The German-language Wikipedia claims that 'the first indoor tournament on German soil with professional teams was held from January 13 to January 17, 1971, in Berlin's Deutschlandhalle'. Mind you, it's not futsal we're talking about here, because that was still an exclusively South American phenomenon when the indoor football craze began in Germany, which was in the early 1970s. As a rule, Germans loved the indoor spectacle. And as a fan, I could never see the attraction, as football was clearly meant to be played outdoors.īut, like I said, I was exception. As a coach, I could talk until I was blue in the face, but my youth-team players would still eventually run around the building and, usually out of sheer boredom, fill their bellies with French fries, soda and sweets, with predictable results in the later rounds. Personally, though, I have always had aversions to indoor tournaments, as a player, as a coach and as a fan.Īs a player, I hated the endless sitting around and waiting for the next game, particularly as the day wore on and the air in those small-town gyms became progressively worse. To many people's regret, I should say, because the brief indoor season was immensely popular. Long gone are the days when the biggest clubs and the greatest stars would contest a whole series of tournaments on AstroTurf all through December and January, watched by tens of thousands and shown live on television, culminating in a tournament for the national indoor championship. But that's the key word here, 'region', because the teams that participated were all local sides from the lower echelons - four clubs from the fourth division and four from the fifth.

A week ago, a sell-out crowd of 8,400 followed the annual indoor masters tournament for the region where I now live. That doesn't mean there aren't any, of course. Schalke's Christoph Moritz attempts the spectacular during the 2009 Winter Cup GettyImages Not just because it was very short, but also because of the absence of what used to be a classic feature of the snowy season - indoor football tournaments. For fans of a certain age, this has been another strange winter break.

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