The FIFA 2023 Coliseum tournament, organized from the famous videogame of soccer, will be held on April 22 in the Ciudad Deportiva de La Habana, as announced by its organizers on Tuesday.
The winner of this unprecedented contest on the island will be the representative of Cuba in the electronic sports competition of the Panamerican Games of Santiago 2023 in Chile, transcended in the press conference reviewed by the official website Cubadebate, in which directors of the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (Inder) participated.
Its organizers announced today to the press that the electronic games event #FIFA2023 will bring together almost 130 competitors this Saturday (10:00 am) at the Ciudad Deportiva coliseum. The winner will represent #Cuba in the Pan American Games #Santiago2023. #InderCuba pic.twitter.com/BsdfYrtonz
— JIT Cuban Sport (@jit_digital) April 18, 2023
A total of 128 competitors will take on this tournament of soccerchosen for being one of the modalities within electronic sports included in the program of the continental multi-sport event in the Chilean capital.
Alexis Tristá, vice president of the Cuban Electronic Sports Association (ADEC), said that these modalities “are an incredible generator of interpersonal connections. At a social level we are able to express how we can manage communities of people with the same interest and motive: video games”.
From his perspective, the objective of the contest is to forge in this community of electronic sports practitioners with professional skills to participate in top-level events, the information refers to.
“Likewise, we seek to develop a first tournament together with Inder and normalize electronic sports in their competitions,” added Tristá.
He commented that the specialty, recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), generates a lot of public attraction and that sports commentators are included in it.
Javier Vidal, president of ADEC, assured that “the psychological abilities of electronic sports practitioners are stimulated and identified at a general and academic level. For this reason, they tend to improve creativity and physical and mental fitness, impacting popular culture”.
The manager added that ADEC is a technological community within the Union of Informaticians of Cuba (UIC) and we hope that soon it will be a federation of the Cuban sports movement based on the fact that events have already been held at the country level, such as the one organized at the Cuba Pavilion in the capital on April 4.
For his part, Eric Gutiérrez, Inder’s director of Recreation, pointed out the opportunity for healthy recreation achieved by electronic sports, in which people of any age can participate.
In the case of the event, he stressed its inclusive nature. “We are committed to ensuring that our children are satisfied both from a recreational and sporting point of view,” she said.
Gutiérrez clarified that the entrance to the Ciudad Deportiva Coliseum competition will cost 10 CUP and that the registration process will be the same day, prior to the start.
Similarly, Oliet Rodríguez, president of the Cuban Football Association (ACF), reiterated that organization’s support for ADEC and its future projects.
According to the organizers, the FIFA 2023 Colosseum tournament will have a direct elimination format, with a single game with two periods of five minutes each.
“We will try to have the logistics to carry out several of them simultaneously, taking into account that there are many participants and the tournament must last five or six hours,” explained Vidal.
“During that time we will try to keep the public entertained with contests, raffles and participation activities,” he told Cubadebate.
