Origins of football

Forms of football have existed for centuries. People in many parts of the world had played games involving a ball and goals, often with little structure and few rules. What changed in the nineteenth century was the move from that patchwork of local games to a single written code — the version of football that the rest of the world now plays.

The story is mostly an English one in its earliest stage, though only because the written rules agreed in England became the basis of the international game. The game itself was a mix of older traditions, and its formal start in 1863 is best understood as a turning point in a longer story rather than the moment football was invented.

Folk football — sometimes called mob football — was played across English towns and villages for centuries, often on feast days. The games could involve very large numbers of players, no fixed pitch, and almost no rules beyond getting an object to a particular place. Similar games existed in Scotland, Ireland and other parts of Europe, and earlier ball games are documented in China, Mesoamerica and elsewhere.

By the early nineteenth century the more structured versions were being played at English public schools. Each school had its own version, shaped by the size of its grounds, its traditions and the people involved. Some allowed handling, others did not. Some had offside rules, others let attackers stand near the opposition goal. When pupils moved on to university, they found their school's version of football did not match anyone else's, and pressure for shared rules built from there.

Representatives from a small number of London clubs and schools met at the Freemasons' Tavern in October 1863. Across six meetings, they drafted a single code of rules — the original Laws of the Game — and founded the Football Association to look after them. The 1863 Laws were short and would not look complete to a modern eye, but they settled enough disputes between clubs to allow shared fixtures.

The most contentious decisions were over handling the ball and tripping or hacking opponents. The FA's choice to ban both forms of physical play in its written code was the choice that ultimately separated association football from the games that became rugby. Some clubs left the FA over that decision, but the rules survived and were adopted more widely.

The clubs that left the FA in 1863 over the ban on handling and hacking continued to play their own version of football. Rugby School's version of the game, in which the ball could be picked up and run with, had been gaining followers since the 1820s, and it kept developing along its own path. In 1871 the Rugby Football Union was founded to manage that version of the game, completing the split.

The two codes — association football and rugby football — were now distinct sports with distinct rules. Association football kept developing through the FA, while rugby football itself later split into rugby union and rugby league. The English word "soccer" is a clipped form of "association", coined in the 1880s to distinguish the FA's version from the rugby version, and it persists in some countries where football refers to a different sport.

Until 1863, football was a generic word covering many versions of a kicking game. After 1863 it needed a more specific name, because two main versions now existed. "Association football" — football played under the rules of the Football Association — was that more specific name. The phrase was used to distinguish the FA's game from rugby football and from the various survivor codes that did not adopt the FA rules.

In time, in most of the world, "football" came to mean association football and the extra word was dropped. In countries where rugby, American football, Australian rules football or Gaelic football took hold, "football" can still mean something else, and "soccer" is used for the association game. The name is a reminder that the modern sport was not the only football of its day; it was the version whose written rules became the basis of the international game.

The FA's rules took a couple of decades to settle into the form that would spread worldwide. The Sheffield code lasted until the 1870s, and Scottish football developed its own version of the FA rules in parallel. Throughout that period the rules kept changing — the crossbar, the penalty kick, the offside rule, the goal net and goalkeeping all arrived gradually and not always together. The shape of the modern game took most of the rest of the nineteenth century to settle.

The bigger story, though, is what happened to the game socially. Football moved out of public schools and universities and into towns, factories and clubs. Working players began to be paid, professional football was born, and the first formal competitions appeared. That second stage is covered in the next pillar.