BeachFest: Changing the Beach Soccer experience

BeachFest is a festival that takes place on the beaches of Britain from Bournemouth to Skegness. This festival includes Beach Soccer matches with many teams entering this competition and competing to be crowned champions.

Credit: BeachFest

This is not just your typical tournament with entertainment for everyone loaded into one fabulous day. This entertainment includes musical performances, DJ sets and various shows throughout the day, which are all family-friendly.

That is not the end of the entertainment with a special celebrity BeachFest event including the likes of Harry Redknapp and Callum Best (if you can call him a celebrity!).

Joe Maxwell, the founder of BeachFest and a former international Beach Soccer player for England, spoke to us about the creation and concept of BeachFest, stating: “After my career, I wanted to come out of Beach Soccer and give something back to it as it was the best six years of my life when I played for England”

Despite having a brilliant time representing England, he felt there was still a lot of work to be done from England in regards to its support of Beach Soccer as a sport, stating: “What I recognised in England was that England is quite far behind other countries, having been around the world and seen the likes of Spain and Portugal, they have a better format and affiliations coming through it. The FA and England focus purely on grass as grass is their biggest business, and then Futsal and then Beach Soccer”

Maxwell offered his praise and admiration to Portugal, stating: “They focus their full energy into all three (Football, Futsal and Beach Soccer), which was really cool, and it was really good to see that in the end-of-season awards the Beach Soccer team would be picking up their awards next to Cristano Ronaldo and that would not happen in England”.

The lack of prioritisation of Beach Soccer in England is what inspired Maxwell to create the BeachFest, stating: “I wanted to create a festival that allowed grassroots teams to experience Beach Soccer for the first time because I had never heard of it when I was a kid and I wanted to open the eyes of children so they can say that they have done it before”.

The festival has gained massive popularity in recent times, with over 250 teams registering to take part in it, achieving Maxwell's goal of helping the sport gain more publicity.

Credit: BeachFest

It has not been easy for the festival to rise as well as it has, with Winter in England providing harsh conditions for players to compete in. Maxwell stated: “it’s not ideal with the weather in England to play on the beach, it’s horrible, we used to play with sand socks on to keep our feet warm but the summer is amazing, and we understand that kids are not going to want to do that in the winter so it’s almost like a half a year sport”

So is this a concept worth exploring in Beach Soccer? Making it a festival undoubtedly makes it more entertaining and has a broader reach, but does it undermine the concept of the sport as a whole?

In my opinion, I think this is a great event and will only benefit the sport and open it up to a bigger audience and hopefully inspire the next generation of Beach Soccer superstars.