Early forms of football

The modern game's earliest direct ancestors were English. But football, in the loose sense of a team game played with a ball that is mostly kicked rather than carried, has been played in many parts of the world across many centuries. The ancient and medieval forms shared little structure between them, varied widely by region, and were not connected by any common organisation.

What makes them relevant to football's history is that they show how widely the broad idea travelled before it was codified. Some directly fed into the English game; others ran in parallel for centuries and only met it when the modern sport spread out from England in the late nineteenth century.

Cuju, played in China from at least the third century BC, involved kicking a leather ball through a small opening. It was practised by the military and at the imperial court, and FIFA recognises it as the earliest documented form of football. The game had organised teams, set rules and skilled players for several centuries before falling out of widespread practice.

Other cultures had their own variants. Kemari was a Japanese kicking game influenced by earlier East Asian ball-game traditions and played at the imperial court. Episkyros in ancient Greece and harpastum in the Roman Empire were team ball games that may have involved kicking among other actions. Mesoamerican ball games, played across the Maya and Aztec civilisations, involved knocking a rubber ball through stone rings — a very different game, but evidence that the broad family of ball-and-goal sports developed independently in different parts of the world.

English folk football — sometimes called mob football — was a long-running tradition rather than a single game. Versions varied from town to town. Most involved two sides, an object that could be kicked or carried, and a goal at each end of the village or parish. There were few rules beyond that, and matches often had hundreds of players, no fixed pitch and few restrictions on contact.

Similar games existed in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and across mainland Europe. The English versions were repeatedly the target of bans from medieval kings onwards, who saw them as a public nuisance and a distraction from archery practice. Despite the bans, the tradition survived for centuries, and a few versions of folk football continue in England as annual local events.

The version of football most relevant to the modern game was the one played at English public schools — Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Charterhouse, Westminster and others. Each school had developed its own version across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with rules that suited its grounds, its housing arrangements and its traditions.

The variations were significant. Eton had at least two distinct games — the field game and the wall game — neither of which much resembled modern football. Harrow used a heavy ball best suited to short kicking. Winchester and Westminster had their own conventions on handling, offside and scoring. Rugby School's version, in which the ball could be picked up and run with, was the version that would eventually become a separate sport.

The problem became sharpest at the universities. When boys from different public schools arrived at Cambridge and Oxford in the 1840s, they wanted to play football together. But each had grown up with a different version of the game, and matches kept stalling on rule disputes. Some form of common code was needed if football was to be played beyond the bounds of a single school.

One of the first major attempts to write down a shared set of rules came from Cambridge University in 1848 — the Cambridge Rules. Other early attempts followed, and by the end of the 1850s, several distinct sets of rules existed in different parts of England. The need to settle on one of them was what ultimately led to the founding of the Football Association in 1863.

The basic shape of the modern game — two teams, two goals, a ball that is mostly kicked, a fixed pitch — came directly from the public school games. Goal-lines, restarts and formal officiating all developed from that same period of experimentation, refined across the decades that followed.

What was left behind was the variation. After 1863, the modern game began moving towards a single shared code, though older and local rule sets continued for a time. The folk football tradition lasted longest in the form of annual local games; the public school games faded into school traditions; the ancient ball games stayed as historical references rather than living sports.