Futsal Rules & Formats

1. The basics: court, ball and how a game works

Futsal is the indoor, five-a-side cousin of football — but it is its own sport with its own rules, not just football in a sports hall. It rewards close control, quick passing and composure in tight spaces, which is why so many of the world's best players grew up on it. If you can play futsal well, eleven-a-side feels like it has acres of room.

The court

A full futsal court is 40m by 20m on a hard, flat indoor surface — never grass or 3G astroturf. Goals are smaller than football's at 3m wide by 2m high (the size of a hockey goal), and there's a marked penalty area shaped from arcs rather than a rectangular box. There are no walls or rebound boards: the ball goes out, and play restarts from the line. Club nights happily run on a slightly smaller sports-hall court; the surface and the markings matter more than the exact dimensions.

The ball

This is the defining piece of kit. A futsal ball is a size 4 with a heavily reduced bounce — drop it and it barely comes back up. That dead bounce is deliberate: it keeps the ball on the floor and forces passing and control over the bouncy, aerial scramble of normal five-a-side. Using a standard size-5 football is the single most common mistake, and it turns a technical game into a chaotic one.

How a game works

Each team has five players on the court: four outfield and a goalkeeper. Substitutions are rolling and unlimited — players come on and off through a marked zone whenever they like, without stopping play, so the tempo never lets up. A proper match is two halves of 20 minutes on a clock that stops for every dead-ball, meaning the actual playing time is far higher than eleven-a-side. There's no offside, the goalkeeper restarts with a throw rather than a goal kick, and balls that leave the court at the side come back as kick-ins. It's a relentless, end-to-end game — which is exactly the point.

2. Scoring: futsal runs on the clock

Futsal is a timed sport, not a first-to-a-number one. You don't play to a target score — you play for a set period, and whoever has more goals when time runs out wins. That single fact shapes everything about how you score and run a session.

The match clock

In the full game, the two 20-minute halves are played on a clock that stops every time the ball is out of play, so a "20-minute half" can take half an hour of real time and there's genuinely no hiding. Each team also gets one one-minute timeout per half. For a club night you don't need a stopping clock and a timekeeper — a simple running clock is fine, and shorter games keep the rotation moving.

Scoring a club night

The practical way to score futsal at a club is short, sharp timed games — typically 10 or 12 minutes each. You blow for kick-off, the clock runs, and the team ahead when the buzzer goes takes the win; a level game is a draw and shared points. Because every game is the same length, you can fit a predictable number into your hall slot and players know exactly how long they're on for. ClubLono scores futsal exactly this way: set the game duration, the app runs the clock and tallies the goals, and the result drops straight into the standings without anyone scribbling on a whiteboard.

Why timed beats first-to-a-number here

A first-to-five game can finish in three minutes or drag for fifteen depending on how the teams match up, which wrecks a rotation when other players are waiting. A fixed clock makes the night predictable: everyone gets the same playing time, the queue of teams moves on schedule, and you're never stuck watching one mismatch run forever while the rest stand around going cold.

3. Rules people get wrong

Most newcomers arrive treating futsal as five-a-side with a different ball. These are the rules that catch them out — worth a quick brief before a beginners' session so nobody spends the night confused.

Kick-ins, not throw-ins

When the ball crosses the touchline, it's restarted with a kick-in from the floor, not a throw. The ball must be stationary on or behind the line, and you can't score directly from it. New players instinctively pick the ball up to throw — gently remind them, it's the most common habit to break.

The four-second rule

You have four seconds to take a kick-in, corner, free-kick or goalkeeper restart. Dawdle and possession goes to the other team. It exists to keep the game flowing and stop time-wasting, and it catches out anyone used to the leisurely restarts of casual five-a-side.

Accumulated fouls

This is the rule that makes futsal tactically distinct. Every team's direct-free-kick fouls are counted up across each half. From a team's sixth foul onwards, the opposition gets a free-kick with no defensive wall, taken from the second penalty mark (10m out) or the spot of the foul — effectively a free shot at goal. It means defenders genuinely can't just hack people down to break up play, and tracking the foul count becomes part of the game.

The goalkeeper restrictions

The keeper restarts with a throw, not a goal kick, and must release it within four seconds while in their own half. There are also limits on the keeper handling a deliberate back-pass and on holding the ball too long. Newcomers playing in goal tend to want to kick it long off the floor — in futsal, distribution is part of the build-up, not a way to hoof it clear.

No offside, no slide tackles

There's no offside in futsal, so you can't camp a player by the opposition goal expecting a flag — they just stand there legally. And while not strictly banned, reckless slide tackles to win the ball from an opponent are penalised; futsal defending is about positioning and timing, not sliding in.

4. Running a social session

For a regular club night the goal is simple: balanced games, lots of playing time, and a clear winner by the end without anyone doing maths. The format that delivers all three is pool-and-playoff.

Pool-and-playoff (recommended)

With three or four teams' worth of players, split into even sides and run a pool where everyone plays everyone in short timed games. Tally the results, then stage a quick playoff — the top two contest a final while the rest play a consolation game. It guarantees everyone a proper run-out regardless of form, it produces a clear winner for the week's bragging rights, and it fits neatly into a 90-minute hall slot. It's the format ClubLono recommends and runs for futsal, and the standings update on their own as results come in.

Sensible alternatives

• Winner-stays-on — with two-and-a-bit teams, the winners hold the court and a fresh team comes on. Simple and fun, but it can leave a strong team out there too long, so cap each game on the clock so the court always turns over.
• Round-robin only — skip the final and just play everyone-versus-everyone, with the top of the table taking the night. Cleaner if you're short on time, though it loses the drama of a deciding game.
• Two-team rolling games — on a thin week with just ten or eleven players, forget formats entirely and play a series of timed games, reshuffling the sides if they're lopsided. Sometimes the right format is no format.

Small-sided and mixed options

If numbers are tight, drop to four-a-side on a shorter court — futsal scales down well and the dead-bounce ball still makes it technical. Mixed sessions work brilliantly because futsal rewards control and clever passing over size and pace, which levels the field far more than outdoor football does. Many clubs run an explicitly mixed or beginner-friendly night alongside their competitive one to widen the pool.

5. Running a league across a season

Once you've got reliable squads, a season-long league turns a weekly kickabout into something people genuinely commit to. The structure is borrowed from football, scaled to your numbers.

Divisions and fixtures

If you've got enough teams, split them into divisions by standard so games stay competitive and a weak side isn't shipping double figures every week — with promotion and relegation between divisions across seasons to keep it interesting. Each division plays a fixture list: a fixed schedule of who plays whom and when, so teams know their season in advance and can plan around it.

Home and away

A full league runs home-and-away — every team plays every other twice, once in each "half" of the season. For a single-venue indoor club "home and away" is really just two meetings rather than two locations, but playing everyone twice smooths out the luck of a single bad night and produces a fairer final table.

Points and standings

Use standard football scoring: three points for a win, one for a draw, none for a loss. Rank the table on points, then break ties on goal difference, then goals scored, then the head-to-head result — exactly as the leagues you watch do it. Because futsal is high-scoring, goal difference does real work as a tie-breaker, so it's worth recording scores accurately rather than just win/lose. The team top of the table when the fixtures run out are champions; add playoffs if you want a Wembley-style finish.

6. How ClubLono runs futsal

Everything above is the manual version — the version where someone keeps the clock on their phone, scribbles scores on a bib and recalculates the table in their head. ClubLono does the bookkeeping so you can play.

For a club night, ClubLono runs futsal as timed games with the pool-and-playoff format built in: set the game length, the app runs the clock, you tap in the goals, and the standings update automatically as results come in — no whiteboard, no arguments about who's on how many points. Team balancing uses a built-in player rating that updates after every game, so the sides stay even week to week. It all works on the free tier, which is £0/month for a single club with no time limit and no feature cliff.

Full season-long leagues — divisions, home-and-away fixtures, a live points table with goal-difference tie-breaks and per-team stats — are a Premium feature. Premium is £19.99/month or £199.99/year with a 14-day free trial on either, and as well as leagues it drops the platform fee on paid sessions to 1% and unlocks multi-club hosting, kiosk mode for a venue tablet, cross-club stats and DUPR export. ClubLono never holds your members' funds — paid-session money goes straight to the host's bank account via Stripe, and cancelled sessions auto-refund every booked player. There's no per-player fee. In short: run your weekly social futsal free, and turn it into a proper league when you're ready.