Our goal is to represent Wales in the UEFA Futsal Cup

Futsal…..? what is that….? Was the main reply to the news that our 5 a side league was in for big changes!.

I am Ade Kiernan and football has been a huge part of my life since I was just 7 years old, it has been responsible for some of the happiest….and saddest times of my life! It has been central to a colorful social life that I have had and I hope will be equally as enjoyable for my 8 year old son as it has been for me.

The norm where I am from and for most of Wales and the UK is that lads play competitive 11 a side football on Saturdays or even Sundays, backed up with a fix of 5 a side to keep them ticking over through the week in the form of fun with friends or as their training sessions for their weekend matches. I was a lad who followed that typical template, but it was only in the latter part or the ‘Twilight’ part of my career that I flipped that template on its head and began to get more of a passion for the small sided game than trying to get around a full size football pitch while creeping into my late thirties.

It was at this point that I became aware of a wonderful sport, which I found out was actually an official, FIFA recognized version of the beautiful small sided version of the game which was key in the development of some of the current top players in the world….FUTSAL!.

With a wonderful invention called…the internet, I was now able to do a lot of research on the sport and find out as much as I could about it….and Futsal Focus was instrumental in aided my search for information and in doing so I found out that there were numerous professional futsal leagues throughout the world and countries where futsal was actually bigger than the 11 a side game.

Strangely enough during this time leisure centers and sports centers were feeling the impact of the economic recession and even closing due the struggling British economy, this handed me a great opportunity to try and develop a new futsal league in my home town of Swansea, South Wales. In Swansea the 11 a side game is flourishing with Swansea City holding its own in the Barclays Premier League, this in itself opening doors to new players for my league as more and more local amateur players were deciding to quit Saturday football to go and watch their beloved ‘Swans’.

Timing seemed to work with me as well, as the Swans were due to move their training venue from Llandarcy Academy of Sport, a new top class sporting venue, to their brand new multi-million pound, state of the art training facilities in the Morfa (an area next to the Liberty Stadium) and Fairwood Common, which gave me a lot of options for available hall time. I

knew that it would be quite a challenge to get players to ‘buy into’ this new sport therefore I decided to start the ball rolling, but made the first season a conventional 5 a side league. I managed to get 8 teams together and had a reasonably successful maiden season. The facility was so good, boasting 150 spectator seats and an electronic scoreboard, this alone was enough to get the teams to sign up for their second season and this is where the futsal journey begins……

I needed some advice and guidance on Futsal, in 2012 I contacted Richard Gunney, the then Futsal Development Officer for Wales, who was also the Welsh National Futsal Team head coach. We decided that a staged implementation would be our best approach, therefore initially we changed the goals to official futsal goals then started to use a futsal ball….as anticipated both were embraced with open arms!

Over the next couple of seasons we slowly introduced Futsal rules such as the 5 accumulated fouls, sub zones and the introduction of teams having to wear full kit. Today I can now boast a fantastic recreational futsal league that actually has teams sitting on a waiting list to join! From this league, our team, Llandarcy Futsal Club was born and this is our story…..

Right from the start, we had one team, called INTER, who were so dominant, they won the first the three league competitions without losing a single match. This team then decided to change the team name to Lonlas, as they had quite a few changes of players and management. Lonlas carried on the same success and have won every league season to date, losing just 2 matches in 3 years of the league competition.

In 2013 I decided to join forces with their coach, Steve Jacobs, and enter the Football Association of Wales (FAW) Futsal Cup, which is a national tournament where teams from all over Wales compete in. We concluded that we would need to strengthen so added a few more quality ‘football players’. We entered the cup competition very raw but to our credit we managed to make it to the Finals day in the North of Wales but were beaten by the eventual competition winners and much more experienced team, Wrexham, who then qualified for the European Futsal Cup that was played in Dublin, Ireland.

This relative success spurred myself and Steve to try and progress and get to the ‘next level’ so we joined forces with a local Welsh League Team, Briton Ferry Llansawel and applied to play in the FAW Elite National Futsal League, which we were granted a license to play in as well as the FAW Futsal Cup.

Again, our momentum kept driving us forward and this time we made it went one step further than before, we were the losing finalists in the FAW Futsal cup and runners up in the National League to Cardiff University Futsal who are littered with Welsh Futsal International players. However this was another season where we took huge strides forward in our development and understanding of Futsal.

On the eve of the 2015/16 season, we have now become LLANDARCY FUTSAL CLUB and made massive improvements in the way we run our club, we take a much more professional approach to everything we do, have signed some top quality players and are looking to make a huge impact on the coming season with European Futsal being our target.

Amongst a squad of very solid local league players, we have managed to attract key signings with ex-Swans professional Chris Jones, Welsh Premier League striker Mark Jones, ex-Swans Kevin Davies and we have another couple of signings in the pipeline which would complete our strongest squad to date, hopefully along the way getting one or two of them into the Welsh National Futsal squad.

A key objective of ours over the next 12 to18 months is to introduce the game to hundreds of young players in the South West Wales area who would benefit both technically and tactically from playing this sport and develop individually and collectively.

Now I couldn’t imagine a life not being involved in Futsal, when I started reading about Futsal I read an article on Futsal Focus where the writer stated that once you start playing Futsal you get addicted, I never knew the feeling behind this words until now and he was right, this is a wonderful sport and I hope more people across the UK and Ireland start to realize this also.