Football

Football is the name given to a number of different, but related,
team
sports. The most popular of these world-wide is

association football (also known as soccer). The English

word "football" is also applied to

American football,

Australian rules football,

Canadian football,

Gaelic football,

rugby football (rugby
union and
rugby
league), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of
rules) is to a greater or lesser extent referred to as "football" and
sometimes "footy" by its followers.

These games involve:

• a large
  spherical or
  
  prolate spheroid ball, which is itself called a
  
  football.


• a team
  
  scoring
  
  goals and/or
  
  points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field
  and either into a goal area, or over a line.


• the goal and/or line being
  
  defended by the opposing team.


• players being required to move the ball mostly by
  kicking and
  — in some codes — carrying and/or passing the ball by hand.


• goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two
  
  goalposts.


• 
  offside rules, in most codes, restricting the movement of players.
  


• in some codes, points are mostly scored by players carrying the ball
  across the goal line.


• in most codes players scoring a goal must put the ball either under or
  over a
  crossbar between the goalposts.


• players in some codes receiving a
  free kick
  after they take a
  
  mark/make a
  fair
  catch.

Many of the modern games have their origins in
England,
but many peoples around the world have played games which involved kicking
and/or carrying a ball since

ancient times.

Etymology

While it is widely believed that the word "football" (or "foot ball")
originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is a
rival explanation, which has it that football originally referred to a variety
of games in

medieval Europe, which were played on foot.^[1]
These games were usually played by
peasants,
as opposed to the

horse-riding sports often played by

aristocrats. While there is no conclusive evidence for this explanation,
the word football has always implied a variety of games played on foot, not
just those that involved kicking a ball. In some cases, the word football has
even been applied to games which have specifically outlawed kicking the ball

 

History

 

Early history

Throughout the history of mankind, the urge to kick at stones and other
such objects is thought to have led to many early activities involving kicking
and/or running with a
ball. Football-like games predate recorded history in all parts of the
world, and thus the earliest forms of football are not known.

 

Ancient games

Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest activity resembling
football can be found in a
Chinese
military
manual written during the
Han
Dynasty in about the

2nd century BC. It describes a practice known as
cuju, which
involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung
between two 30 foot poles.

Another Asian
ball-kicking game, which may have been influenced by cuju, is
kemari.
This is known to have been played within the
Japanese
imperial court in
Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari several people stand in a circle
and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground
(much like

keepie uppie). The game appears to have died out sometime before the
mid-19th century. (It was revived in 1903, and it can now be seen played for
the benefit of tourists at a number of festivals.)

Mesoamerican ballgames played with rubber balls are also well-documented
as existing since before this time, but these had more similarities to

basketball or

volleyball, and since their influence on modern football games is minimal,
most do not class them as football.

The

Ancient Greeks and

Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the
use of the feet. The Roman writer
Cicero
describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball
was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game
harpastum
is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros)
or pheninda that is mentioned by Greek playwright,

Antiphanes (388-311BC) and later referred to by

Clement of Alexandria. These games appears to have resembled

rugby.

There are a number of references to
traditional,
ancient,
and/or
prehistoric ball games, played by

indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in
1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named

John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with
Inuit (Eskimo)
people in
Greenland.^[2]
There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called

Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in
parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's
line and then at a goal. In 1610,

William Strachey of the

Jamestown settlement,
Virginia
recorded a game played by

Native Americans, called

Pahsaheman. In

Victoria, Australia,

indigenous people played a game called
Marn
Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by

Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man
called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed
Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost
player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a
possum and
how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely
believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of

Australian rules football (see below).

These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have
influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football
codes appear to lie in western Europe, especially
England.

 

Mediæval and early modern Europe

The
Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual

Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England.
The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the

Roman occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate this. Reports
of a game played in
Brittany,
Normandy,
and Picardy,
known as
La Soule or Choule, suggest that some of these football games
could have arrived in
England as
a result of the

Norman Conquest.

These archaic forms of football, typically classified as "mob
football", would be played between neighbouring towns and villages,
involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in
a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated
pig's bladder by
any means possible to markers at each end of a town (sometimes instead of
markers, the teams would attempt to kick the bladder into the balcony of the
opponents' church). There is no evidence to support the legend that these
games in England evolved from a more ancient and bloody ritual of kicking the
"Dane's
head". Shrovetide games have survived into the modern era in a number of
English towns (see below).

The first detailed description of football in England was given by William
FitzStephen in about 1174-1183. He described the activities of
London youths
during the annual festival of

Shrove Tuesday:

After lunch all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take
part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the
workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens,
fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors
competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their
inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun
being had by the carefree adolescents.^[3]

Most of the very early references to the game speak simply of "ball play"
or "playing at ball". This reinforces the idea that the games played at the
time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked.

In 1314 ,
Nicholas de Farndone,

Lord Mayor of London issued a decree banning football (in the

French used by the English upper classes at the time. A translation reads:
"[f]orasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large
foot balls [rageries de grosses pelotes de pee] in the fields of the
public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and
forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in
the city in the future." This is the earliest reference to football.

The earliest mention of a ball game that involves kicking was in
1321, in

Shouldham,
Norfolk: "[d]uring the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of
his... ran against him and wounded himself".^[4].

In 1363, King

Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball,
football, or hockey; coursing and cock-fighting, or other such idle games",
showing that "football" — whatever its exact form in this case — was being
differentiated from games involving other parts of the body, such as handball.

King

Henry IV of England gives the earliest documented use of the English word
"football", in 1409,
when he issued a proclamation forbidding the levying of money for "foteball".^[5]

There is also an account in
Latin from the
end of the
15th
century of football being played at
Cawston,

Nottinghamshire. This is the first description of a "kicking game" and the
first description of
dribbling:
"[t]he game at which they had met for common recreation is called by some the
foot-ball game. It is one in which young men, in country sport, propel a huge
ball not by throwing it into the air but by striking it and rolling it along
the ground, and that not with their hands but with their feet... kicking in
opposite directions" The chronicler gives the earliest reference to a football
field, stating that: "[t]he boundaries have been marked and the game had
started.^[6]

Other firsts in the mediæval and

early modern eras:

• "a football", in the sense of a ball rather than a game, was first
  mentioned in 1486.^[7]
  This reference is in Dame
  
  Juliana Berners' Book of St Albans. It states: "a certain rounde
  instrument to play with ...it is an instrument for the foote and then it is
  calde in Latyn 'pila pedalis', a fotebal."
  ^[8]
  


• a pair of football boots was ordered by King
  
  Henry VIII of England in 1526.
  ^[9]


• women playing a form of football was in 1580, when Sir
  
  Philip Sidney described it in one of his poems: "[a] tyme there is for
  all, my mother often sayes, When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles
  at football playes."^[10]
  


• the first references to goals are in the late
  
  16th and early
  
  17th centuries. In 1584 and 1602 respectively,
  John
  Norden and
  
  Richard Carew referred to "goals" in
  
  Cornish hurling. Carew described how goals were made: "they pitch two
  bushes in the ground, some eight or ten foote asunder; and directly against
  them, ten or twelue [twelve] score off, other twayne in like distance, which
  they terme their Goales".^[11]
  He is also the first to describe goalkeepers and passing of the ball between
  players.


• the first direct reference to scoring a goal is in
  John Day's
  play
  
  The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (performed circa 1600; published
  1659): "I'll play a gole at
  
  camp-ball" (an extremely violent variety of football, which was popular
  in
  East Anglia). Similarly in a poem in 1613,
  
  Michael Drayton refers to "when the Ball to throw, And drive it to the
  Gole, in squadrons forth they goe".

 

Calcio Fiorentino

In the 16th century, the city of
Florence
celebrated the period between

Epiphany and Lent
by playing a game which today is known as "calcio storico" ("historic
kickball") in the

Piazza della Novere or the

Piazza Santa Croce. The young aristocrats of the city would dress up in
fine silk costumes and embroil themselves in a violent form of football. For
example, calcio players could punch, shoulder charge, and kick
opponents. Blows below the belt were allowed. The game is said to have
originated as a military training exercise. In 1580, Count Giovanni de' Bardi
di Vernio wrote Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino. This is
sometimes said to be the earliest code of rules for any football game. The
game was not played after January 1739 (until it was revived in May 1930).

 

Official disapproval and attempts to ban
football

Numerous attempts have been made to ban football games, particularly the
most rowdy and disruptive forms. This was especially the case in England and
in other parts of Europe, during the
Middle
Ages and

early modern period. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England
alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. The need to repeatedly proclaim
such laws demonstrated the difficulty in enforcing bans on popular games. King

Edward II was so troubled by the unruliness of football in
London that
on April 13,
1314 he issued a
proclamation banning it: "Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused
by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid;
we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such
game to be used in the city in the future."

The reasons for the ban by

Edward III, on
June 12,
1349, were
explicit: football and other recreations distracted the populace from
practicing
archery, which was necessary for war.

By 1608, the
local authorities in

Manchester were complaining that: "With the ffotebale...[there] hath beene
greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes
broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons ..."^[12]
That same year, the word "football" was used disapprovingly by

William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's play
King Lear
contains the line: "Nor tripped neither, you base football player" (Act I,
Scene 4). Shakespeare also mentions the game in

A Comedy of Errors (Act II, Scene 1):

Am I so round with you as you with me,

 

That like a football you do spurn me thus?

 

You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:

 

If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.

"Spurn" literally means to kick away, thus implying that the game
involved kicking a ball between players.

King

James I of England's Book of Sports (1618) however, instructs
Christians to play at football every Sunday afternoon after worship.^[13]
The book's aim appears to be an attempt to offset the strictness of the
Puritans
regarding the keeping of the
Sabbath.^[14]

 

Establishment of modern codes of football

 

British public schools

While football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain,
its

public schools (known as private schools in other countries) are widely
credited with four key achievements in the creation of modern football codes.
First of all, the evidence suggests that they were important in taking
football away from its "mob" form and turning it into an organised team sport.
Second, many early descriptions of football and references to it were recorded
by people who had studied at these schools. Third, it was teachers, students
and former students from these schools who first codified football games, to
enable matches to be played between schools. Finally, it was at British public
schools that the division between "kicking" and "running" (or "carrying")
games first became clear.

The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at
English public schools — mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle
and professional classes — comes from the Vulgaria by William Horman in
1519. Horman had been headmaster at
Eton
and

Winchester colleges and his
Latin textbook
includes a translation exercise with the phrase "We wyll playe with a ball
full of wynde".

Richard Mulcaster, a student at
Eton
College in the early
16th
century and later headmaster at other English schools, has been described
as “the greatest sixteenth Century advocate of football”.^[15]
Among his contributions are the earliest evidence of organised team football.
Mulcaster's writings refer to teams ("sides" and "parties"), positions
("standings"), a referee ("judge over the parties") and a coach "(trayning
maister)". Mulcaster's "footeball" had evolved from the disordered and violent
forms of traditional football:

[s]ome smaller number with such overlooking, sorted into sides and
standings, not meeting with their bodies so boisterously to trie their
strength: nor shouldring or shuffing one an other so barbarously ... may use
footeball for as much good to the body, by the chiefe use of the legges.

In 1633, David
Wedderburn, a teacher from
Aberdeen,
mentioned elements of modern football games in a short
Latin textbook
called "Vocabula". Wedderburn refers to what has been translated into modern
English as "keeping goal" and makes an allusion to passing the ball ("strike
it here"). There is a reference to "get hold of the ball", suggesting that
some handling was allowed. It is clear that the tackles allowed included the
charging and holding of opposing players ("drive that man back").

A more detailed description of football is given in

Francis Willughby's Book of Games, written in about
1660.^[16]
Willughby, who had studied at

Sutton Coldfield School, is the first to describe goals and a distinct
playing field: "a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called
Goals". His book includes a diagram illustrating a football field. He also
mentions tactics ("leaving some of their best players to guard the goal");
scoring ("they that can strike the ball through their opponents' goal first
win") and; the way teams were selected ("the players being equally divided
according to their strength and nimbleness"). He is the first to describe a
"law" of football: "they must not strike [an opponent's leg] higher than the
ball".

English public schools also devised the first
offside
rules, during the late
18th
century.^[17]
In the earliest manifestations of these rules, players were "off their side"
if they simply stood between the ball and the goal which was their objective.
Players were not allowed to pass the ball forward, either by foot or by hand.
They could only dribble with their feet, or advance the ball in a
scrum or
similar formation. However, offside laws began to diverge and develop
differently at the each school, as is shown by the rules of football from
Winchester,
Rugby,

Harrow and

Cheltenham, during in the period of 1810-1850.^[18]

By the early
19th
century, (before the

Factory Act of 1850), most

working class people in Britain had to work six days a week, often for
over twelve hours a day. They had neither the time nor the inclination to
engage in sport for recreation and, at the time, many

children were part of the labour force.
Feast day
football played on the streets was in decline. Public school boys, who enjoyed
some freedom from work, became the inventors of organised football games with
formal codes of rules.

Football was adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging
competitiveness and keeping youths fit. Each school drafted its own rules,
which varied widely between different schools and were changed over time with
each new intake of pupils. Two schools of thought developed regarding rules.
Some schools favoured a game in which the ball could be carried (as at Rugby,

Marlborough and Cheltenham), while others preferred a game where kicking
and dribbling the ball was promoted (as at Eton, Harrow,

Westminster and

Charterhouse). The division into these two camps was partly the result of
circumstances in which the games were played. For example, Charterhouse and
Westminster at the time had restricted playing areas; the boys were confined
to playing their ball game within the school
cloisters,
making it difficult for them to adopt rough and tumble running games.

William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, is said to have "showed a
fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time" by picking up
the ball and running to the opponents' goal in 1823. This act is usually said
to be the beginning of Rugby football, but there is little evidence that it
occurred, and most sports historians believe the story to be apocryphal.
Nevertheless, by 1841 (some sources say 1842), running with the ball
had become acceptable at Rugby, as long as a player gathered the ball on the
full or from a bounce, he was not offside and he did not pass the ball.

The boom in rail transport in Britain during the 1840s meant that people
were able to travel further and with less inconvenience than they ever had
before. Inter-school sporting competitions became possible. However, it was
difficult for schools to play each other at football, as each school played by
its own rules.

Apart from Rugby football, the public school codes have barely been played
beyond the confines of each school's playing fields. However, many of them are
are still played at the schools which created them (see

Surviving public school games below).

 

The first football clubs

During this period, the Rugby school rules appear to have spread at least
as far, perhaps further, than the other schools' codes. For example, two clubs
which claim to be the world's

first and/or oldest football club, in the sense of a club which is not
part of a school or university, are strongholds of rugby football: the

Barnes Club, said to have been founded in
1839, and

Guy's Hospital Football Club (1843).
Neither date nor the variety of football played is well-documented, but such
claims nevertheless allude to the popularity of rugby before other modern
codes emerged.

In 1845, three
boys at Rugby school were tasked with codifying the rules then being used at
the school. These were the first set of written rules (or code) for any form
of football.^[19]
This further assisted the spread of the Rugby game. For instance,

Dublin University Football Club — founded at

Trinity College, Dublin in
1854 and later
famous as a bastion of the Rugby School game — is the world's oldest
documented football club in any code.

 

Cambridge rules

In 1848, at

Cambridge University,

Mr. H. de Winton and Mr. J.C. Thring, who were both formerly at

Shrewsbury School, called a meeting at

Trinity College, Cambridge with 12 other representatives from Eton,
Harrow, Rugby,

Winchester and Shrewsbury. An eight-hour meeting produced what amounted to
the first set of modern rules, known as the Cambridge rules. No copy of
these rules now exists, but a revised version from circa 1856 is held in the
library of Shrewsbury School. The rules clearly favour the kicking game.
Handling was only allowed for a player to take a clean catch entitling
them to a free kick and there was a primitive offside rule, disallowing
players from "loitering" around the opponents' goal. The Cambridge rules were
not widely adopted outside English public schools and universities (but it was
arguably the most significant influence on the

Football Association committee members responsible for formulating the
rules of

Association football).

 

The first modern balls

In Europe, early footballs were made out of animal
bladders,
more specifically pig's bladders, which were inflated. Later
leather
coverings were introduced to allow the ball to keep their shape.
^[20]
However, in 1851,

Richard Lindon and

William Gilbert, both shoemakers from the town of

Rugby (near the school), exhibited both round and oval-shaped balls at the

Great Exhibition in
London.
Richard Lindon's wife is said to have died due to lung disease caused by
blowing up pig's bladders.^[21]
Lindon also won medals for the invention of the "Rubber inflatable Bladder"
and the "Brass Hand Pump".

In 1855, the
U.S. inventor

Charles Goodyear — who had patented

vulcanized rubber — exhibited a spherical football, with an exterior of
vulcanized rubber panels, at the

Paris Exhibition Universelle. The ball was to prove popular in
early forms of football in the U.S.A.
^[22]

 

Sheffield rules

By the late 1850s, many football clubs had been formed throughout the
English-speaking world, to play various codes of football.

Sheffield Football Club, founded in
1857 in the
English city of
Sheffield,
by former Harrow School pupils Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, was later
recognised as the world's oldest club playing association football. However,
the club initially played its own code of football: the Sheffield rules.
There were some similarities to the Cambridge rules, but players were allowed
to push or hit the ball with their hands, and there was no offside
rule at all, so that players known as kick throughs could be
permanently positioned near the opponents' goal. The code spread to a number
of clubs in the area and was popular until the 1870s.

 

Australian rules

Tom
Wills began to develop Australian football in

Melbourne during 1858. Wills had been educated in England, at Rugby School
and had played
cricket for Cambridge University. The extent to which Wills was directly
influenced by British and Irish football games is unknown, but there were
similarities between some of them and his game. There were

pronounced similarities between Wills's game and

Gaelic football (as it would be codified in 1887). It appears that
Australian football also has some similarities to the

indigenous Australian game of
Marn
Grook (see above).

Melbourne Football Club was also founded in 1858 and is the oldest
surviving Australian football club, but the rules it used during its first
season are unknown. The club's rules of 1859 are the oldest surviving set of
laws for Australian rules. They were drawn up at the Parade Hotel,

East Melbourne on
17 May, by
Wills, W.J. Hammersley, J.B. Thompson and Thomas Smith (some sources include
H.C.A. Harrison). These men had similar backgrounds to Wills and their code
also had pronounced similarities to the Sheffield rules, most notably in the
absence of an offside rule. A free kick was awarded for a mark
(clean catch). However, running while holding the ball was allowed and
although it was not specified in the rules, a rugby ball was used. The club
shared many members with the

Melbourne Cricket Club, which was based at the

Melbourne Cricket Ground, and

cricket ovals — which vary in size and are much larger than the fields
used in other forms of football — became the standard playing field for
Australian rules. The 1859 rules did not include some elements which would
soon become important to the game, such as the requirement to bounce
the ball while running.

Australian rules is sometimes said to be the first form of football to be
codified but, as was the case in all kinds of football at the time, there was
no official body supporting the rules, and play varied from one club to
another. By 1866, however, several other clubs in the

Colony of Victoria had agreed to play an updated version of the Melbourne
F.C. rules, which were later known as "Victorian Rules" and/or "Australasian
Rules". The formal name of the code later became Australian rules football
(and, more recently, Australian football). By the end of the 19th century the
code had spread to the

other Australian colonies (although rugby football would remain more
popular in

New South Wales and

Queensland) and

other parts of the world.

 

The Football Association

 

During the early 1860s, there were increasing attempts in England to unify
and reconcile the various public school games. In 1862, J. C. Thring, who had
been one of the driving forces behind the original Cambridge Rules, was a
master at

Uppingham School and he issued his own rules of what he called "The
Simplest Game" (these are also known as the Uppingham Rules). In early October
1863 another new revised version of the Cambridge Rules was drawn up by a
seven member committee representing former pupils from Harrow, Shrewsbury,
Eton, Rugby, Marlborough and Westminster.

At the Freemason's Tavern, Great Queen Street,
London on the
evening of
October
26, 1863,
representatives of several football clubs in the

London Metropolitan area met for the inaugural meeting of

The Football Association (FA). The aim of the Association was to establish
a single unifying code and regulate the playing of the game among its members.
Following the first meeting, the public schools were invited were sent to to
join the association. All of them declined, except Charterhouse and Uppingham.
In total, six meetings of the FA were held between October and December 1863.
After the third meeting, a draft set of rules were published. However, at the
beginning of the fourth meeting, attention was drawn to the recently-published
Cambridge Rules of 1863. The Cambridge rules differed from the draft FA rules
in two significant areas; namely running with (carrying) the ball and hacking
(kicking opposing players in the shins). The two contentious FA rules were as
follows:

IX. A player shall be entitled to run with the ball towards his
adversaries' goal if he makes a fair catch, or catches the ball on the first
bound; but in case of a fair catch, if he makes his mark [to take a free
kick] he shall not run.

X. If any player shall run with the ball towards his adversaries'
goal, any player on the opposite side shall be at liberty to charge, hold,
trip or hack him, or to wrest the ball from him, but no player shall be held
and hacked at the same time.

At the fifth meeting it was proposed that these two rules be removed. Most
of the delegates supported this, but F. W. Campbell, the representative from

Blackheath and the first FA treasurer, objected. He said: "hacking is the
true football". However, the motion to ban hacking was carried and Blackheath
withdrew from the FA. After the final meeting on
8
December, the FA published the "Laws
of Football", the first comprehensive set of rules for the game later
known as

football (later known in some countries as soccer).

The first FA rules still contained elements that are no longer part of
football, but which are still recognisable in other games: for instance, a
player could make a fair catch and claim a
mark,
which entitled him to a free kick, and; if a player touched the ball behind
the opponents' goal line, his side was entitled to a free kick at goal,
from 15 yards in front of the goal line.

 

Rugby football

In Britain,
by 1870, there were about 75 clubs playing variations of the Rugby school
game. There were also "rugby" clubs in
Ireland,
Australia,
Canada and
New
Zealand. However, there was no generally accepted set of rules for rugby
until 1871, when 21 clubs from London came together to form the

Rugby Football Union (RFU). (Ironically, Blackheath now lobbied to ban
hacking.)
The first official RFU rules were adopted in June 1871. These rules allowed
passing the ball. They also included the
try, where touching
the ball over the line allowed an attempt at goal, though drop-goals from
marks and general play, and penalty conversions were still the main form of
contest.

 

North American football codes

The first game of rugby in
Canada is
generally said to have taken place in
Montreal,
in 1865, when

British Army officers played local civilians. The game gradually gained a
following, and the

Montreal Football Club was formed in 1868, the first recorded football
club in Canada.

In 1869, the first game played in the

United States under rules based on the English FA (soccer) code occurred,
between

Princeton and

Rutgers. This is also often considered to be the first US game of

college football, in the sense of a game between colleges (although the
eventual form of American football would come from rugby, not soccer).

Modern

American football grew out of a match between

McGill University of Montreal, and

Harvard University in 1874. At the time, Harvard students are reported to
have played the

Boston Game — a running code — rather than the FA-based kicking
games favored by US universities. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to
the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between
their respective sets of rules. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both
adopted McGill's rugby rules and had persuaded other US university teams to do
the same. In 1876, at the

Massasoit Convention, it was agreed by these universities to adopt most of
the

Rugby Football Union rules. However, a
touch-down
only counted toward the score if neither side kicked a
field
goal. The convention decided that, in the US game, four touchdowns
would be worth one goal; in the event of a tied score, a goal converted from a
touchdown would take precedence over four touch-downs.

Princeton, Rutgers and others continued to compete using soccer-based rules
for a few years before switching to the rugby-based rules of Harvard and its
competitors. US colleges did not generally return to soccer until the early
twentieth century.

In 1880,

Yale coach
Walter
Camp, devised a number of major changes to the American game, beginning
with the reduction of teams from 15 to 11 players, followed by
reduction of the field area by almost half, and; the introduction of the
scrimmage, in which a player heeled the ball backwards, to begin a game.
These were complemented in 1882 by another of Camp's innovations: a team had
to surrender possession if they did not gain five yards after three downs
(i.e. successful tackles).

Over the years Canadian football absorbed some developments in American
football, but also retained many unique characteristics. One of these was that
Canadian football, for many years, did not officially distinguish itself from
rugby. For example, the Canadian Rugby Football Union, founded in 1884
was the forerunner of the

Canadian Football League, rather than a rugby union body. (The

Canadian Rugby Union was not formed until 1965.) American football was
also frequently described as "rugby" in the 1880s.

 

Gaelic football

In the mid-19th century, various traditional football games, referred to
collectively as
caid,
remained popular in Ireland, especially in

County Kerry. One observer, Father W. Ferris, described two main forms of
caid during this period: the "field game" in which the object was to
put the ball through arch-like goals, formed from the boughs of two trees,
and; the epic "cross-country game" which took up most of the daylight hours of
a Sunday on which it was played, and was won by one team taking the ball
across a parish
boundary. "Wrestling", "holding" opposing players, and carrying the ball were
all allowed.

By the 1870s, Rugby and football had started to become popular in Ireland.

Trinity College, Dublin was an early stronghold of Rugby (see the

Developments in the 1850s section, above). The rules of the English FA
were being distributed widely. Traditional forms of caid had begun to
give way to a "rough-and-tumble game" which allowed tripping.

There was no serious attempt to unify and codify Irish varieties of
football, until the establishment of the

Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884. The GAA sought to promote
traditional Irish sports, such as
hurling and
to reject imported games like Rugby and Football. The first Gaelic football
rules were drawn up by

Maurice Davin and published in the United Ireland magazine on
February
7, 1887.
Davin's rules showed the influence of games such as hurling and a desire to
formalise a distinctly Irish code of football. The prime example of this
differentiation was the lack of an

offside rule (an attribute which, for many years, was shared only by other
Irish games like hurling, and by Australian rules football).

 

The split in Rugby football

The

International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) was founded in 1886, but rifts
were beginning to emerge in the code.

Professionalism was beginning to creep into the various codes of football.

In Britain, by the 1890s, a long-standing

Rugby Football Union ban on professional players was causing
regional tensions within rugby football, as many players in northern England
were

working class and could not afford to take time off to train, travel, play
and recover from injuries. This was not very different from what had occurred
ten years earlier in soccer in Northern England but the authorities reacted
very differently in the RFU, attempting to alienate the working class support
in Northern England. In
1895, following a
dispute about a player being paid broken time payments, which replaced wages
lost as a result of playing rugby, representatives of the northern clubs met
in
Huddersfield to form the

Northern Rugby Football Union (NRFU). The new body initially permitted
only various types of player wage replacements. However, within two years,
NRFU players could be paid, but they were required to have a job outside
sport.

The demands of a professional league dictated that rugby had to become a
better "spectator" sport. Within a few years the NRFU rules had started to
diverge from the RFU, most notably with the abolition of the
line-out.
This was followed by the replacement of the
ruck with the
"play-the-ball ruck", which allowed a two-player ruck contest between the
tackler at marker and the player tackled.

Mauls were stopped once the ball carrier was held, being replaced by a
play-the ball-ruck. The separate Lancashire and Yorkshire competitions of the
NRFU merged in 1901, forming the Northern Rugby League, the first time
the name
rugby
league was used officially in England.

Over time, the RFU form of rugby, played by clubs which remained members of
national federations affiliated to the IRFB, became known as
rugby
union.

 

The globalisation of Association football

The need for a single body to oversee Association football had become
apparent by the beginning of the 20th century, with the increasing popularity
of international fixtures. The English Football Association had chaired many
discussions on setting up an international body, but was perceived as making
no progress. It fell to associations from seven other European countries:
France,
Belgium,
Denmark,

Netherlands,
Spain, Sweden,
and
Switzerland, to form an international association. The Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)
was founded in
Paris on May
21, 1904. Its
first president was

Robert Guérin. The

French name and acronym has remained, even outside French-speaking
countries.

 

The reform of American football

Both forms of rugby and American football were noted at the time for
serious injuries, as well as the deaths of a significant number of players. By
the early 20th century in the USA, this had resulted in national controversy
and American football was banned by a number of colleges. Consequently, a
series of meetings was held by 19 colleges in
1905–06. This
occurred reputedly at the behest of President

Theodore Roosevelt. He was considered a fancier of the game, but he
threatened to ban it unless the rules were modified to reduce the numbers of
deaths and disabilities. The meetings are now considered to be the origin of
the

National Collegiate Athletic Association.

One proposed change was a widening of the playing field. However,

Harvard University had just built a concrete stadium and therefore
objected to widening, instead proposing legalisation of the

forward pass. The report of the meetings introduced many restrictions
on tackling and two more divergences from rugby: the forward pass and the
banning of mass formation plays. The changes did not immediately have
the desired effect, and 33 American football players were killed during 1908
alone. However, the number of deaths and injuries did gradually decline.

 

Further divergence of the two rugby codes

Rugby league rules diverged significantly from rugby union in 1906, with
the reduction of the team from 15 to 13 players. In 1907, a
New
Zealand professional rugby team toured Australia and Britain, receiving an
enthusiastic response, and professional

rugby leagues were launched in Australia the following year. However, the
rules of professional games varied from one country to another, and
negotiations between various national bodies were required to fix the exact
rules for each international match. This situation endured until 1948, when at
the instigation of the French league, the

Rugby League International Federation (RLIF) was formed at a meeting in
Bordeaux.

During the second half of 20th century, the rules changed further. In 1966,
rugby league officials borrowed the American football concept of

downs: a team could retain possession of the ball for no more than
four tackles. The maximum number of tackles was later increased to six (in
1971), and in rugby league this became known as the

six tackle rule.

With the advent of full-time professionals in the early 1990s, and the
consequent speeding up of the game, the five metre off-side distance between
the two teams became 10 metres, and the replacement rule was superseded by
various interchange rules, among other changes.

The laws of rugby union also changed significantly during the 20th century.
In particular, goals from
marks
were abolished, kicks directly

into touch from outside the

22 metre line were penalised, new laws were put in place to determine
who had possession following an inconclusive

ruck or

maul, and the lifting of players in
line-outs
was legalised.

In 1995, rugby union became an "open" game, that is one which allowed
professional players. Although the original dispute between the two codes has
now disappeared — and despite the fact that officials from both forms of rugby
football have sometimes mentioned the possibility of re-unification — the
rules of both codes and their culture have diverged to such an extent that
such an event is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

 

Football today

 

Use of the word "football" in English-speaking
countries

The word "football", when used in reference to a specific game can
mean any one of those described above. Because of this, much friendly
controversy has occurred over the term football, primarily because it
is used in different ways in different parts of the

English-speaking world. Most often, the word "football" is used to refer
to the code of football that is considered dominant within a particular
region.

Globally, and not necessarily in native English speaking countries, the
word "football" usually refers to

association football as this is the most widely played code of football.
The name "soccer" (or "soccer football") was originally a slang

abbreviation of association football and is now the prevailing term
in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand where other codes of
football are dominant.

Of the 45 national
FIFA affiliates in which

English is an official or primary language, only three (Canada,

Samoa and the

United States) actually use "soccer" in their organizations' official
names, while the rest use football (although the Samoan Federation actually
uses both). However, in some countries, such as
Australia
and New
Zealand, use of the word "football" by soccer bodies is a recent change
(or a reversion to a long-abandoned name) and has been controversial. It is
argued that using football instead of soccer, against the local trend in the
country, is done for marketing reasons or to aid integration with European and
South American countries where football unambigously refers to association
football.^[24]

The different codes are listed below and are described more fully in their
own articles