My Football and Futsal Journey

The European Football Championship 2024 (EURO 2024) in Germany has started, so it’s just completely natural for me to write about how I got hooked on football, and futsal later on, while keeping a close eye on the matches between the best teams in front of the TV screen and cheering for our team.

I developed my love and passion for football as a child, holding on to a ball and hanging around the football fields in the neighbourhood all day long. It was a rubber ball, and the fields were not real football courts – those were more unoccupied grass fields in the neighbourhood, while ‘goal doors’ were made of stone or bricks. A lot of kids enjoyed carefree playing and hanging together which enabled us to always make several teams.

True love for football and my talent were recognized by the local Football Club ‘Radnički’ from Vršac, where I joined the youngest team, and soon after that I moved to the junior team of the Football Club ‘Vršac’. My professional career started right there. At the age of a bit less than seventeen, I joined the first team, where I played eight seasons and proudly wore the captain's armband. Later on in my career, I also played several seasons in the First League of Serbia, which I am particularly proud of.

I soon replaced running on a big field with playing futsal. I joined the futsal club ‘Forum’ from Vršac in 2005, and since 2015, I have been officially appointed as a coach. While I was regularly playing, I simultaneously pursued my education, and shortly after that acquired the National Futsal Diploma of the Football Association of Serbia Coaching Education Centre, and in 2019 I obtained the prestigious UEFA FUTSAL B Diploma of the Football Association of Serbia Coaching Education Centre, which is the most respected diploma for futsal in the world.

Futsal (or indoor football) is a kind of football which is played indoors – in a sports hall with parquet flooring. The rules that apply to football are different from futsal rules. A futsal team consists of four (4) players in the field and a goalkeeper. A team is composed of twelve (12) players and two (2) goalkeepers. Due to dynamic movements, speed, strong tempo and player exhaustion, so-called flying substitutions are allowed, which means that players can be substituted without stopping the game and without a limited number of substitutions. Futsal is played with a smaller ball (‘size 4’) which has a weight for low-bouncing in order to be easily controlled. The duration of a game is 2x20 minutes with time stopping at each break. Futsal is a demanding game in which the score changes a lot, so I learned not to give up and to fight until the very end, because the score is rapidly changing.

In order to play and be successful in indoor football, as in any sport, it takes a lot of sacrifice, work, order, and persistence. Taking care of your health, i.e. proper nutrition, and resting between practices is important equally as the sincere will and desire for success and the teamwork. Every sport, including this one, forces you to take care of both your mental and physical health, teaching you how important it is to focus on yourself and others.

My sports career was marked by numerous awards for the best player, the best scorer, but I achieved the greatest success as a team player, winning numerous awards with clubs both in the country and abroad. In addition to the enviable results achieved with the seniors, significant successes were also achieved with the youth teams both at the level of Vojvodina and Serbia. The crown of my work so far is my appointment as the coach of the Senior National Team of Vojvodina in 2016, followed by the appointment as the coach of the University National Futsal Team of Serbia. I am looking forward to competing at the international level, and in the meantime, I am practicing hard because love, work, perseverance, and unity are the basic postulates of success both in sports and in any business.

From the point of view of someone who has been doing sports for years, at the end of my professional (but not recreational) career I would like to highly recommend everyone to go in for sports because sports know no borders, and age is not an obstacle to do it recreationally. The benefits to health, joy and satisfaction that pursuing sports brings at all ages are much more important.

Author: Nenad Varađan, Reference Protocl Associate, Legal Affairs, Compliance, and Commercial Projects, Hemofarm Group

Source: Hemofarm Foundation - My Football and Futsal Journey (fondacijahemofarm.org.rs)