How five-a-side futsal was the making of Leeds’ stand-in boss Michael Skubala

Michael Skubala did not plan to coach a Premier League club. He did not even plan to coach a football team. Up until two years ago, the man tasked with steering Leeds to safety was focused on a five-a-side game played on an indoor court. Skubala’s sport was futsal.

But then came the 40-year-old’s sliding doors moment. At the end of 2020, the FA controversially cut their funding for futsal, forcing the England team he managed to fold. Others lost their jobs, but Skubala was kept on as a coach of the England Under-18s. It offered him a route back into the traditional game and ultimately led him to Leeds.

‘Until the cuts happened, I don’t think Michael had any intention of going into football,’ says Doug Reed, England futsal’s second most-capped player and vice-captain under Skubala. ‘But futsal is great for developing players and coaches. It is a great foundation for anyone who wants to be involved in football.’

Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar all credit the game – which originated in South America in the 1930s and uses a smaller, harder ball on a smaller, hard court – for honing their football skills. For Skubala, it was the making of him as a coach.

‘I learned a lot around things like tactical decisions and making substitutions,’ he told Sportsmail. ‘In a way, it’s made me a little bit different to other coaches which I’m proud of. It’s part of my eclectic journey and gives me a way of looking at things in a slightly different way.’

Skubala’s first foray into futsal came while he was a student at the University of Birmingham. Then, he was still playing 11-a-side football at non-league and England Universities level. But he was approached to represent England in the five-a-side sport. Skubala made his debut in Thailand in front of 8,000 fans and went on to captain his country and win more than 60 caps.

‘At my first training camp with England, he was still a player,’ says Reed. ‘But I remember in that session, he was talking a lot about tactics, so you could tell he was interested in that side of the game.’

Futsal, though, did not pay the bills and Skubala worked for seven years as a PE and psychology teacher at Lutterworth College, Leicestershire, his old school, while spending his evenings and weekends coaching across both formats.

Aged 23, he was an assistant coach of non-league Barwell, then helped in the academies at Coventry and Nottingham Forest. He then returned to the England futsal side as an assistant, as well as coaching the teams at Loughborough University and British Universities.

By 2013, he left teaching behind to become full-time director of football – including futsal – at Loughborough. By 2016, he was managing the England futsal team and leading the FA’s strategy on the sport.

‘I found coaching futsal gave me something different to football,’ Skubala told Coaches Voice in 2018. ‘On average you make around 80 substitutions during a game of futsal. And every substitution is technical, tactical. Are they left or right-footed? Are they physically coping with the game? I felt I could have more of an impact on a match in futsal.’

Skubala’s impact saw England break into the top 50 of the FIFA futsal rankings for the first time. ‘Before he was there, the attitude was very much, ‘Just enjoy yourself’,’ says Reed. ‘But Michael was focused on winning. He changed the culture of the team and made it more professional.

‘He was very organised, very methodical. He always did a lot of video analysis on our opponents and would adjust his tactics accordingly. The image of futsal is that it is freestyle football, a tricks game. But it is a highly-developed tactical game as well. If the other team makes an adjustment, you have to make an adjustment. It’s like a chess battle.’

Skubala faces a very different battle now at Leeds. He only joined the Whites last summer to head up their U21s after just 20 months with England U18s. But following the sacking of Jesse Marsch, he has been asked to take charge of the first team in their relegation fight – possibly until the end of the season. It is a challenge his former colleagues expect him to rise to.

‘He is a very calm person, he is not fazed by problems or moments of crisis,’ says Lutterworth College headteacher Dom Lane, who worked with Skubala in the PE department. ‘He has an ability to look at a problem and see a solution.’

Lane gives a specific example. ‘We do all of our exams here in the sports hall, but the PE office is in that hall and whenever exams were on, every time the door opened, kids would lift their head up to look who was coming through.

‘It was a real distraction and had been a problem plaguing the school for years and years. But Skubs just said, ‘Why don’t we put the chairs the other side of the table and make the kids face the other way?’.

‘Everyone just went, ‘Oh yeah’. Nobody had ever looked at it that way, but overnight the problem was solved. That was Mike all over. He would look at something and come up with a tweak which seems really small, but would have a huge impact.’

Skubala added: ‘For 20 years, they were all facing the wrong way. I said just turn the seats round and it will solve your problem. Sometimes we look for the really big stuff and sometimes I feel the solutions are in front of us.’

From turning seats around, Skubala now has to turn Leeds around. Lane admits it is ‘surreal’ to see his close friend on the touchline, but he adds: ‘We always talk about PE teachers as failed sportsmen, so it’s nice that one of us has scrambled out of that and made it into the big time!’

Now Skubala’s job is to keep Leeds there.