The World Cup is currently underway in North America, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about football, or soccer depending on where you are from. And specifically, we are going to explore the history of the worldโs most popular sport.
Most people probably think football has always looked more or less the same. Two teams with eleven players. Referees and clear rules. Ninety-minute matches.
But that is not true at all. If you travelled back a few hundred years and watched a football match in England, you might not even recognise it as football.
In this episode, we are going to explore the development of football.
I want to talk about medieval folk football, the British schools that helped create modern rules, and cities like Sheffield that played their own versions of the game. Weโll also look at why football and rugby developed separately, where the word โsoccerโ actually comes from, and how industrialisation transformed football into a global professional sport watched by billions of people.
By the end of this episode, I think youโll see football very differently. And you will also have learned lots of new English vocabulary!
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Vocabulary
- rule system (n phr): A set of rules used to organise and govern an activity or game.
- Different schools had their own rule systems for playing football.
- hacking (n): An old football practice of kicking opponents in the legs.
- Hacking was eventually removed from football because it was considered too dangerous.
- dribbling (n): The skill of moving a ball while keeping it under control.
- The player used excellent dribbling to get past the defenders.
- unified (adj): Joined together into a single system or group.
- The Football Association created a unified set of rules for clubs across England.
- industrialisation (n): The process of developing industries, factories, and large cities.
- Industrialisation helped football grow by bringing large numbers of people into urban areas.
- professionalism (n): The practice of doing an activity as a paid job rather than just for enjoyment.
- The legalisation of professionalism allowed footballers to earn money from the sport.
- spectator (n): A person who watches a sporting event or other activity.
- Thousands of spectators attended the cup final to support their teams.
Origins and Folk Football
If you search online for where football comes from, you’ll find lots of different opinions. We have records of ancient ballgames played in China, [00:04:00] ancient Greece and Rome, also in the Americas.
But if we are talking specifically about the modern sport of football, then we need to focus on Britain.
People in Britain had been playing different kinds of “football games” for centuries before they wrote down any official rules. These early games are now called “folk football” by historians.
And actually, a lot of the information in this episode has come from the work of the historian Tony Collins. I read his book about five or six years ago, and it was incredibly interesting. So I’ll leave a link in the description of this episode.
Folk football was usually played in villages or small towns during festivals and holidays. In folk football games, the entire community could be involved. Sometimes it was married men playing against unmarried men, or one village would compete against [00:05:00] another village.
There were often no written rules. The matches would involve sometimes hundreds of players at the same time. The goals might be several kilometers apart from each other, meaning the game would move through streets, rivers, forests, fields. Carrying the ball in your hands was usually allowed, and wrestling and fighting were common. It often looked more like a riot than a sport.
And you can still see this kind of football today. If you want to see a modern version, search Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football on YouTube. This is a game that takes place across two days in the town of Ashbourne in England and has been held for around 800 years and features hundreds of players and is very violent.
In fact, football used to be so violent and disruptive that it [00:06:00] was almost banned. Quite a few English kings tried to ban it in the medieval period.
Why Its Called Football
There is an important language point here that often confuses people.
Why is football called “football”?
Is it because you kick the ball with your feet? No.
Most early versions of football didn’t require you to kick a ball. That was maybe an option, but you didn’t have to kick it.
There is still some debate around the term football, but a lot of historians believe “football” originally referred to games played “on foot” rather than on horseback.
In the medieval period, a lot of popular sports involved using horses. So football was a game where you didn’t need to use a horse. You used your feet. You played by walking or running around.
Many Rules in Britain
It also did not describe one sport. [00:07:00] Football was a whole family of different ball games played in different ways across Britain.
By the 1800s, these different versions of football were becoming quite popular across Britain, but every place played football by different rules. There was no original version of football.
You might imagine that the modern sport we play today existed in some version in the 1800s, but it’s not that simple. It’s not historically true to think in that way.
Different towns, schools, clubs had their own rule systems.
Some games allowed you to carry the ball in your hands. Others focused mostly on kicking the ball. Some versions allowed you to throw or catch the ball. Other versions banned using your hands completely. Certain games included hacking, which meant kicking opponents legs.
In some places, football looked [00:08:00] a little bit like modern soccer. In other places, it looked a little bit like the sport of rugby.
And because the rules were so different, teams from different towns would struggle to play against each other. Imagine your town organized a football game against a different town. But when you arrive for your match, you found out that they played a football with very different rules to your version of football.
They had a different number of players on the pitch. They had a different scoring system. They allowed players to kick each other.
This isn’t an exaggeration. Every town and school in Britain literally played a different version of football in the 19th century.
Sheffield Rules Innovations
One of the most important football cities during the Victorian time was Sheffield in Northern England.
Sheffield is often called the home of club football or the home of football because it [00:09:00] helped to create some of the earliest versions of organized football. The city had its own rule book known as the Sheffield Rules.
Some Sheffield Rules were actually more modern than the official Football Association rules that came later. For example, Sheffield introduced corner kicks and free kicks early on. Headers, using your head, became an accepted part of the game thanks to Sheffield.
They also used crossbars before many other football systems did. So crossbars are between the two posts of the football pitch. Most versions of football didn’t have crossbars. In fact, the first Football Association rules did not have crossbars.
But Sheffield Rules were also very different from modern football. There was no offside rule. If you were an attacker, you could simply stand next to your opponent’s goal waiting for the ball. They [00:10:00] didn’t throw the ball in if it went out of the side of the pitch. Instead, it was a “kick in”.
Some of the ideas that developed in Sheffield eventually became part of modern soccer. Others didn’t. But remember that Sheffield was just one of the cities and towns which had its own rules.
The modern game of football is partly a combination of these different football traditions from towns across Britain.
Elite Schools and Rugby
At the same time, it wasn’t just towns or clubs making football rules. Britain’s elite schools also were making their own systems of football. Confusingly, Britain’s elite private schools are called “public schools” in the UK.
These schools include Eton, Harrow, and Rugby School, and they all had their own ball games, and they all believed their version of football was the best.
Eton is [00:11:00] perhaps the most famous and elite school in England. It’s where Prince William went to school. It’s where our former prime ministers, Boris Johnson and David Cameron, went to school.
Eton had a dribbling-based game, so using your feet, and it was mainly played with the feet. Actually, Eton has two versions of its own football. The other version is still played today, and it involves a brick wall. It’s called the Eton Wall Game.
Harrow, another elite school, had its own unusual rules. It had offside rules that are completely different from any system used anywhere else.
And Rugby School focused heavily on carrying the ball and tackling and physical contact. At Rugby School, football was rough and aggressive, and many of its rules would later influence Rugby Football, or the sport of Rugby Union as it’s called today.
According to legend, [00:12:00] during a match at Rugby School, a student named William Webb Ellis suddenly picked up the ball and ran forward with it instead of kicking it.
Historians today think this never happened. Actually, it almost certainly never happened. The story was created much later as a kind of founding myth for Rugby Football.
But even if it’s not true, even if the story of William Webb Ellis is not true, it does show that football was very flexible.
The Football Association and the Great Split
As I mentioned already, by the middle of the 1800s, football was becoming popular across Britain. More schools started playing football, and clubs and cities and towns were playing the game, but nobody agreed on the rules. If two clubs from different cities wanted to play a match against each other, they first had to negotiate which version of football they would use.
Eventually, people [00:13:00] realized that football needed a standard set of rules, one set of rules for everyone to play.
In 1863, representatives from several different football clubs met in London with the aim of creating a unified football code. These meetings eventually created the Football Association.
But there were some really big disagreements. Should players be allowed to carry the ball in their hands? Should they be allowed to use their hands at all? Should hacking, kicking opponents in the legs, be part of the sport? How many points should you get for a goal?
Some clubs believed that physical contact and carrying the ball were essential parts of football. Other clubs wanted a much less violent game. Some clubs walked out of the meetings entirely and never returned because they disagreed so strongly with the new rules.[00:14:00]
Historians call this moment “The Great Split“. Two major versions of football developed from this point.
One version became Association Football. This is the sport we now call football or soccer. The other sport, a few years later, evolved into Rugby Football, or the modern sport of Rugby Union.
Rugby did not split away from a finished version of modern soccer, which is what some people believe. Some people believe there was a sport called football, which was played with your feet. One day, a man picked the ball up and started running, and rugby was born. But that’s not true.
There were so many different versions of football, and in the process of making one set of rules, the sports developed separately. They both came from the same collection of older versions of football.
And actually, that wasn’t the last time that different versions of football would develop.
[00:15:00] Rugby split again in 1895, eventually creating two separate sports, Rugby Union and Rugby League, which are two separate sports with different rules.
Outside of Britain, sports like American Football, Canadian Football, Australian Rules Football, and Gaelic Football also developed from some of the early British football versions, mixed with other cultures and other sports from other countries.
Early FA Game and Tactics
The Football Association in 1863 basically just chose which parts of older football traditions they would use and which parts of older football traditions they didn’t want to use anymore.
They then published these rules so that clubs and schools that aligned with the Football Association could all play the same sport.
The FA’s early football looked very strange compared to modern [00:16:00] football. For example, the first set of rules actually said that kicking a ball between the two posts at any height was a goal. A few years later, they updated the rules so that there was a piece of tape stretched across the posts.
There were also no substitutions. You couldn’t change your players. Footballs changed in size and shape. And early goalkeepers could catch the ball or use the ball in much larger parts of the field than modern goalkeepers.
But actually, if you were to travel to the 1860s and watch a game of football played with the Football Association’s rules, the first thing that would surprise you perhaps would be the tactics of the players, the way the game was played.
Today, passing is one of the most important parts of football. Players pass the ball to each other, [00:17:00] and by passing they make space and score goals. But in early English football, players didn’t like passing. They actually looked down on passing.
It was considered braver, more skillful, more manly, to dribble individually through defenders. Basically, once you have the ball, you try and score. Don’t give it to someone else. You try and score yourself.
Passing could be seen as cowardly because it relied on teamwork, not individual strength.
Soccer Name Explained
I’ll just take a few minutes here to talk about the name of the sport as well.
Most of you listening will call the sport “football”. But in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, and a few other places around the world, it is more common to say “soccer”. Many people, especially in Britain, associate the word “soccer” with the United States. And a lot of football fans dislike the [00:18:00] word soccer because they think it sounds too American.
Surprisingly though, the word soccer is British.
Remember that in the 1800s, there were several sports called football. After the Football Association created their rules, there was then a split between towns using Association Football rules, and towns, or clubs, or schools using different rules, like Rugby Football rules.
British university students in the 1800s liked using slang words, and they would create slang words by shortening or changing longer words. For example, Rugby Football became known as “rugger” at some of the universities in the UK. Association Football was also changed. Students shortened association to “assoc“, and eventually this became [00:19:00] “soccer”.
So the word soccer literally comes from Association Football, and for decades, people in Britain regularly used both football and soccer to talk about the sport.
Other English-speaking countries still use soccer today because they have their own versions of football. In the United States, football usually means American Football. In Australia, football often means Australian Rules Football
Industrial Revolution Boom
Going back to 19th century Britain, how did the Football Association version of football become so popular?
One reason is the Industrial Revolution. During the 1800s, millions of people in the UK moved from small villages into big industrial cities. Places like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow became crowded, busy cities [00:20:00] filled with working class people. And this was the perfect place for a sport like football to grow.
People now lived close together. Workers slowly began to get some free time, especially on a Saturday afternoon. Railways also let teams travel between towns far more easily, and mass printed newspapers could report sports results to audiences across the country. Football became a version of mass entertainment, and it was deeply tied to working class identity.
Many of the early football clubs were created by factories, railway companies, or groups of workers. For example, we can look at the origins of some of the English Premier League’s most famous teams.
Manchester United was originally Newton Heath Football Club, and it was formed by railway [00:21:00] workers, I think. Arsenal was formed by workers at the Woolwich Royal Arsenal, which is why it’s called Arsenal. Aston Villa, Everton, Tottenham, they were all church football teams for young boys.
FA Cup and Club Growth
One of the most important developments during this period was the FA Cup. The FA Cup was created in 1871 and still happens today.
For the first time, the FA Cup allowed clubs from across all of England to compete in a single tournament using the same rules, and this helped to make people use the Football Association’s version of football.
By the late 19th century, some football matches attracted tens of thousands of spectators.
As crowds increased, the clubs realized they could make some money. Football could become a business. And because football could be a business, the [00:22:00] teams wanted better players. It gave them a better chance to win tournaments and get more fans. And the better players wanted some money. They wanted payment.
In the early years of the FA Cup, amateur teams usually won. For example, Wanderers won five of the first FA Cups. Wanderers were a team made up of graduates from the prestigious elite schools of the UK. Other winners of the FA Cup in the early years included the Royal Engineers, part of the British Army, and also Oxford University.
But from the 1880s, professional teams like Blackburn Rovers, Aston Villa, and West Bromwich Albion started to dominate.
Scotland Invents Passing
Although England created the Football Association and created the standard rules of football, it was another part of Britain that changed how the sport was played. That part [00:23:00] was Scotland.
In the early days of football, English teams focused on individual dribbling, no passing, but Scottish football was different. Especially in places like Glasgow, teams began playing with a more organized and tactical style. They would move and pass the ball and use tactics to score goals. Scottish teams focused on strategy more than strength.
Because of this, Scottish teams often defeated English sides during the late 19th century. English clubs began copying Scottish tactics, and many of Scotland’s most famous and talented players moved south to play for clubs in northern England.
The kind of football that we watch today, modern passing football, exists thanks to Scotland.
Professionalism and League
As football became more popular, one of the biggest debates in England and Britain was whether or [00:24:00] not players should be paid.
In the 19th century, many of the people who controlled football came from wealthy backgrounds, and they believed that all sport should be amateur. Football should be played for enjoyment, not money. Many people believed that paying players made the sport less noble.
This sounds strange today. We associate sport with being professional, but it wasn’t always like that. Lots of people believe sport should only be amateur until relatively recently.
Two examples: the game of rugby was an amateur sport, officially an amateur sport, until the 1990s because of anti-professionalism in the sport, and the Olympics were officially amateur until 1988.
But it was difficult for football to stay amateur. Football clubs [00:25:00] started to get bigger crowds, and thousands of people were paying money to watch football games. If you were a successful team and you won more matches, you would get bigger crowds and more fans and earn more money. And because winning was important, clubs wanted the best players.
Now, a lot of the best players came from working class backgrounds. They came from industrial northern towns. And working class players could not afford to spend all of their time training or traveling to games or playing games without money. Missing work to go and play football meant losing your wages and not having money to pay for your rent or to support your family
Some clubs began to secretly pay talented players, despite those official rules against professionalism. This happened particularly in the industrial towns of northern England. Clubs in places like [00:26:00] Preston and Blackburn, which were two of the strongest teams in the 19th century, were willing to offer quite a lot of money for the time to attract skilled players. They especially offered money to Scottish footballers.
Eventually, the Football Association realized they couldn’t fight professionalism. In 1885, the FA officially legalized professional football. In 1888, the world’s first football league was established.
So alongside the cup competitions like the FA Cup, clubs now would play regular league matches throughout the entire season. This meant there was a more regular schedule and rivalries between clubs could develop.
And I think this was the birth of modern football.
By the end of the 19th century, football had standardized rules. It had organized competitions, [00:27:00] cups, and leagues. There were professional players. Stadiums just for football. And fans who supported teams and went to games and read the results in the newspapers the day after.
Global Spread
Then the sport started to become international. Britain was the world’s largest empire and one of the most powerful trading countries in history. British people traveled across the world and they took their sports with them. Some of the earliest clubs in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Italy were founded by British immigrants or influenced by British communities.
And because of this, football did not remain British for that long.
I’m going to do a bonus episode on my Patreon later this week about the History of International Football and the story of the first World Cup.
If you’re interested in listening, go over and subscribe.
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Final Thought
In this episode, I’ve tried to introduce you to the history of football. The modern sport of football did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. It came from the various ball games played across Britain in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
As football became more organized, attempts to create standard rules led to the formation of the Football Association in 1863. It also separated two major versions of football: association football, which became modern soccer, and rugby football.
Then industrialization changed the game. Cities grew, railways were built, newspapers and more leisure time meant that football spread across Britain, and it became a mass spectator sport.
Britain’s global influence carried football around the world, [00:29:00] and it became a international game, watched and played by billions of people today.
But what do you think?
Were you surprised to learn that football originally had some different rules? Why do you think football became the world’s most popular sport? Why was it football instead of rugby football or cricket or another game that became so popular?
What do you call the sport? Do you call it football or soccer? And are you watching the World Cup right now?
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