Less than a month is left until the final tournament of the European Championship in indoor football, which Latvia will host together with Lithuania and Slovenia at the beginning of 2026. Latvian indoor footballers have completed most of the preparation phase and the hosts will claim to enter the playoffs in the final tournament.
The national team player Edgars Tarakanovs emphasized in a conversation on Latvian Television that the team’s goal in the tournament at home will be to get out of the group. To do that, you need to win at least second place in a strong four-team competition. In the group stage, Latvian indoor football players will face the national teams of Georgia, France and Croatia.
France is also a great country in indoor football, but you can fight with them, explained Tarakanov, who plays at club level in Belgium. He added that Latvians have managed to beat the Georgian national team before, but it will be a tough fight against Croatia due to the physically powerful performance of the opponents. Indoor football has a lot of nuances that differentiate the game from classical football, especially in terms of the intensity of the game, added Tarakanov.
The Latvian national team has been led by the Italian Massimiliano Belarte since the summer of 2024, under whose leadership the team has made significant progress.
Belarte believes that the team has great prospects and potential to qualify for the World Cup finals, but must first prove its abilities in the European Championship, said Renārs Krīgers, head of the Marketing and Communications Department of the Latvian Football Federation (LFF). According to him, the Latvian national team has good chances to go beyond the group stage.
Krieger emphasized the gradually accumulated experience in holding high-level indoor football competitions in Latvia – in 2019, the U-19 European Championship was like a kindergarten graduation, and in 2022, the Champions League final four matches followed like a high school graduation, which gathered 8,000 spectators to the final and increased the organizers’ faith in their abilities. In contrast, the European Championship will be like a university exam.
The European Championship in Riga will be a celebration not only for the players, because everyone will be able to admire what top-class players are technically able to do with the ball, Krieger added. With the organization of the European Championship, LFF will have reached the organizational maximum in indoor football, but in 2027 it will already organize the U-17 European Championship in classical football, which will be hosted in Jelgava, Sloka and Riga.
The final tournament of the European Indoor Football Championship held once every four years will take place from January 21 to February 7, bringing together 16 national teams. Group A matches and one quarter-final will be held in Riga, but the decisive matches in the fight for medals will be hosted by the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana.
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