The 1997 Beach Soccer World Championships was the third edition of the ''

Beach Soccer World Championships The Beach Soccer World Championships was the premier international beach soccer competition contested by men's national teams between 1995 and 2004. It was replaced by the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup. The tournament took place annually in Braz ...

'', the most prestigious competition in international

beach soccer Beach soccer, also known as beach football, sand football or beasal, is a variant of association football played on a beach or some form of sand. Whilst football has been played informally on beaches, the introduction of ''beach soccer'' was an a ...

contested by men's national teams until 2005, when the competition was then replaced by the second iteration of a world cup in beach soccer, the better known ''

FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup The FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup is an international beach soccer competition contested by the national teams of the member associations of FIFA, the sport's global governing body. The tournament was preceded by the ''Beach Soccer World Champions ...

''. It was organised by Brazilian sports agency Koch Tavares (one of the founding partners of

Beach Soccer Worldwide Beach Soccer Worldwide (BSWW) is the organisation responsible for the founding and growth of association football's derivative sport of beach soccer. The founding partners of BSWW codified the rules of beach soccer in 1992, with BSWW as it is kno ...

). For the third consecutive time, the tournament took place at

Copacabana Beach Copacabana () is a ''bairro'' (neighbourhood) located in the South Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is most prominently known for its 4 km (2.5 miles) balneario beach, which is one of the most famous in the wor ...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...

, Brazil. Hosts

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

won the tournament for the third time in a row by beating

Uruguay Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...

5–2 in what was a repeat of the final in the previous edition. It was also the first and only time in the history of the world cup that no European nations finished in the top four. Future champions

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

and

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

both competed for the first time at this edition, as did the first Asian nation,

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

Organisation

The organisation remained the same as the format established during the championship's inception in 1995; the eight participating nations competed in two groups of four teams in a

round robin Round-robin may refer to: Computing * Round-robin DNS, a technique for dealing with redundant Internet Protocol service hosts * Round-robin networks, communications networks made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology * Round-robin schedu ...

format. The top two teams progressed straight to the semi-finals from which point on the championship was played as a

knock-out tournament A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses: # One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentr ...

until a winner was crowned with an additional match to determine third place. The capacity of the arena used for this edition of the World Championships was scaled down from the 12,000 seats available in the two previous events, to 7,000 for this year's tournament.

Teams

Africa and Oceania were unrepresented. Asian Zone (1): *¹ European Zone (3): *¹ * *¹ North American Zone (1): * South American Zone (2): * * Hosts: * (South America) Notes: :

1. Teams making their debut

Group stage

Group A

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Group B

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Knockout stage

Semi-finals

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Third place play-off

Final

Winners

Awards

Final standings

Sources

RSSSF
{{FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup

1997 File:1997 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The movie set of ''Titanic'', the highest-grossing movie in history at the time; ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', is published; Comet Hale-Bopp passes by Earth and becomes one of t ...

1997 in beach soccer 1997 in Brazilian football