Dave’s Football Blog

As if we needed another argument as to why futsal is the future of American soccer, Thomas Dunmore of If This Is Football — who’s doing fine work writing about the state of soccer in the U.S. and Canada — points us to a New York Times article (blocked off by the Times now, but reprinted here) which details an American businessman’s quest to build futsal courts in Harlem and create a street soccer renaissance.

West Harlem is swarming with real estate speculators these days, so a worldly bystander might not have been surprised to see Irv Smalls Jr. looking covetously the other day at a trash-strewn lot on 114th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

But Mr. Smalls, a 34-year-old former Penn State football player, was not imagining river views or calculating square footage. “”To me,”” he said, “”that’s a futsal field. That’’s perfect. Please.””

Futsal is a compact, five-on-five form of soccer, invented in Uruguay in 1930 and popular around the world, especially as a training sport for young players. But for Mr. Smalls, who is now the executive director of a youth soccer club called FC Harlem Academy, its selling point is that the sport and its variants can be played on small concrete surfaces— for example, on a patch of bare cement at the edge of Taft Houses, a public housing project, which he had surveyed with delight that afternoon.

The gang at This Is American Soccer had a similar story about what’s happening in Harlem these days. Isn’t it interesting that the kids seem quick to embrace Association football in an area where street basketball reigns? I wonder what this says about the state of both these sports in America…

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