Futsal: Championship play-offs kick off on 11 May with the Preliminary Round

Around a week after the first title of the year is awarded (the Titano Futsal Cup final is scheduled for 3 May at the Multieventi), the race for the San Marino futsal Scudetto – and with it qualification for the 2026-27 UEFA Futsal Champions League – will officially get underway.

Under the competition rules, the top four sides in the regular season standings benefit from a bye in the Preliminary Round – where the next eight teams in the table will instead be involved. Of these, the top half will play the home-and-away Preliminary Round ties as seeded sides: that status will come into play if the tie is perfectly level over the 120 minutes, with no extra time or penalties, and qualification going – in that case – to the team with the higher finish in the regular season. Once the teams that have come through this first filter are known, the quarter-final pairings can be drawn up. Here too, league position will be decisive: the lowest-ranked qualifier will face Murata – regular-season leaders – up to the side with the best record, who will take on Tre Penne. It is worth recalling that Virtus finished second thanks to a better head-to-head record against La Fiorita, despite both sides collecting the same number of points over the thirty league matchdays.

The first legs of the Preliminary Round are scheduled for Monday 11 May and will be played on the artificial pitches of Fiorentino and Domagnano in the usual kick-off slots of 20:15 and 21:45. Thursday 14 May will see the return fixtures. Folgore-Faetano and Pennarossa-Cailungo will open the postseason. The sides from Falciano and Chiesanuova will go into their ties as favourites: Zonzini’s Giallorossoneri finished the regular season in fifth place and now face a Faetano side that only clinched a Preliminary Round berth with the very last ball of matchday thirty. Runners-up Pennarossa will need to handle with care the Cailungo obstacle, as the latter have shown themselves to be a solid and dangerous team. The late-evening fixtures promise to be even more finely balanced: Domagnano-Cosmos and Juvenes Dogana-Libertas. Starting with the latter, the Serravalle club have already experienced the quality of the Granata – 4-1 winners in the second round of the league campaign. The revenge taken in the reverse fixture by Cellarosi’s men (3-2) suggests that the gap between the two sides may be rather narrower than the regular-season standings might indicate. Lastly, Domagnano and Cosmos went head-to-head from a distance right up to the final matchday to decide – in effect – which of the two would be seeded, with their respective positions frozen for weeks. It will be the Wolves who, if needed, can count on the slight “push” provided by the single point that separated the sides at the end of the regular season.

This is the fixture list for the Preliminary Round of the San Marino Futsal Championship play-offs: