A brief history of Football

 

A sport similar to football (called soccer in the United States and elsewhere) was played 3000 years ago in Japan. Chinese text from 50 BC mentions football-type games between teams from Japan and China. A text dating from 611 AD confirms that football was played in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.

Ancient Greeks and Romans also played a game that resembled football – although the Greeks permitted carrying of the ball. Olympic games in ancient Rome featured a 50-minute football game with twenty-seven men on a side.

Football (or soccer as the game is called in some parts of the world) has a long history. Football in its current form arose in England in the middle of the 19th Century. But alternative versions of the game existed much earlier and are a part of the football history.

In China under the 3rd and 2nd century BC a game named Cuju was played. Other earlier variants of the game had been known from the Ancient Greece. At this stage the ball was made by shreds of leather filled with hair. The first documents of balls filed with air are from the 7th century.

The most admitted story tell that the game was developed in England under the 12th century. In this century games that reminded of football were played on meadows and roads in England. Besides from kicks, the game involved also punches of the ball with the fist. This early form of football was also much more ruff and more violent than the modern way of playing. This would also be one of the reasons for the game to be forbidden in several centuries, but the football-like games would appear again in the streets of London in the 17th Century.

It took, however, long time until the features of today’s football had been taken into practice. For a long time it was no clear distinction between football and rugby. There were also many variations concerning the size of the ball, the number of players and the length of a match.

The game was often played in schools and two of the predominant schools were Rugby and Eton. At Rugby the rules included the possibility to take up the ball with the hands and the game we today know as rugby has its origin from here. At Eton on the other hand the ball was played exclusively with the feet and can therefore be seen as a close predecessor to the modern football. The game in Rugby was called “the running game” while the game in Eton was called “the dribbling game”.

Proper rules for the game were decided at a meeting in Cambridge 1848. Another important event in the history of football come about in 1863 then the first Football association was formed in England. This also led to a standardization of the size and weight of the ball.

As with many things in history, women was for a long time excluded from participating in games. I was not before the late 19th Century that also women started to play football. 

The early days

How the sport spread from the East to Europe is not clear but England became the home of modern football. At first the game had a bad reputation among English royalty – possibly because of the noise the fans made – by whose insistence the government passed laws against it. King Edward (1307-1327) proclaimed, “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city.” In 1365 King Edward III banned football because of its excessive violence and for military reasons playing took time away from archery practice the game had become too popular to be curtailed. King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the sport, and Queen Elizabeth I “had football players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”

Laws failed to slow the popularity of football and by 1681 it received official sanction in England. The games were still ruff and noisy, with players hardly ever leaving the field without broken bones or even being spiked. There was no standard set for the size of teams or the field; the earliest organized games, usually bitter confrontations between teams from two or three parishes, had goals as far as 5 km (3 miles) apart. It was only by 1801 that it was (somewhat) agreed that teams should have an equal number of players and that the playing area should be about 91 metres (100 yards). Records show that Eton college drew up the first written rules of football in 1815. (The modern standardized rules are known as the Cambridge rules.)

Until the mid-1800s football rules still varied across regions. Team sizes ranged from 15 to 21. The 11-player team was standardized in 1870. The crossbar between two goal posts became mandatory in 1875. The goalkeeper was formally distinguished in the 1880s.

FIFA

The first football club was formed in Sheffield, England in 1857. The Football Association was founded on 26 October 1863 by 11 clubs meeting in London. (The word association was abbreviated to assoc., which became “soccer.”)

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in the rear of the headquarters of the Union Française de Sports Athlétiques at the rue Saint Honoré 229 in Paris on 21 May 1904. The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay.

Where does the word “soccer” come from?

In the 1880s students of Oxford university abbreviated words by adding “er” to the end; for instance, breakfast became “brekkers” and “rugby rules” was referred to as “rugger.” When one student, Charles Wreford Brown, was asked if he’d like to play rugger, he was the first to abbreviate “association rules” (Football Association rules) by answering, “No, soccer.” Brown later became an England international and Football Association vice-president.

The first competitions

Other milestones were now to follow. Football Association Challenge Cup (FA Cup) was first run in 1871. The next year was the first match between two national teams played for the first time. The match was between England and Scotland, ended 0-0 and was followed by 4000 people at Hamilton Crescent (the picture showing illustrations from this occasion).

The first international tournament occurred in 1883 and included four national teams: England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

The football was in a long time a British concern and it gradually spread to other European countries. The first game that took place outside Europe occurred in Argentina 1867, but it was foreign British workers who were involved and not Argentinean citizens.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded 1904 and a foundation act was signed by representatives from France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. 

The man most responsible for the transition from this rugby-like game to the sport of football we know today was Walter Camp, known as the “Father of American Football.” As a Yale undergraduate and medical student from 1876 to 1881, he played halfback and served as team captain, equivalent to head coach at the time. Even more importantly, he was the guiding force on the rules board of the newly formed Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA). Thanks to Camp, the IFA made two key innovations to the fledgling game: It did away with the opening “scrummage” or “scrum” and introduced the requirement that a team give up the ball after failing to move down the field a specified yardage in a certain number of “downs.” Among the other innovations Camp introduced were the 11-man team, the quarterback position, the line of scrimmage, offensive signal-calling and the scoring scale used in football today. In addition to his work with the rules board, Camp coached the Yale team to a 67-2 record from 1888 to 1892—all while working as an executive at a watch-manufacturing firm.