football history

also called  association football  or  soccer  game in which two 11-member teams try to propel a ball into the opposing team's goal, using any part of the body except the hands and arms. Only the goalkeeper, who is restricted to the penalty area in front of the goal, is allowed to handle the ball. The team that scores the most goals is the winner.

Football is the most widely played ball game in the world and the most popular as a spectator sport. The simplicity of the rules and the fact that it can be played practically everywhere has contributed to this popularity. It is played on all continents and in more than 200 countries. At the 2000 census taken by the world governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), there were some 30 million registered players at all levels. In addition, there are many millions of casual players involved in pickup games in streets, on parking lots, on school playgrounds, in parks, and even, as in Brazil, on beaches.

From antiquity, games existed in which two teams, or sides, attempted to kick, push, or otherwise propel a ball in opposite directions toward the opponents' goal. The ball varied in shape from round to oval, as it does today. A football game was played in China as early as 206 BC, and by AD 500 round footballs stuffed with hair were in use. In ancient Greece a game with elements of football—episkuros, or harpaston—was played, and it migrated to Rome as harpastum by the 2nd century BC. In this game, play began with a ball being thrown in the air between two teams, each of which tried to push it beyond the opponents' goal line. Roman legions may have introduced the game throughout Europe and in England during the Roman occupation (AD 43/44–410). One report has the Irish kicking a stuffed ball even earlier.

In 7th-century Japan there was a football game. In the 14th century calcio (“kick”) was played in Florence; it persists as a festival game. Also in medieval Europe there were mob games, called mêlées or mellays, in which a ball, usually an inflated animal bladder, was advanced by kicking, punching, and carrying. As many as 100 players from two towns or parishes started at a midpoint and used their localities' limits as goals. King Richard II of England banned the game in 1389 because it interfered with archery practice, and later monarchs issued similar proscriptions into the 15th century, to little effect.

Shrove Tuesday (the last day before the Western Christian season of Lent) was a traditional football day in both England and Scotland from the 12th century. At Chester, in the north of England, the game was said to be played in commemoration of the day in 217 when a mighty flying wedge (a moving formation of soldiers resembling a wedge) drove the Romans out. A similar explanation was given for a game celebrating the driving out of the Danes from Kingston upon Thames in the 8th century. The field in later games came to be 80 to 100 yards (about 73 to 91 metres) long with a goal at each end formed by driving two sticks in the ground 2 or 3 feet (0.6–0.9 metre) apart. The ball was an inflated bladder encased in leather. When one team drove the ball through the opponent's goal, the game ended.

Football in a less violent form was played in England from the 17th century by youths from wealthy and aristocratic families at private schools (called public schools in England), although the authorities frowned on it as too rowdy for young gentlemen. Rules varied from school to school, but all forbade running with the round ball or passing it forward.

When football arose in England, it was first played as a winter game between residence houses at public schools such as Winchester, Charterhouse, and Eton but not often between schools, for each school had its own rules, some allowing limited handling of the ball and others not. Public schoolboys who went up to the universities could not play football there except with old schoolmates. An attempt to codify rules and remove differences was made at the University of Cambridge in 1843, and in 1846 most of the public schools adopted what were called the Cambridge rules, which were also used at that university and later by graduates who formed football clubs. Then in 1862 and 1863 a series of meetings of school and nonschool clubs in the London area and surrounding counties agreed to print the rules and, by so doing, left the rugby game outside the newly formed Football Association (FA).

The new rules were not at once universally accepted; many clubs continued to play by their own rules, especially in and around Sheffield, the first provincial club to join the FA. In 1867 the Sheffield Football Association was founded, the forerunner of county associations formed later. Sheffield and London played two matches in 1866, and in 1867 a match pitting Middlesex against Kent and Surrey was played under the revised rules. In 1871 all 15 FA clubs were invited to subscribe for purchase of a trophy cup to be played for by all clubs. By 1877, 43 clubs were competing, and the original dominance of the London area began to diminish. By the end of the 1870s only the Scottish Association rules varied from those of the FA.

Professionalism became an issue in 1884, and two clubs were excluded from the FA for using professional players; professionalism was eventually permitted by the FA, though not all clubs allowed it. The issue of professionalism first arose with “broken time,” recompense to players for time lost from their regular jobs to playing football. Ultimately professionalism came to mean full-time employment of players. The teams using professionals were mainly in the Midlands and the north. Professionalism led 12 clubs to form the Football League, intended to be national in scope, in 1888. A second division was introduced in 1892, and the total number of teams increased to 28. The Irish formed a league in 1890 and the Scottish in 1891. The Southern League began in 1894.

Later national leagues outside Great Britain followed the British model. A league was formed in The Netherlands in 1889, but professionalism was not adopted there until 1954. Germany completed its first national championship season in 1903, but the Bundesliga, a comprehensive national league, did not evolve until 60 years later. In France, where the game was introduced in the 1870s, a professional league did not begin until 1932, shortly after professionalism had been adopted in the South American countries of Argentina and Brazil. The FA, while legalizing professionalism from 1885, was determined to preserve amateurism, as were some of Britain's southern clubs, but ultimately professionalism prevailed, the London FA yielding to it in 1906.

The Football League became more national in 1920, when the Southern League was absorbed as a third division, the Midlands and northern clubs maintaining their superiority. Thereafter, though the FA Cup was prestigious, the weekly Football League matches formed the backbone of British football.

In 1904, when the game had spread across the continent of Europe to the point at which international organization was needed, Belgium, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). The English FA had been consulted earlier, but “in a monumental example of British insularity,” as the official FA history later put it, had failed to take the lead expected of it, though England voiced agreement with the concept in 1905 and joined the association the following year. The FA had, however, in 1882 set up the International Football Association Board as an international rule-making body, with English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish representation, and it continued as such. In 1913 FIFA was given representation on the board, but they were voted out after Britain withdrew from the world governing body in 1920 over the reinstatement of Germany and its World War I allies. FIFA representation, however, was resumed four years later.

The FA did consult with FIFA, especially on the question of professionalism, a problem that came to a head with the unofficial inclusion of football in the Olympic Games of 1900 and 1904 and its official inclusion thereafter (except in the 1932 Games). The commitment of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) was to pure amateurism; FIFA allowed its national associations to handle the question independently. Uruguay won in the 1924 and 1928 Games with virtually professional teams. Some nations refused to compete. The IOC wavered; the popularity of the sport worldwide may have discouraged ironhanded enforcement. After winning in 1908 and 1912, Britain withdrew in protest of the professionalism of other national teams in 1920 and did not permanently rejoin FIFA until 1946, having temporarily returned in the interim. Since that time all football-playing nations have worked under the aegis of FIFA.

In addition to its duties of promulgating football rules, FIFA also sanctions a number of tournaments, the most important of which is the World Cup championship series—officially the Jules Rimet Cup. The first such tournament was played at Montevideo in 1930 and won by Uruguay. The World Cup competition was scheduled every four years between Olympic Games.

British engineers and businessmen first carried the game abroad: to Prague and to Graz, Austria, in the 1880s, and to Vienna, where two clubs were formed in the 1890s. In 1887 a textile mill representative introduced the game in Russia. The first football match in Turkey was played in 1895 between British residents and Greek students, who had learned the game from British sailors. Danes formed the Boldspil (“Ball Game”) Union in 1889, the same year that the Netherlands federation was formed. In Malmö, Sweden, English residents played both rugby and association football and occasionally combinations of the two. Belgian and Swiss associations were formed in the 1890s.

National leagues became established in many countries. England and Scotland had the first leagues, formed in 1888 and 1890, respectively, but by the 1930s most of the countries in Europe and many of those in South America formed such leagues. Matches between nations were played, but organized interleague tournaments in Europe began with the European Cup of Champion Clubs for national league champions, which first took place in 1955 among the countries of the Union des Associations Européenes de Football (UEFA; formed in 1954). UEFA inaugurated the European Cup–Winners' Cup series in 1960, a competition that was dropped after the 1998–99 season. The International Inter-City Industrial Fairs Cup began tentatively in 1955 but by 1971 was firmly established, renamed the UEFA Cup. In 2001 UEFA had 51 member nations. Its premier competition is the Champions League, and its second competition is the UEFA Cup. Thirty-two teams qualify to play in the round-robin Champions League based upon their performance in their own leagues. Teams not making the cut for the Champions League are eligible to play in UEFA Cup tournaments. This tournament is a single-elimination contest between 96 teams.

Oddly enough, in comparison with other British sports in the 19th century, association football did not travel first or even very effectively to what later became the Commonwealth countries and to the United States. The game played from the 1870s in Canada and from the 1880s in Australia and New Zealand was rugby.

A distinctly different game, American (gridiron) football, emerged early in the 20th century as the most popular football sport in the United States. Association football, usually called soccer there, survived as an intercollegiate sport, first under the aegis of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) from 1905, and from 1924 under that of the Intercollegiate Soccer Association of America, which in turn later affiliated with the NCAA.

Outside the schools, the game was most popular in cities where immigrant groups played it: St. Louis, Missouri; Philadelphia; Chicago; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Cleveland, Ohio; to which later Hispanic migration added New York City and Los Angeles. The U.S. Soccer Federation was formed in 1913, affiliated with FIFA, and sponsored competitions. U.S. teams have participated in the World Cup from 1930, but usually they have not gone far in the competition.

The U.S. professional game became national in 1968 when the new North American Soccer League (NASL) began play. The league did not survive long, however. The game was slow to attract American sports fans, and franchises frequently moved from one city to another or simply failed. Competition from such favourite American sports as baseball, basketball, and gridiron football was difficult to overcome. If one player was responsible for popularizing the game as a spectator sport in the United States, it was the Brazilian World Cup player Pelé, signed by the New York Cosmos in 1975. But interest waned after the early 1980s, and the NASL finally collapsed prior to the 1985 season. The demise of the NASL, however, did not result in a total collapse of professional soccer. After experimentation, soccer officially moved indoors in 1978 with the institution of the six-per-side Major Indoor Soccer League, a concept designed to create a faster, higher-scoring game for American tastes. It developed attendance problems nonetheless, folding in 1992.

Despite the difficulties experienced by professional soccer, in the 1980s very large numbers of youngsters regularly played the sport in youth leagues throughout the United States and were filtering talent into high schools and colleges. The youth soccer phenomenon, and the attention garnered by the United States hosting the World Cup in 1994, created increased interest in the sport. In 1996 a new outdoor league, Major League Soccer (MLS), debuted with teams in 10 cities. By 2000 the league had expanded to 12 teams. The United States hosted the Women's World Cup in 1999, and the championship performance of the women's national team was enthusiastically followed by American audiences. In 2001 a women's professional league, the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA), began its first season with eight teams