Baku 2015 - fantastic opportunity for beach soccer
By Nigar Orujova
The First European Games in Baku serve as a fantastic opportunity to promote beach soccer and bring it closer to being featured in the Olympics.
The statement came from Joan Cusco, a FIFA Board Member and Vice President of Beach Soccer Worldwide, at a press conference in Baku on June 23.
The Baku 2015 European Games is an innovative competition that has gathered over 6,000 athletes from 50 countries to compete in 20 sports.
The beach soccer event will commence on June 24. Eight men’s teams, comprising of total 96 athletes, will go head-to-head over the five days of the competition.
Europe is home to some of the world’s best beach soccer teams, including reigning world champions and runners-up Russia and Spain, respectively. Russia also took second place in the 2014 Intercontinental Cup, while Portugal finished third.
“We are a very young sport, and new trend in sports, a part of football,” he said adding that joining Baku European Games is the best news that “we have been able to bring to this sport.”
Cusco said that the beach soccer is represented at the Baku 2015 by the best team, best players from Europe.
“We want to showcase this sport at its best. We want to gain new fans, new players, new teams, new media and new sponsors. We are very young and everything we do is just to gain people to get in love with our game,” Cusco stressed.
He also said that the facilities created for this sport here are fantastic, up to world class standards. In particular, Cusco praised the stadium, saying it was "the best we have ever played on".
Azerbaijan’s promising future in beach soccer
Azerbaijan has promising future in beach soccer, Jose Miguel Mateus, the head coach of the national beach soccer team, said at the press conference.
He added that there are excellent conditions for that—not only the facilities, but also the athletes of this sport.
“The European Games can make young people, in particular in Azerbaijan, feel fascinated about beach soccer. And with our games and our performances we will try to get more and more people interested in it,” Mateus said.
“We have responsibility of representing the country,” he said adding that the team will try its best to show good results.
Emin Kurdov, Azerbaijan national team's goalkeeper said that the team maintains an excellent mood. “We will try to be among top five teams,” he stressed.
“Football in Azerbaijan is developing, and with beach soccer competitions we will try to prove it,” Kurdov added.
Taken from the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, beach soccer is one of five non-Olympic sports featured in the European Games program.
The sport traces its roots back to 1993, when the first professional beach soccer game was organized in Miami, in the United States. Two years later, the sport returned to Rio for the inaugural Beach Soccer World Championship.
With a shot on a goal approximately every 30 seconds, an average of 9 to 11 goals are scored in total per game.
--
Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar
Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz