The split between football and rugby

Association football and rugby football grew out of the same pre-1863 traditions. Both were versions of the public-school games played at English schools across the early nineteenth century, and both used a similar mix of kicking, handling and physical contact. The split between them happened at the Football Association's founding meetings in late 1863, when the clubs around the table had to choose between a kicking-only game and a game that kept the older school traditions of handling and hacking.

The choice was not unanimous. The majority of clubs voted to ban handling the ball in hand and to ban hacking — kicking opponents on the shins. A minority refused to give those features up. After the vote, the clubs that preferred the older game left the FA and continued to play their own version, which in time formally became rugby football. Within a generation, the two sports were fully separate, with their own associations, their own competitions and their own grounds.

The clubs that met at the Freemasons' Tavern in October 1863 fell roughly into two camps. One group, drawing on the Cambridge tradition and the kicking games of Eton and Charterhouse, wanted football to be a sport in which the ball was kicked and the players were not allowed to harm each other deliberately. The other group, drawing on the Rugby School game and similar handling-and-running traditions, wanted to keep the freedom to pick up the ball, run with it and tackle opponents physically.

Across the founding meetings, the two camps argued each point in detail. The deciding issues were the ban on running with the ball in hand and the ban on hacking. The proponents of physical play argued that football without hacking would be unmanly and that running with the ball was central to the game's character. The proponents of a kicking game argued that the old physical traditions made football too dangerous for adults outside school grounds, and that a kicking-only game would spread more easily.

At the final meeting of the FA's founding sequence, on 8 December 1863, the kicking-game camp won the vote. The new Laws of the Game banned running with the ball in hand and banned hacking. Francis Campbell of Blackheath Football Club, the most prominent voice for the older game, argued strongly against both decisions. When the votes went against him, Blackheath withdrew from the FA.

Blackheath's withdrawal did not end the older form of football. The clubs that had preferred the handling game continued to play among themselves, and the rules they used — drawn largely from Rugby School — kept developing along their own line. For most of the 1860s, the two versions of football existed in parallel, with crossover players and informal contact between the two sides.

Across the late 1860s, the two games grew further apart. Association football was governed by the FA, played to its Laws of the Game, and was spreading from London to other parts of England. The handling game was less centralised, with each club playing to its own variant of the Rugby School rules and arranging matches one by one. It needed its own organisation if it was going to keep up.

Several attempts were made to organise the handling game across this period, and several rule changes were debated. The most significant was the question of whether the closed, V-shaped scrummage of the Rugby School game should be replaced with something more open. By the early 1870s, enough clubs were involved that a single national body was viable, and the conditions were in place for a formal split.

The Rugby Football Union was founded on 26 January 1871 at a meeting of twenty-one clubs at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London. Its first task was to agree a single set of rules for the handling game. The first RFU laws were drawn up that summer, drawing heavily on the Rugby School game but adapting it for adult play. The new sport had its own national governing body, its own rules, and its own national team — England played Scotland in the first rugby international that same year.

With the founding of the RFU, the split between the two sports was complete. Both games had their own national associations, their own competitions, and their own playing styles. From 1871 onwards, association football and rugby football were unambiguously two separate sports, even though they came from a shared root and still shared a name.

With two sports both called football, English speakers needed a way to tell them apart. The convention that developed was to call them "association football" and "rugby football", named after their respective associations. Around the 1880s, a slang clipping of "association" began to appear at English public schools and universities — "assoc.", then "socca" or "socker", and finally "soccer". The term gained currency among players who needed to distinguish their football from the rugby version played in the same circles.

The word stayed in regional use through the twentieth century. In countries where association football is the dominant code and the only "football" people commonly use, the word soccer fell out of use. In countries where a different code dominates — the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland — "soccer" is still in regular use, and "football" can refer to American football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football or rugby, depending on where you are.

The handling game did not stay under one code for long. By the 1890s, deep arguments had developed within the RFU over whether players should be paid for time off work. Several northern English clubs wanted to compensate their working-class players for missed wages, while the RFU's southern leadership insisted that rugby should remain strictly amateur.

In 1895, twenty-two northern clubs broke away from the RFU and formed what would become the Rugby Football League. Rugby league developed its own rules, with a smaller number of players, different scoring and a faster, more open style. The original handling game became known as rugby union and remained the larger of the two codes globally. The story of the rugby split mirrors the football one — a disagreement over the character of the game, settled by one group walking away and founding a new sport.

The clean separation of the two sports in the 1860s and early 1870s meant that they spread separately through trade and empire across the rest of the nineteenth century. Where one code reached a country first, it tended to capture the word "football" for itself. Where both arrived close together, the country needed two names, and "soccer" stayed in use. This is why "football" can mean different things in different countries.

Despite the split, the two sports have a more shared history than is often remembered. Several early clubs played both versions, the early players in each sport often knew each other, and a number of rules — including throw-ins and goal kicks — had similar forms in both codes. The split was about which version of the older school games would dominate, not the invention of two unrelated sports.