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

 The Eton College was to place limits of the violence and assign referees to judge unfair challenges in the 16th century. They were also the first to establish the idea of positions and the idea of goalkeeping. The concepts of an organized scrum and the offside came to be during in the period of 1810–1850 in Winchester, Rugby, Harrow and Cheltenham. This is also where the great divide between being able to carry the ball in your hands and controlling it with your feet by dribbling happened. Schools like Rugby and Cheltenham had rules that the ball could be carried, while Eton, Harrow and Westminster had rules that the ball should be controlled by the feet only.

In 1848, the Cambridge Rules were officially created in Cambridge University when a meeting was called between representatives from Cambridge, Trinity, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury. They brought together first established rules for a game that involved mostly kicking but also allowed players to use hands to catch the ball. These rules established the basics of all football games to follow. Similar games spread to other countries which were either current or former England colonies like Australia, Canada and United States of America. These nations also had their own schools which played a variety of football-like games but without much central regulation. The game evolved differently to form the various codes through these early schools.

The Football Association (The FA)

In 1863, representatives of several London football clubs and English colleges agreed to set up a first formal regulatory association for football. The gentlemen met over a period of 3 months to chart down the rules and agree on the organization of the game. Some of the original rules no longer apply to association football, but they are still a part of other codes of football. For example, being able to catch the ball with the hands and call a “mark” is still part of  Australian football. We can only imagine the debates that entailed as the members of the FA argued of how the game should be established, but they must have been heated. For example, the representative from Blackheath stormed out of an FA meeting because the other members didn’t agree that “true football” needed to have a rule that allowed the ball carrier to be kicked in the shin (hacking) and said that the removal of hacking would bring “lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice”. After much debate and on their fifth, the early Campbridge rules of allowing players the ability to use their hands to catch a kicked ball and hacking were removed from the FA charter. This caused the Blackheath Club as well as some other football clubs who disagreed with the rules to remove themselves from the FA and form their own association.

The establishment of Rugby Football

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