Beach soccer is the most spectacular football version

POV: you're on the beach and you've just finished your book, it's time to go play football on the water's edge, trying to beat the record for volleyed touches with the other accomplices that have lasted since last summer, risking hitting beachgoers with a bicycle kick in the water.

In summer, the best version of those actions on the shore is beach soccer, a sport that has the ball in common with football and little else, which indeed seems to be a spectacularized version of the game, in which the bicycle kick is more common than the pass. Beach soccer seems to satisfy the constant desire of fans to see spectacular actions, as if in a parallel universe normal footballers, constantly looking for sensational gestures, have begun to fly, kick from improbable distances and solve championships with circus overhead kicks, such as happened in the last Serie AON, the top Italian championship.

In the Scudetto final between Viareggio and Catania, the Tuscans' goalkeeper scored two goals and out of a total of eleven goals (9 to 2 for the Tuscans) and the last one was scored with a bicycle kick from midfield. The Scudetto final is the beach soccer routine as if every game were any All-Star Game with spectacular dunks, three-pointers and alley-oops.

Upside down acrobats

Beach soccer looks like soccer in which the doses of the recipe have been completely changed. It's far from the hyper physicality that now unites all the teams even in the minor categories and ok, we know that running on the beach is tiring, even more so in the summer and further if you can't throw yourself into the sea. However, those perfect machines with hypertrophic quadriceps and deformed calves don't play football on the sand, the footballers look like physically able-bodied people who have developed the ability to move with shocking naturalness on a surface hostile to human movements. Your friend who is good at football but is also an acrobat in another universe plays beach soccer. In fact, matches look like matches between performers in which the goal on the pitch is to do something that the public would never expect to see.

In beach soccer, the dimension of the space in which the ball travels also changes. Actions in which the ball is held high and the touches are made on the fly are opposed to the ball on the ground and short touches, certainly to counteract the unpredictability of the dunes, but also because otherwise how would one be able to do overhead kicks? Before traditional football was very much influenced by the pitch and by the clods of land, now at a certain level the ground is no longer such a relevant discriminator, as if perfection were placed at the service of the gesture and the ball thrown into a black hole where there is no friction. On the other hand, in beach soccer you play with dunes, they are used to kick and to raise sand that disturbs the opponents, to defend the ball and for stability.

Aesthetics and geography of a real film

Due to the different seasons in which it is played, obviously, the aesthetics of the teams and uniforms also change, which only in some cases resemble those of 11-a-side football but with more sponsors, without socks and a simpler overall look. Even the game, despite its spectacularity, seems simpler, the path to get to the goal is more vertical, without maneuvers but with large individual gestures that narrow the distance between traditional football and that acrobatic and absurd vision represented in the 2001 film "Shaolin Soccer".

In beach soccer, the geography of the teams is also different from that of Serie A, obviously the sea and the places where you find yourself playing and having stadiums on the beach have an impact, in which a cultural tradition of small matches played between the umbrellas has developed. In Serie AON in the last season (the nineteenth) there were 17 teams, divided into two groups which also included teams from small cities but large centers of very Italian tourism. Even the venues of the five phases of the championship seem to be the perfect scenarios to tell the neo-realist story of a family holiday in Italy, among packaged ice creams, rows of umbrellas and the last summer catchphrase from the factory coffers: San Benedetto del Tronto, Lignano Sabbiadoro, Catania, Cirò Marina and Viareggio.

If for you summer football was only Aldo Baglio emerging from the sand in a highly quoted film by Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo, in reality, beach soccer seems to be a capsule in which the primitive spectacularity of football has remained intact. Perhaps beach soccer is a capsule preserved on earth that we will discover when European football has melted behind the logic of the market and crazy transfers to Arabia, leaving the performance, acrobatic athleticism and the joy of playing looking at the horizon where sea and sky merge.