As soon as we pay attention to Futsal, we realize all the reasons people give for the evolution of goalkeepers in football have existed in Futsal long before.
Think about it for a second, the speed of players in Futsal isn't much lower than that in football. However, the field itself is smaller both in size and in ratio. The first one isn't really tough to explain, but the ratio is also smaller because when you compare the maximum space of a football pitch and that of a futsal and divided on the number of players on the pitch in both sports, you'd discover that a futsal player holds 28-33% of the space a football player holds. That's why, a goalkeeper is more than needed to take away from that space.
The second reason is also related to the size of the pitch, it makes the use of hands and feet the way football goalkeepers used to play almost meaningless. Futsal goalkeepers threw the ball to his teammates before even Grosics and Yashin did, they passed short and accurate passes with their feet before even Ederson, Neuer, and Ter Stegen started playing by 80 years.
Since futsal's inception in 1930, long balls were considered meaningless for a futsal keeper as they were too slow to create any advantage, this takes us to the third reason.
Since futsal players hold 28-33% of the space a football player holds makes the game faster by many levels, and more importantly it the futsal keeper under pressure since the first second a game starts. A futsal keeper simply can't be like legendary keeprs such as Buffon or Oliver Kahn, or even future legends like Thibaut Courtois and David De Gea as they don't have the luxury to say that they are excellent shot stoppers but bad with their feet. Why is that? Well, this takes to the fourth reason.
Futsal goals are also smaller than football goals both in term in size and ratio, it is also smaller for the futsal keeper as well. The goal in futsal is 2 meters high and 3 meters wide, while in football it is 2.44 meters high, and 7.32 meters wide. This means that a futsal keeper doesn't require many abilities like diving, flexibility, and movement, thus making his physical features much closer to that of his teammates in other positions.
In conclusion, this means that futsal is a sport where goalkeepers can be chosen for their foot abilities on the ball more than their abilities off the ball. This means that football keepers didn't invent anything but rather were forced to copy things from futsal keepers. So, whether Grosics, Yashin, Michels, Cruyff, or Pep Guardiola are aware of that fact or not, it is still copied from there.
Is It Really an Evolution
As football progressed and got more complicated, the game became much faster than it used to and now has fewer empty spaces which puts the goalkeepers in football under a lot of pressure. That makes it similar to futsal in that aspect now, although futsal had already had that since its inception while it happened to football in 1992 when the back pass rules were changed. So, simply put,
Now the question is whether that makes what happened in football to goalkeepers really an evolution when it was copied from futsal. When I take something from a different field and apply it to my own field, is that considered evolution? The answer is, well, yes, obviously. The idea here isn't to undermine such evolution or revolution in football but to only put the main idea and source of inspiration in context.
The only thing that makes this complicated is the simple fact of marketability as mentioned in the previous. In football, futsal wasn't as marketable as Hungary's Grosics, who wasn't as marketable as Rinus Michels, who wasn't as marketable as Johan Cruyff, who wasn't as marketable as who many view as the source of this evolution, Pep Guardiola.
Why the Idea Seems Strange?
It is only considered strange because many people who follow football don't seem to be aware of this fact. It's also considered strange because of how simple it was or should have been to connect both.
Many of us have played futsal, we've all rented a futsal court for an hour or so and played the 5 versus 5 sport. Often we'd put the least skilled or the fattest person as the goalkeeper, but we also often rotate the goalkeepers. Up until the turn comes to the skilled player to become the keeper and you'd often see him barge forward and use his skill to make space or pass the ball. Yet we never really made that connection.
The strangest part, however, is that many goalkeeper coaches seem to be surprised by this simple fact as well as the way they speak about it even after they realized it. Tony Elliott, the English goalkeeper coach who's very involved in the English FA, and who is also considered one of key people in the recent revolution. He's one of the people who attended and gave lectures in the English FA conference about goalkeeping, says that he owes a lot of what he learned to keepers in different sports, especially futsal keepers and goalkeepers in Powerchair football.
He also says that coaches can't even imagine the number of things they could learn by looking into other sports. Have you noticed the way keepers like Neuer, Stegen, Alisson, Ederson, and really most keepers nowadays go after the ball in one-on-one situations? That technique which has saved goals and won trophies many times was something Tony Elliott learned from futsal.
This technique came from one of the key differences between the two sports, we've already said that football goals are much bigger making it pointless to attempt to cover all of it when attacked. In futsal, it is the opposite. No matter what's your size, there's still a chance for you to cover the goal if you use your limbs correctly.
That idea moved to football, so instead of forcing the keeper to count on his skills, ability to guess, or just quick response, we could instead teach him a technique that would cover the parts he could cover of the ball. If that technique doesn't work when the attacker is in the middle facing the keeper, then at least it would work when he comes from a side angle.
The video above is three years old, but notice how Elliott shares key advice that a keeper shouldn't let his knee touch the ground, which is something that even top football keepers don't do. The point of that advice is that because if the attacker tricks the keeper or changes direction, the keeper would still have time to respond and adjust. We also see that in action in the video below.
This video shows how Andy Reading, the goalkeeper coach at England's futsal team, was teaching his keepers to do the same thing. This technique has been something Reading was teaching even before Stegen or Alisson were starting at any club. All of that is off the ball. On the ball, it is different.
Andy Reading says that in futsal when a goalkeeper has the ball, he becomes very similar to American football's quarterback, the most important position in American football. The keeper has to be in charge of ball distribution with speed and accuracy without any entanglement. The reason this matters is also because of who Andy Reading is.
Andy Reading used to be a futsal goalkeeper before becoming a coach, and even before that he was a football goalkeeper and this was a key difference he noticed when making the shift.
In Conclusion
Everything we considered revolutionary in football when it comes to football was already within the basics of futsal since it started. It is also a part of us as football who also play it, just like whenever we have a skilled player at the goal when we play 5 v 5, he'd be offering us much more than when we'd pick an unskilled player as the goalkeeper.
This doesn't make the goalkeepers' evolution less impressive or innovative for the football keepers and coaches who participated in moulding it into its current. But, does this mean we owe the credit to the goalkeepers' evolution to the creator of futsal, Juan Carlos Ceriani, an Argentinian PE teacher in Uruguay who created a mini football pitch? No, not really. That's because Ceriani could have never anticipated the changes in football which required such skills from the keepers.
What Ceriani simply did was a reaction to the lack of available pitches that would be able to have 11 versus 11 football as we know it. And much like the changes to goalkeepers in football, Ceriani's actions were simply based on the old saying "Necessity is the mother of invention".
What did goalkeepers and coaches do with this knowledge? That's what we will find out in the upcoming parts.
Previous Parts
Sources
Euro 2016: Which is the greatest team in history of international football?
HOW GOALKEEPERS HAVE EVOLVED from 1871-2020
The football field and its dimensions
Thirty years of the backpass ban: The story of modern football’s best rule change
futsal
THE GOALKEEPER COACH: AN UNDERAPPRECIATED MASTERMIND
Part 1 - Tony Elliott: Futsal Goalkeeper Techniques | FA Learning Coaching Session
Andy Reading: Key Attributes Of A Futsal Goalkeeper | FA Learning Interview
Goalkeepers in futsal: An expert view
THE HISTORY OF FUTSAL
MARCOS ABAD EXCLUSIVE: LEEDS’ GOALKEEPER COACH ON ‘BIELSABALL’, ADAPTING TO CHANGE, AND THE LANGUAGE OF GOALKEEPING
Feet (not hands), X-rays and seat-belts: How you scout – and train – a goalkeeper
Training technology puts Bournemouth at forefront of goalkeeping revolution
The most spoken languages in the world
Ajax ontdekte door Onana dat de keepersopleiding niet klopte | Bij de datanerds van Ajax