They laughed at my father's dream, now I coach India | By Joshuah Vaz

At the end of 2011, my dad attended a futsal Level 1 course in Kerala. Soon after that, we were fortunate enough to have a futsal court back home in Goa.

Opening an academy had always been his dream, and that was when he decided to start an exclusive futsal academy.

Back then, people laughed at him.

Today, when his son works at the highest level in futsal, many of those same people look back and say they finally understand why he started.

From player to coach

I played football and futsal simultaneously for many years. Since 2012, both sports were part of my life. Futsal helped me become a better footballer – the smaller spaces, tighter areas, close control and constant pressure forced me to improve.

Unfortunately, injuries stopped me from progressing further in my football career. In 2019, I suffered an ACL tear and had to stop playing for some time. Then Covid-19 hit, and I was no longer at my peak.

In 2021, when the first futsal club championship was held in Delhi, we formed a team with players from Goa and a few friends from Pune. We finished runners-up.

That tournament slowly pushed me more towards coaching than playing. I was a coach-cum-player then, and even in the following season I coached more than I played.

I come from a family of teachers. My father is a coach, my mother and wife are teachers, my brother is a physical education teacher and a coach.

Teaching and guiding people is something that has always been part of my life, and that is probably one of the main reasons I genuinely enjoy coaching.

Learning, mentors and a new goal

I completed my futsal Level 1 course in 2018 in Goa under an elite instructor in Dr Shahabeddin Sofalmanesh from Iran, who is currently the assistant coach of the Iran.

Watching the way he conducted sessions and ran the course inspired me to set a new goal for myself – to become an elite instructor one day.

Six years later, I became an AFC Futsal Elite Instructor.

For me, futsal is fun, it is exciting, and it has a thrill that I feel more strongly than in football.

The most important quality a futsal player must have is speed of thought. Football intelligence matters more than just how good you are with your feet. Of course, technique is important, but if you can think faster, the game becomes much easier on a futsal court.

It is also important to understand why futsal was created in the first place. The game was invented in 1930 by a physical education professor named Juan Carlos Ceriani in Uruguay. Even after Uruguay had won the World Cup, he felt other countries were still ahead. He realised players needed to be more agile and think faster, and his solution was to make them play in smaller, tighter spaces.

That is exactly what futsal gives players – confidence, better technical ability, ball control, decision-making under pressure and a much sharper understanding of transitions from attack to defence and defence to attack. Even modern goalkeeping has taken a lot from futsal, especially in terms of blocking techniques and using the feet.

Many of the world’s top players – Messi, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Iniesta and Busquets – all come from futsal backgrounds. In South America and Europe, children usually start with futsal between the ages of four and ten.

In futsal, players touch the ball far more than in 11-a-side football, sometimes almost ten times more, and that naturally accelerates learning.

In Asia as well, countries like Iran, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan have strong futsal systems, where players grow up playing futsal before moving into football.

In India, one thing must be clearly understood – futsal is not here to compete with football. It is an auxiliary to football.

The equipment itself also supports learning. The futsal ball is slightly heavier. On a flat, hard indoor surface, a lighter ball would bounce too much.

For a young child, a lighter football often bounces off the leg and rolls away. A heavier futsal ball stays closer, helps control and builds confidence.

Working with India’s men’s and women’s teams

I first worked with the men’s team in 2023, and I have been working with many of those players since 2021. I took charge of the women’s team in 2025, when we went for the AFC qualifiers and later competed in the 2026 SAFF Championship.

The women’s team has a lot of potential. But if we genuinely want to qualify for an AFC competition six years from now, the planning has to begin immediately.

There are around five FIFA windows every year in futsal, and several Asian national teams are already interested in playing friendly matches with India.

At the same time, we face a big structural challenge. India does not have a women’s futsal league. Players were nominated by state associations for trials, and several could not attend because of exams or because they were playing in competitions such as the Indian Women’s League.

There is far more talent in the country than what we are currently able to access.

Even so, I was very happy with the group of girls who came in. Our team’s average age was around 20, while most opposition teams had average ages of 25 or 26 and players who had already represented their countries at senior level in football.

In spite of that gap in experience, we dominated most of our matches. There were only short phases – one half against Bangladesh and brief periods against Bhutan – where we were not fully in control, and in both matches the opposition goalkeepers made the difference.

We finished the tournament strongly by winning our final match 5-2 against Sri Lanka. Because of Nepal’s result against Bhutan, we finished as runners-up.

For me, however, the performance mattered more than the final position.

What the girls achieved in just 30 days is something I truly admire. Many of them were playing futsal for the first time, and many were also playing at international level for the first time.

The match against Pakistan, in particular, came with a very different emotional and psychological pressure. Being 1-3 down and coming back to win 5-3 showed tremendous courage, spirit and fight.

The biggest strength I see in this team is that the girls are smart and tactically adaptable. After almost every match, I introduced one new tactical idea.

In the following game, when we scored, the players would often say, “This one came from the training ground.”

That ability to absorb new concepts so quickly is rare. If these players are given longer training camps and more time to repeat and refine tactical patterns, I genuinely believe they can perform at a much higher level internationally.

That is the future I see for this team.

Written by Aswathy Santhosh