FIFFSA 5-a-side World Cup Qualifying – Week 1

With only a few days until the start of the FIFFSA 5-a-side world up, we would like to welcome you to the preview of the FIFFSA Five-A-Side World Cup. We have 64 teams competing and we want to thank all of you for your participation.

The Tournament Format

As revealed last week there will first be continental qualifying in eight groups of eight teams. These groups shall be a round robin where each team faces each other once and the top four teams shall qualify for the World Cup Finals, which will follow a traditional 32 team format. The eight continental groups were drawn as follows last week:

For a comprehensive explanation of the tournament rules you can read our World Cup Charter.

Pre-Tournament Favourites

While San Marino is one of the weaker nations on the footballing stage, they have assembled a vastly experienced squad and approach this tournament with 49 FPL seasons of history and in that time they have accumulated 94,793 FPL points. This is more than any other nation although they are closely followed by Iran with 48 seasons’ history and 94,764 points and Cuba with 48 seasons’ history and 91,164 points. It’s clear that these teams have a wealth of knowledge to draw from, but will the old timer’s legs be able to stand the pace of 5-a-side football in the Thai heat?

At the other end of the scale, Egypt enters the tournament with only a previous 4 seasons’ experience of FPL and 7266 points. They will surely be hoping their youthful exuberance will make up for their lack of FPL experience.

If you value quality over sheer experience, then look no further than Wales who, led by Athletic Timboyo, stand out as one of the most individually successful sides in the draw. They are the only squad to include a past FPL winner and together they have amassed an impressive six top 1k finishes as well as nineteen top 10k finishes. Hot on their heels is team Jamaica who have twenty one top 10k finished amongst the squad as well as five top 1k finishes.

Looking at this season’s early form book suggests India are another team to look out for as they have an average of 664 points each and an average rank of 15,574. They are closely followed by the USA averaging 661 points each at rank 22,930 and team Germany averaging 660 points at rank 25,571.

A more detailed summary of this can be found on the player history tab which includes the rank history of every player in the tournament at our team sheets and tables spreadsheet.

Matches

Each Gameweek teams will pick a team of five players to go head to head with their opposite nation. The match will then be decided by the aggregate score of each teams’ Gameweek scores after hits have been accounted for. This week’s games can be found here.

Captains are required to submit their team sheets to fiffsa.exec@gmail.com by 11pm (GMT) by the Friday of each Gameweek otherwise their sixth player will be automatically benched.

Live scorecards will be up shortly before the early kick-off on Saturday at our score centre spreadsheet.

If you have any further queries, feel free to ask below in the comments or email us at: fiffsa.exec@gmail.com

Enjoy the tournament; this is the FIFFSA 5-A-Side World Cup. Accept no imitations.

As a final request, please do try and keep FIFFSA 5-A-Side chat to the comment sections of our articles.

The FIFFSA Executive Committee – President Sepp Balders, VP BabyB, VP Jaffalicious!, VP Diva, VP Blue Lion and Secretary General Jerome Cheeseoid.