What Do You Know About Football? Part 1: How Football Originated

This article will look at the history of the game of football and how the codes separated to give us the variety we have today. Many are completely clueless where their preferred football code came from, and many are surprised that they have been historically derived from one another.

Ancient games and violent mob football

There are many ancient games from around the world that could be the roots of football. In fact, it seems that virtually every single culture prior to the Industrial Revolution had some form of ball game that involved the ball being kicked towards some goal. The oldest is the Chinese game of "cuju" from the second century BC. The game involved kicking a ball through a hole in the cloth to score points. Ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Mayans and other civilizations all had ball kicking games that influenced later sports. However, by all counts, modern football's origins lie in England.

There have been various "mob football" games in the middle ages where entire villages would compete to move a ball from their side to the opponents "goal", which was often a church or some other building. In the beginning these games had few rules, massive heaps of people would fight over a ball and kick it around until it got to the goal. Punching and kicking your opponents was common, and all out brawl would break out as the teams fough over the ball. Property was frequently destroyed and the streets of the village and people's fences were often left destroyed by the violence. The only rule pretty much was: no murder.

There were really no true limits or official rules, and variations of the game abounded (an Italian version of mob football called Calcio Fiorentino was one of the earliest recorded codes in 1580). As the ruling classes of Europe saw the really rowdy nature of the games as dangerous, many laws were passed to ban the game. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. However it was very difficult to enforce these and stop huge crowds from playing the games...and so football continued in all of its unstructured chaotic glory.

England colleges and the first sets of rules

The first organizations that saw that the extremely violent game of mob football need to be changed to involve less fighting and more structured rules were the English public schools. It was here that the first rules were laid down, and the distinction between kicking and carrying were first established.

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