Presence of women in futsal. A systematic review

Abstract

Futsal is one of the sports that has been gaining in number of practitioners worldwide. Among the groups in which the practice has grown in recent decades, women stand out. Thus, the objective of this review is to offer a vision of the most recent scientific publications in relation to the presence of women in futsal. For this, a systematic review was carried out from 2015 to 2020, searching with the terms of the UNESCO Thesaurus: “futsal” and “woman” in the Scopus and Dialnet databases, allowing the selection of original articles (experimental, descriptive, quasi -experimental and / or case studies) that included information on this line of research. A total of 381 articles were found, although after applying the inclusion criteria of the review they were reduced to 27 articles. These publications were divided into three main categories: 1) Research related to conditioning factors of training and competition in women, 2) Research related to injuries and other psychological variables in women and 3) Other topics investigated; doing a discussion about each of these categories. In conclusion, this systematic review makes it possible to quickly and easily observe the analysis of women’s futsal research within the international context in recent years, as well as to identify the most relevant scientific issues today. Thus, there is a scarce number of publications on the presence of women in futsal in all the topics of study, and therefore, it is necessary to cover with greater scientific contribution given the great boom, extension and popularity that has been acquiring the figure of the woman in this sport.