The Origins of Football

A Global Game:
Trying to pinpoint the exact starting point for what is now the world’s most popular sports is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. England may have been the home of football, but the first instances of foot meeting ball may well have taken place thousands of miles away; and as time moved on, the formative game was being adopted and invented in various guises all across the globe. Nobody took football to the world; the world discovered it in dozens of locations over thousands of years

The China Link:
Traditionalists often talk of the early game being played out with hollow pigs’ bladders which could burst at any moment. Certainly there is some truth in this assumption – today, we believe the earliest incarnation of football to have been played with animal skins in ancient China around 2500 BC. The ‘ball’ was kicked between poles some thirty feet high, and may have served a military purpose; soldiers were trained using the rough-and-tumble of game play and matches were held to mark important dates in the calendar.

A Game of Peace:
By AD 50, the Chinese had named the game ‘tsu chu’ and early records compare the round ball and square goal to Yin and Yang, the ancient symbols of harmony an interesting contrast to the distinctly inharmonious scenes that followed as the game developed. Historians have also suggested that ancient Egyptian fertility rites may have been linked, in some was, to a form of football; however a more plausible stage of development was a Mexican game in AD 600 which involved forcing a ball through a hole in the wall of a specially designed court. Certainly, the Mexicans came up with the first synthetic footballs.

Gang Warfare:
By the time the game was developing in England, it had taken a strangely comic – and occasionally tragic – turn for the worse. The earliest stories of football date from around AD 1100 and involved a crude chasing of a ball through city streets by gangs of youngsters egged on by their parents. There was little organization either in terms of fixtures or rules, yet the foundations for the development of the game in its host country had laid.

Breaking The Rules:
Throughout the next 700 years or so, football became a source of inspiration for the masses and of great consternation to the authorities. Edward II was the first monarch to call for curbs on the ‘uproar’ the game caused – and it seems he may well have had a point. What began as a game of chasing soon developed into near warfare, with scores of players forming sides and causing havoc in urban areas as they rampaged through pitches hundreds of yards long. There were reports of serious injuries and even deaths, as well as complaints from more sedate residents alarmed by the disruption football caused.

Country Troubles:
In rural areas the problem was exacerbated by the vast amounts of space afforded to the game. Whole villages would come out to chase the makeshift ball and the absence or rules meant kicking, punching and crushing were all acceptable. The traditional Shrove Tuesday clashes were particularly troublesome. Successions of English rulers and lawmakers issued edicts attempting to crack down on the game, but it proved near impossible to stop. At the same time, the American Indians had developed a beach version of the game – in which players would disguise themselves in masks to evade blame for dangerous challenges – and the Inuits had begun playing on ice, shooting balls stuffed with grass through goals placed miles apart. Football was taking off in many different ways all over the world.

Saved By The Schools:
Somewhat ironically, it was the public schools who gave the whole affair some order. Oxford and Cambridge had accepted football as a competitive sport as early as the seventeenth century, and Eton, Harrow, Shrewsbury and Rugby quickly followed suit. The implementation of rules worked both ways: with Victorian values gradually disappearing, the schools saw the sport as a vital way to in still discipline, while also disassociating the young gentlemen who played it from the lower classes and their street games. Many still considered football too ‘vulgar’ a game for the upper classes, but by the 1899s it was common practice in public school life. As a result, the people’s game began to take shape in the last bastions of the aristocracy.

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