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

The first standardization came from Walter Camp, a Yale coach who is often dubbed the father of American Football, almost single handedly establishing the sport. His aim was to create a game that combined his two favorite sports: Rugby football and Chess. Hence he broke up the game into individual start-stop “plays”, similar to the way chess is played. He also reduced the number of players to 11 like in association football, and introduced the concept of the line of scrimmage that acted as a line which players couldn’t get over before a play starts, a variation of the offside line in other football codes.

Gaelic football 

Many people have never heard of the sport of Gaelic football, and upon their first sight they may conclude that it is a crazy mix between association football, Australian football and rugby. However, it is a very old sport that has roots to County Meath in 1670. The Gaelic Athletic Association had a desire to promote traditional Irish sports and reject foreign sports that were coming in from England. The first Gaelic football rules were drawn up by Maurice Davin in 1887, and came to being to both increase the influence of the hurling based rules and remove some English association football rules such as offside. The sport became its own code, and many believe that it greatly influenced Australian football. The games appear to have so many commonalities that Irish and Australian teams have played under modified team rules known as compromise rules or international football rules. Although the sport has mostly been kept amateur by the mandate of the GAA, its today considered to be the national sport of Ireland.

Why your football isn’t better than another football

 Today football has become the dominant sport in the world, in all its wonderful varieties. Many people limit themselves to only one code of football, which is a shame. Arguments over which is the “real” football do nothing but expose the ignorance of many people that there is more than one game called football, it would be like arguing over whether a fullback is a position in American football or association football since it’s a position name used in both. Arguing over which one is better is as silly as arguing over whether Chinese food is better than Mediterranean food or is French food the best…there is no basis for these arguments as people generally are going to like whatever their culture exposes them to the most. Such is the case with football as well, and since they are all so interrelated and came from similar roots its even more silly to argue over it.

So now that you know the basic history of the major codes, why not learn a bit more of another football and broaden your horizons? If you’ve been a Manchester United fans for life, why not check out the Dallas Cowboys as well? If you’re a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, give the All-Blacks a look. In the next few articles of the series, I will go over each code and underline its premise and give a brief introduction to people who are new to the sport. So lets all go grab a beer and watch some football!  

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