The 1997 Beach Soccer World Championships was the third edition of the ''
Beach Soccer World Championships'', 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).
For the third consecutive time, the tournament took place at
Copacabana Beach in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Hosts
Brazil won the tournament for the third time in a row by beating
Uruguay 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 and
Portugal 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 format. The top two teams progressed straight to the semi-finals from which point on the championship was played as a
knock-out tournament 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
----
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
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