Third IFF Central Board meeting of year 2023 took place in Vantaa, Finland from 2nd – 3rd September. The CB had a workshop focused on the Future of Floorball on Saturday and the actual meeting on Sunday. Various topics were discussed mainly focusing on the preparations of upcoming events.
FUTURE OF FLOORBALL QUESTIONNAIRE
The Future of Floorball questionnaire has been finalised and had a total of 1.327 respondents. The questionnaire was published in the following languages; Czech, English, Finnish, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. The IFF Office has made a thorough analysis of the results which have been collected. The CB worked on the results on Saturday and will come up with proposals for the IFF member associations, which will be presented in the IFF Associations Meeting in Singapore in December in conjunction with the Women’s WFC 2023.
The CB also discussed about the possible future formats of the WFC in general and also planned the agenda for the upcoming Associations Meeting.
TWG 2025 – Road to Chengdu
The preparations of The World Games 2025 in Chengdu have now started for real after the very successful FISU Universiade in Chengdu. IWGA is organising a Media Workshop for TWG 2025 in Lausanne from the 27th to 28th of September.
Referee Committee
The IFF RC will run two webinars regarding the physical play and rules of the game for the IFF referees and observers. The webinars will take place on 13th and 15th of September and so far, almost all referees and observers have registered to the webinar. The first is more scheduled for Europe and the second one more for Asia.
Africa Floorball Cup
Thet next edition of Africa Floorball Cup will be played from the 16th to 17th September in Abidjan in Cote d’Ivoire with six men’s teams and three women’s teams. The teams are coming from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco, and Togo.
Even though Morocco is not yet officially member of the IFF, the IFF has also previously granted the participation to African nations, who are aiming for the membership within the IFF. The IFF competition department has in co-operation with Floorball CIV created the match schedule for the event.
Due to the limited number of players available to travel from Morocco (because of high costs) the team shall be registered as the Morocco Sports Academy which will then allow for other non-Moroccan players to be included in the team list.
The IFF is planning to run education clinics in conjunction with the event.
Men’s Euro Floorball Challenge
The EuroFloorball Challenge for Men was played with 7 teams 23rd – 27th of August in Besancon, France. UKS Bankowka Zielonka (POL) won the event by defeating UFC Utrecht (NED) in the final.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Women’s U19 WFC 2024
The U19 WFC 2024 EUR qualifications were played in Besancon, France, from 25th – 27th August where Hungary, Denmark and Italy qualified for the final round.
New dates for the event were confirmed by the city of Lahti and the Finnish Floorball Federation and the event will now take place from 8th – 12th of May 2024. The IFF has consulted the participating countries and fortunately the new dates worked for all the qualified teams.
The contract discussions with the City of Lahti are still on-going and the aim is to finalise this in the coming weeks. After this the LOC can finalise the budget for the event. As the LOC needed to change the dates for the event, they have needed to ask for new accommodation offers from the hotels, but this seems not to be an issue, only the Pajulahti Sports Institute has much smaller accommodation capacity during the new term. The aim is to send the 1st Information letter to the participating teams during the last week of September. The aim is to launch the ticket sales in October in connection to the Turku EFT tournament.
The group ballot was held on 2nd September in conjuction with the Nordic Challenge event between Finland and Sweden.
Champions Cup
The new format of Champions Cup started in August with the Northern Conference Quarterfinals. Thorengruppen IBK & Pixbo IBK qualified to the Women’s Semi-finals, and Storvreta IBK & IBF Falun to the Men’s. They will play the winners of the Southern Conference Quarterfinals which are scheduled to be played from 13th – 23rd of September, after which the ballot for the semi-finals will be held.
Women’s WFC 2023, Singapore
During June & July there were two site visits made in Singapore by IFF staff.
The LOC have done several different promotions regarding the ticket sales– Early Bird discount and a 20% discount – both available in Singapore and to the international market. There are several events within Singapore where they are regularly promoting the event and there will be targeted advertising that will appear in the IFF app during some of the key international events in Europe, such as the EFT and Nordic Challenge. It is also very important that all national associations are promoting the ticket sales.
IFF has already secured the broadcast in the following countries, even if all agreements are not signed: Czech Republic/CTV, Finland/YLE, Norway/TV2 Slovakia/ArenaTV, Sweden/SVT and Switzerland/SRF.
Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games 2023, Bangkok, Thailand
The event has been postponed to 2024 and will be organised from 24th February – 6th March 2024, in Bangkok and Chonburi.
The next edition of the AIMAG in Saudi Arabia has been moved to 2026.
WFC 2024, WFC 2026 and WFC 2027
The WFC 2024 qualifications will be played in Latvia (Liepaja) 31.01-03.02, Slovenia (Skofja Loka) 31.01-04.02, Poland (Lochow) 01-04.02, Canada (Toronto) 17-18.02 and the Philippines (Pasig City, Manila) 21-25.05. The late dates for the Philippines is due to the postponement of Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games to be played 24.02-06.03.
It is the status quo regarding the organisation of the Men’s Euro Floorball Championships 2025. Slovakia has earlier informed that they can earliest in September inform if they will bid for the event and has also confirmed that this is still the case. In the last IFF CB meeting the CB noted the need to make the decision of the Euro Floorball Championships 2025 latest in the CB meeting in December 2023 to make all other related decisions in time.
The minutes from the CB meeting are now published here
