Coaching pathway Angelo Schirinzi

Before becoming a FIFA beach soccer technical expert, Angelo Schirinzi enjoyed highly successful stints in charge of the Swiss and Tahitian national beach soccer teams. In both jobs, he delivered huge progress both on and off the beach, helping to develop the game from an amateur pursuit into a thriving professional sport. He spoke to FIFA about his varied career on sand and on grass, his coaching philosophy, and how to spread beach soccer across the world of football.

Part 1: Falling in love with beach soccer
In the first part of the interview, Schirinzi summarises his career to date, starting with his days as an 11-a-side player in his native Switzerland and going on to discuss how he set up his homeland's national beach soccer team.  To conclude this section of the video, he looks back over the key moments of his career and assesses the development of beach soccer more generally, culminating in the advent of the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup™ in 2005.

Part 2: Tahiti and developing beach soccer
Following Switzerland's failure to qualify for the 2013 Beach Soccer World Cup, Schirinzi was appointed to coach Tahiti's national beach soccer team. In this part of the interview, he describes how he led the Pacific islanders all the way to a fourth-place finish on home sand. He also considers how coaches and federations have had to change their approach to player recruitment as beach soccer has become both more professional and more distinct from 11-a-side football.

Part 3: Schirinz's coaching philosophy
The final part of the interview focuses on what practitioners can do to develop beach soccer and spread it across the world. Here, Schirinzi sets out how he turned landlocked Switzerland into a European beach soccer powerhouse by building up both technical and commercial infrastructure in his home country. He then moves on to discuss how coaches can disseminate beach soccer expertise within their respective federations, and the importance of ensuring that beach soccer coaches are licensed in the same way as their counterparts in the 11-a-side game.