Futsal: post-season and Titano Futsal Cup final dates confirmed

The first trophy of the San Marino futsal season will be awarded on Tuesday 2 May 2023. The showdown between Fiorentino and Folgore – the two standout sides of this year’s biancazzurro futsal campaign – will take place at the Multieventi. It will be an unprecedented evening in the history of the sport in the Republic, with a title up for grabs on the parquet for the very first time. Michelotti’s and Spada’s teams will already cross paths, again at the Multieventi, in the late match of the next league round – effectively a preview of the clash that will open the roll of honour to one of the two contenders, with Folgore determined to retain the trophy they lifted last year in the final against Tre Fiori. More complex, naturally, is the programme for the Championship’s post-season. The format provides for the title – and the resulting place in the UEFA Futsal Champions League – to be decided via play-offs. The top four teams will be exempt from the Preliminary Round, which will feature home-and-away ties between the next eight sides in the table, according to the pairings defined at the end of the regular season (5-12, 6-11, 7-10, 8-9). If the aggregate score is level after the two legs, extra time and penalties will not be played; instead, the team that finished higher in the league during the regular season will qualify. This rule will also apply to the quarter-finals and semi-finals. The two-legged Preliminary Round will be played on the evenings of 27 April and 4 May. Only then will we know which teams will join the top seeds in the quarter-finals. As mentioned, the four teams finishing the regular season in the top positions will enter the play-offs at the quarter-final stage, taking up seeded positions and facing opponents with progressively lower rankings. Thus, the regular-season winners will be guaranteed, on paper, the most favourable tie (against the team with the lowest league placing among those qualified), and so on, until all four pairings are set. These ties will be played on the evenings of Monday 8 and 15 May on the artificial pitches of Acquaviva and Fiorentino. From this stage of the competition, a full knockout bracket takes shape, in which the teams finishing first and second in the league can only meet in a potential final. Both semi-finals and the finals will be played on the Multieventi parquet. The finalists will emerge from the two-legged semi-finals scheduled for 23 and 30 May (first leg at 20:15, second leg at 21:45). The third-place play-off and the final will both be single matches: the San Marino champions will be crowned on Tuesday 6 June from 21:45, with extra time and/or penalties to be played should the scores remain level. The same applies, naturally, to the match between the losing semi-finalists, which will kick off at 20:15.

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