By admin 
The joys and thrill of the FIFA World Cup may have come to a close last month, but the passion and camaraderie developed through soccer don’t have to end.
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A local street soccer club is working to foster community among amateur and casual athletes in the Sacramento area, and its reach recently hit new heights when it hosted a national tournament.
Futsi started in 2024 as a community futsal pick-up league at Jennie McConnell Park in Elk Grove and Tanzanite Community Park in Natomas. The group quickly grew at home and received attention from beyond — in its first year running, Futsi was picked to host the International Street Football Association’s Northern California regional qualifier for its inaugural World Cup tournament.
From there, expansion boomed. Co-founders Hayden Spilman and Ruben Cisneros found a permanent space for the Futsi community: a nondescript former truck terminal in Mansion Flats with the potential to be more. In 2025, the pair cleaned up the space and added in two hard-surface soccer courts, along with some seating areas for players to hang out, and they dubbed it “The Clubhouse.”
In the two years Futsi has hosted local street soccer players, not only has community been formed, but players have received major opportunities to play in international tournaments and get scouted by college teams.
“It was something that was missing in Sacramento … a space to play for free and to enjoy the beautiful part about the game,” Spilman said. “There’s an opportunity that we’re having fun, but there’s real, actual life-changing stuff that happens.”
Kicking it in Mansion Flats: How futsal works
Though Sacramento and Northern California have plenty of facilities and local leagues for traditional field soccer, futsal has different requirements.
The smaller-scale variant of the world’s game is played on a hard court roughly nine times smaller than a regulation FIFA soccer field, with similarly small goals and a downsized ball. Teams are typically made up of three to seven players per side, with 5-on-5 matchups considered the standard.
Games are far more fast-paced, lasting only 40 minutes with two 20-minute periods, though the match lengths vary depending on the size of teams.
At the International Street Football Association’s 3-on-3 tournaments, matches go on for only 10 minutes, with no break. In an elimination round, if the regulation time ends with a tied score, the teams play one-on-one until someone scores a goal.
Spilman said despite the huge differences between field soccer and futsal, the communities are very similar.
“We all have, like, a need to play the game, all players are players,” he said. “Someone that plays field a lot comes here and tries (futsal) for the first time, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing, I love this,’ and vice versa.”
In addition to offering free pick-up matches, Futsi hosts a 3-on-3 competitive street league, played weekly over a monthlong season. The street league’s second season wrapped up in early June, and Spilman said the next season will likely start at the end of September.
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Going forward, the Futsi team is working on securing permits to host food trucks and live entertainment in the open courtyard.
“We want this to be a secondary hub for people to come watch and be entertained and hang out,” Spilman said. “We’re getting there.”
The property owner for The Clubhouse, Skip Rosenbloom, said turning the 1425 C St. lot into a community-oriented space has been a net positive for the Mansion Flats and Alkali Flat neighborhoods. His hope for the Futsi Clubhouse is that it becomes a hub for activity and entertainment for the neighborhood.
“I think it’s great,” Rosenbloom said. “(The area) is a little bit of both an entertainment and a food desert, so I think (it will improve) once we get approval for the food truck court and hopefully approval for some fort of music and entertainment.”
Futsi joins the national stage
On Saturday, Aug. 1, Futsi’s involvement with the International Street Football Association hit a new high when it hosted the organization’s USA National tournament ahead of the league’s second-ever street football 3v3 World Cup.
“It’s insane,” Spilman said. “If you told me starting free pick-ups could turn into something like this, I’d have been like, ‘Yeah, maybe in like 10 years,’ but for it to happen so quick and us to only be two years old, it’s surreal. I still have to take the time to really take it all in because it’s really cool.”
Eight teams from across the country gathered in Sacramento over the weekend to fight for the designation of Team USA at the World Cup in Utrecht, Netherlands next month. Selections represented Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, Sacramento, Nashville, Detroit and New York City, while a wild-card team from the Sacramento area rounded out the bracket.
After 15 dynamic matches over three rounds, the team from New York City was victorious, going undefeated across its five games.
Some of the members of team Sacramento — who are actually based in the Bay Area — reflected on their experience competing for a national title in the capital city, saying it was a “weird” feeling.
“Last time, (the national tournament) was in L.A., and we traveled to it, so it felt like a national championship,” said Sacramento player Kai “KG” Galia. “But it just happened to be held here, and it just felt like another weekend … and all these people traveled from across the country to play here. It’s cool.”
Galia and his team previously played at Futsi in July, at the Sacramento regional championship, where they won their entry into the national tournament.
“I feel like (spaces like Futsi are) just an easy way for people to come out and enjoy something that’s a common interest,” Galia said. “It’s easy to play with your friends and stick to that group, but here you can have different groups of people meet … All these different organizations are bringing people together. Not just soccer players, but creatives, people from all different walks of life, so it was cool to see that.”
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