, Raoni Medina, one of the handful of naturalised foreign citizens to have represented England at futsal.
“‘It’s difficult to pick holes in Italy’s game … That’s why they are seventh in the world’ ”
Born in Brazil, Medina turned professional in football at Sporting Lisbon in Portugal – where he played in the same youth cohort as Cristiano Ronaldo – before falling out of eleven-a-side and back into the game he played most as a boy. The skilful pivot has been at the forefront of the game, for England and the dominant London-based club side Helvécia, for over a decade.
Skubala sits calmly, acting as a facilitator, a guide encouraging the players to take ownership of the process, nudging them towards answers only when he feels they’re missing a trick or getting sidetracked. Calvin Dickson, a left-footed winger/pivot with a maths and physics degree, and Richard Ward, a City of London bank worker with a sideline in depositing the ball in the back of the net for his country, offer swift and vocal insight. It’s a masterclass in coaching off the court.
Mike Skubala engaging Calvin Dickson, far right, and team-mates in a bout of opposition analysis in 2019
After the summary of Italy’s potential strengths and weaknesses are completed, Skubala stands up from his desk-bound position with a laptop and points the group towards a grid on the clipboard. It’s extremely lopsided. The column marked ‘strengths’ is a riot of warnings, whereas the ‘weaknesses’ section contains four lonely entries. ‘That’s why they are seventh in the world,’ Skubala declares. ‘It’s difficult to pick holes in Italy’s game.’
Once Goldstein and the second group return to share their findings on Belarus, Skubala restates the big message of the morning’s training session, when he implored the goalkeepers, particularly the first-choice Mark Croft, to ‘own the game in the build-up’.
He wants the goalkeepers to break out of the high press that all three teams, particularly Italy, will no doubt inflict on them. Just like their patient passing game, Italy’s suffocating high press is predictable yet extremely effective, the physical manifestation of the brutal tactical punishment meted out in high-grade futsal. The lethal simplicity that Skubala talks about.
The session they are about to begin at 5 pm – the second of the day – is about preparing tactical tweaks to face their third group opponent, Hungary. Skubala’s tone changes as he demands the players park all thoughts of Italy and Belarus.
‘Now. Please. Now. Hungary.’ The ensuing chat – and session – concerns how to shackle Zoltán Dróth, the hulking pivot who poses Hungary’s biggest threat.
If I were Skubala’s coach mentor, I’d be full of praise for a robust display of flexible, adaptable coaching in preparation for facing fear- some challengers. As it was, I simply thanked him for the insight, wished the team luck and departed with a promise to talk again after the mission near the Amalfi coast.
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In the end, England’s attempt to shatter the glass ceiling was undone by their opponents’ brutal cohesion, and the tactical intelligence of their star players.
Zoltán Dróth was largely nullified in the opening game, his markers sticking to the gameplan of forcing the Hungary number eleven on to his unfavoured left. But an early second-post finish by Dróth’s teammate, Imre Nagy, set the tone of the three- match tournament.
England preparing to try to break the glass ceiling and reach a major tournament in 2019. Now the team is finally back on court
As though a metaphor for England’s pursuit of the big European futsal nations, the second-minute tap-in left them playing catch-up. Two second-half goals (one from Dróth) com- pleted a 3–0 loss. England needed a result in the following game to retain hope of claiming one of the two qualifying berths in the four-team tournament.
The Italian job came next. Again, it was an opposition player cited as a threat a week earlier, 1,500 miles away in St George’s Park, who struck – effectively ending England’s chances of qualification. Alex Rodrigo da Silva Merlim, a Brazil-born winger known simply as Merlim, was singled out by the England players as the Italians’ weapon of choice.
Alex Merlim: Italy’s Brazil-born star ended England qualification hopes with two trademark strikes
Frustratingly, England held Italy at 0–0 until half- time, the pledge to manage the game and make it ‘scrappy’ played out for real. Then Merlim pounced. Not just once, but twice. Both world-class strikes, one with the right foot, one with the left. The game was over. Italy got a couple more before England pulled one back with a penalty. A 5–2 defeat to Belarus in the final group game completed the misery.
But there was no demoralising hammering in the manner of those painful winless early years under Graeme Dell. Skubala told me afterwards the games were always going to be a ‘tough gig’ and compared them to a non-league football club trying to beat the pro clubs in the FA Cup. ‘It’s possible, but not often.’
As for Merlim? ‘He was class, but we kept him quiet tactically until we got tired. I suppose that’s why his club pay him 20k a month!’
And why he was named third best player in the world that year.
Yet again England were undone by moments of quality from teams with more highly paid game-changing individuals in their ranks.
The loss of Stuart Cook to a knee ligament injury a few weeks earlier had left England facing an uphill struggle.
“Futsal’s so much more enjoyable than eleven-a-side. You don’t have to run 50 yards first. It’s like getting straight into the battle”
Arguably England’s equivalent of a Merlim, the Mancunian fixo is England’s game-changer, with an extraordinary array of fleet-footed magic on court. He was lauded in 2014 with a headline in the Daily Mirror asking: ‘Is this England’s best footballer?’
Shining for Manchester Futsal Club at the time, Cook’s talent contrasted with the underperforming England football team.
Cook tells me he was always drawn to small-sided games.
As a late developer, he was small and technical and ‘fell out of love with football aged fourteen’ to pursue five-a-side cage football ‘four or five times a week’ against adults in tough parts of Manchester.
‘I had to learn to look after myself pretty quickly,’ he says. He turned to futsal just over a decade ago, aged twenty-two, after a big growth spurt and found it suited his game. ‘It’s so much more enjoyable than eleven- a-side. You don’t have to run fifty yards first. It’s like getting straight into the battle.’
Turning out for various clubs in England, at times he was paid expenses to play futsal on a Sunday for the likes of Helvécia (where he played for three years) and semi-professional football on a Saturday.
With a secure day job, a mortgage and four children, the thirty-three year-old admits he has spurned many offers to turn professional (from futsal clubs in Italy, Slovakia, Iran, Malta and Cyprus) and from Crewe Alexandra in English football. ‘Financially, it was never viable,’ he says.
Cook’s equally cogent decision-making on the court has long been key to England’s chances of reaching the next level.
Without him, the Italian job was always likely to be a mission too far.
ALL Extracts
ENGLAND MEN’S futsal team is back. To mark the historic return, here’s an exclusive extract from Futsal: The Indoor Game Revolutionizing World Soccer focusing on the last time they competed in main round qualifiers