Reading Royals Futsal Club have announced a new partnership with Four Zero Futsal, an international Futsal service provider from New Zealand.
The partnership comes with a range of benefits for the Royals, including access to new talent ahead of the 2022-23 FA National Futsal Series.
Richard Oxley, Royals Secretary and Men’s Team Manager, explains the benefit of this exciting new partnership.
Oxley said: “The immediate benefit of this partnership is a massive injection of international futsal experience into our Men’s squad.
“We are really excited to welcome Jordi Ditfort, Logan Wisnewski and Kyle Wisnewski to the club, all current members of the New Zealand Men’s Futsal squad.”
Ditfort and the Wisnewski brothers join the Royals from New Zealand club-side, the Waikato Rapids.
Collectively the trio bring 195 club appearances and 95 goals between them. The young trio also bring the experience of 19 international appearances and 6 international goals.
Oxley continued: “We are also excited to welcome Sam Masterson to the club as our new Men’s Head Coach.
“Sam is a specialist futsal coach from New Zealand and will allow Brayden [Royals player-coach since 2020] to focus on playing.”
Masterson also joins the Royals from the Waikato Rapids. Under his watch, the Rapids finished first and second in the New Zealand Men’s Futsal Superleague.
Following this success, Masterson was named 2020 New Zealand Futsal Coach of the Year.
As well as access to international futsal talent, the partnership with Four Zero Futsal will also bring a specialist futsal service provider to Berkshire.
New Royals signing, Kyle Wisnewski, founded Four Zero Futsal to support the development of futsal.
The ethos of Four Zero Futsal is to work with schools and clubs to deliver quality futsal programmes and create futsal pathways.
Fellow Royal and New Zealand international, Brayden Lissington, has joined Wisnewski as a director of Four Zero UK.
Their ambition is to apply the same ethos to futsal in the the United Kingdom to accelerate the growth of the sport.
Futsal is an exciting, fast-paced five-a-side game likened to football, that is played indoors for halves of 20 minutes of stop-clock action.
The balls in futsal do differ from a regular football, a futsal ball is three times heavier to promote close control on the court floor and possession inside the court.
The benefits of futsal are heavily transferable outside of the sport itself and onto the football pitch, with players most notably improving ball control and becoming more comfortable in possession.
Reading as a town provides multiple avenues to get involved in futsal with two futsal clubs to choose from; Reading Royals and Dynamo Tekkers.
Both teams have youth setups starting as early under-7s, with clear progression pathways through the age groups and into the adult teams.
Household names like Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar have credited their world-class dribbling skills to early development from futsal, even Wolverhampton Wanderers defender Max Kilman has a futsal background earning 25 caps for the English national futsal team.
Reading Royals has two men’s teams and a women’s team that plays in the NFS Series Two, LNFS West Division and NFS Tier Two respectively.
Reading’s women’s team saw an incredible turn in results in the second half of their season to finish second in their first season together.
To get involved with Reading Royals Futsal Club, or Four Zero Futsal, please contact: info@royalsfutsal.co.uk
