National futsal team to face Bosnia and Herzegovina

By Azernews

By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijani national futsal team has will face Bosnia and Herzegovina in the final of the 2022 UEFA Futsal Championship, on January 29.

Azerbaijan Futsal Federation that the national team will hold a pre-match training today at 15:30 Baku time.

Before the training, a press conference will be held with the participation of head coach Jose Alesio Da Silva and Isa Atayev.

The UEFA European Futsal Championship  is the main futsal competition of the men's national futsal teams governed by UEFA. The first tournament was held in Spain in 1996 with only six teams.

The 2022 UEFA Futsal Championship is hosted for the first time in the Netherlands.

This is the first tournament to be held on a four-year basis and featuring 16 teams, as the competition was previously played every two years and included 12 teams since 2010.

The 15 teams which joined automatically qualified hosts Netherlands in the finals were decided by qualifying running.

The futsal teams from Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, Poland and other countries are taking part in the 2022 UEFA Futsal Championship which runs until February 6.

Notably, futsal is a ball sport played on a hard court, smaller than a football pitch, and mainly indoors. It has similarities to five-a-side football.

The game is played between two teams of five players each, one of whom is the goalkeeper. Unlike some other forms of indoor football, the game is played on a hard court surface delimited by lines; walls or boards are not used.

Azerbaijan had never qualified for the FIFA Futsal World Cup until 2016. However, national futsal players participated in the last five editions of the European Championship.

Now futsal team successfully represents Azerbaijan at multiple international futsal competitions such as the FIFA Futsal World Cup and the European Championships.

The team is ranked 14th in the world, the highest-ranking team from Caucasus in the World Rankings.