The demands of water polo, accepted: thirteen players per team at the Paris Olympic Games

He water polo has managed in recent times to make one of the demands promoted in recent years, including Paris 2024 Olympic Games focused. A total of thirteen players per team can be at the event in Paris.

This was announced recently by the captain of the Spanish team Felipe Perrone, a member of the World Aquatics athlete committee who has fought in recent months to regain the common quota of members in national teams. Also in the working group is Maggie Steffens and Margarita Plevritou. Meanwhile, RFEN confirmed to MD that this quota of thirteen players will be valid for both general tournament and match-by-match calls.

The limit on the number of total athletes imposed by the IOC with Agenda 2020 means that the various international federations have to limit their number of athletes classified in each modality. To adjust your seat count, one of the decisions made by World Aquatics affected water polobecause the number of players each team can call up for the Olympic event has been reduced.

The organization first established calls for twelve players for the Tokyo 2021 Games. Then, the reception is no longer good in the world of water polo, because of the physical breakdown of the matches and the risk of eliminations due to expulsions, the rounds can be reduced significantly. Faced with protests in the middle of a pandemic, World Aquatics and the IOC decided allow a thirteenth player in the Olympic village, even without match callswhere the twelve remained.

But the next step following that Agenda 2020 is a reduction to eleven total players for the Paris 2024 Games, now without a pandemic context. Complaints did not stop against that decision and initially it was possible to maintain the Tokyo quota of twelve players per match and one outside of each call. But the protests continued, they bore fruit and there will be thirteen final call-ups both for the Olympic tournament in general and for each specific match.

The decision to reduce the places on each team in the Olympic Games was, in fact, against the trend imposed in previous years at World Cups and Europeans, where longer calls of fifteen players are allowed for championships with two throws per game. Today, this growth does not occur in Paris, but water polo is able to fulfill its great demand by maintaining its thirteen players per team.