The Origins and development of Football (Soccer) Part One

Most habitancy would agree that England gave the world the modern game of football; and indeed, this statement was recently corroborated by Sepp Blatter, the current President of Fifa, while his speech announcing the flourishing bidders to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup Tournaments. But where did the game for real start?

Many races have realistic claims to being the first habitancy to start kicking a ball around, but none are definitive. Antique Chinese documents dated at colse to 2500Bc allude to the kicking or handling a round object straight through holes in a net positioned between two poles. This action was designed to keep warriors physically fit when not actively involved in battle. Added documents indicate that by 350Bc this training was given the name Zuqiu which is still the Chinese word for football today. Four centuries later zuqiu had come to be tsu chu where a leather ball filled with hair and feathers was booted between two poles.

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But the Italians can also lay claim to the gorgeous game as members of the fine Roman Empirical Armies in colse to Ad 200 played a game called Harpastum which bore inescapable similarities to the game played today with the shape of the ball, the field of play and its rules. The action was different, however, comprising a hybrid mix of American football and rugby with the beginnings of the modern rugby line out, scrums and tackles. Records also show the Roman soldiers taking the game on a tour of conquered nations, and beating them as befits their station. Imaginations can run free with this type of on-field combat as players being sent off were probably fed to the lions. Fortunately, history makes no reference to this.

The Aztecs were also playing a type of football which involved forcing the ball straight through porthole type arrangements, but their valuable gift to football was in the way the balls were constructed. They would tie the leather together using laces a convention still used well into the 20th Century as I remember only too well. Heading a water-sodden leather ball on a cold Saturday afternoon was assuredly not for the faint hearted.

Records also show that a football-type game was played before the Middle Ages in Central America, Scandinavia, Japan, Egypt and Greece, but we have to wait until the 1800s before the understanding of a tasteless set of rules was first mooted. while the 700 to 800 years prior to this momentous occasion, football was synonymous with faultless mayhem with games often turning into a full scale riots which ultimately met with valid and royal disapproval. Especially in England where entire towns and villages chased balls straight through streets, over fields and trampled straight through people's homes with no apparent aim. The balls were probably imported by the Romans or Vikings.

The allinclusive disorder created by hundreds of young men rampaging straight through urban districts inevitably brought "Futeball" to the concentration of the authorities. In 1314, Edward 11 of England, became the first Monarch to ban the game; and his successor, Edward 111 decreed footballers to take up archery. Huge games were being played in Scotland between married and unmarried women, but the sight of hundreds of women scrapping in the mud over a ball was too much for James 1 who debarred such activities. How times have changed. Such a spectacle today would be well received.

It has been noted that Charles 11 did attend a football match in 1681, but with the game banned in every major town in Britain, it would have been consigned to the history books if the collective schools of England had not popularised the sport. Schools such as Harrow, Blackheath, Rugby and Eton used the game to promote corporal fitness and team spirit, and it soon became very beloved with the pupils. But without a set of rules or a unifying code as it was called then, inter school competition was approximately impossible.

As the game industrialized throughout the collective school environment two factions were emerging with those who favoured handling the ball and those who adored dribbling, and in the 1840s two Cambridge House Masters defined a set of rules for use in within the university. These rules travelled with graduates over England, and many clubs were formed playing to this unified code.