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Football
This article is about various sports known as "football". For information about the balls used in these sports, see football (ball).
Football is the name given to a number of different, but related, team sports. The most popular of these world-wide is association football (also known as soccer). The English word "football" is also applied to American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby union and rugby league), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules) is to a greater or lesser extent referred to as "football" by its followers.
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Some of the many different codes of football.
These games involve:
A spherical or prolate spheroid ball, which is itself called a football.
A team scoring goals and/or points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field and either into a goal area, or over a line.
The winning team being the one that has the most points or goals, when a specified length of time has elapsed.
the goal and/or line being defended by the opposing team.
the ball being moved mostly by kicking, carrying and/or passing by hand, depending on the code, without sticks, bats, racquets, or other equipment.
supervision by officials known as referees or umpires.
goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts.
offside rules, in most codes, restricting the movement of players.
in some codes, points being mostly scored by players carrying the ball across the goal line.
players scoring a goal, in most codes, being required to put the ball either under or over a crossbar between the goalposts.
players in some codes receiving a free kick after they take a mark/make a fair catch.
players being required to use their feet (and possibly other specific parts of their bodies) to move the ball and/or score, depending on the code.
Many of the modern games have their origins in England, but many peoples around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball since ancient times.
While it is widely believed that the word "football" (or "foot ball") originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is a rival explanation, which has it that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot. These games were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports often played by aristocrats. While there is no conclusive evidence for this explanation, the word football has always implied a variety of games played on foot, not just those that involved kicking a ball. In some cases, the word football has even been applied to games which have specifically outlawed kicking the ball.
Throughout the history of mankind, the urge to kick at stones and other such objects is thought to have led to many early activities involving kicking and/or running with a ball. Football-like games predate recorded history in all parts of the world, and thus the earliest forms of football are not known.
Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Han Dynasty in about the 2nd century BC. It describes a practice known as cuju, which involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30 foot poles.
Kemari being played at the Tanzan Shrine, Sakurai, Japan.
Another Asian ball-kicking game, which may have been influenced by cuju, is kemari. This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari several people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground (much like keepie uppie). The game appears to have died out sometime before the mid-19th century (It was revived in 1903 and it played for the benefit of tourists at festivals).
The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or pheninda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388-311BC) and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. These games appear to have resembled rugby.
These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football codes appear to lie in Western Europe, especially England.
Main article: British public school football games
While football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain, its public schools (known as private schools in other countries) are widely credited with four key achievements in the creation of modern football codes. First of all, the evidence suggests that they were important in taking football away from its "mob" form and turning it into an organised team sport. Second, many early descriptions of football and references to it were recorded by people who had studied at these schools. Third, it was teachers, students and former students from these schools who first codified football games, to enable matches to be played between schools. Finally, it was at British public schools that the division between "kicking" and "running" (or "carrying") games first became clear.
Match at Winchester College around 1840.
The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools - mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle and professional classes - comes from the Vulgaria by William Horman in 1519. Horman had been headmaster at Eton and Winchester colleges and his Latin textbook includes a translation exercise with the phrase "We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde".
By the early 19th century, (before the Factory Act of 1850), most working class people in Britain had to work six days a week, often for over twelve hours a day. They had neither the time nor the inclination to engage in sport for recreation and, at the time, many children were part of the labour force. Feast day football played on the streets was in decline. Public school boys, who enjoyed some freedom from work, became the inventors of organised football games with formal codes of rules.
Football was adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging competitiveness and keeping youths fit. Each school drafted its own rules, which varied widely between different schools and were changed over time with each new intake of pupils. Two schools of thought developed regarding rules. Some schools favoured a game in which the ball could be carried (as at Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham), while others preferred a game where kicking and dribbling the ball was promoted (as at Eton, Harrow, Westminster and Charterhouse). The division into these two camps was partly the result of circumstances in which the games were played. For example, Charterhouse and Westminster at the time had restricted playing areas; the boys were confined to playing their ball game within the school cloisters, making it difficult for them to adopt rough and tumble running games.
Rugby School
William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, is said to have "showed a fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time" by picking up the ball and running to the opponents' goal in 1823. This act is usually said to be the beginning of Rugby football, but there is little evidence that it occurred, and most sports historians believe the story to be apocryphal. Nevertheless, by 1841 (some sources say 1842), running with the ball had become acceptable at Rugby, as long as a player gathered the ball on the full or from a bounce, he was not offside and he did not pass the ball.
The boom in rail transport in Britain during the 1840s meant that people were able to travel further and with less inconvenience than they ever had before. Inter-school sporting competitions became possible. However, it was difficult for schools to play each other at football, as each school played by its own rules.
Apart from Rugby football, the public school codes have barely been played beyond the confines of each school's playing fields. However, many of them are still played at the schools which created them.
Further information: Football (word)
The word "football", when used in reference to a specific game can mean any one of those described above. Because of this, much friendly controversy has occurred over the term football, primarily because it is used in different ways in different parts of the English-speaking world. Most often, the word "football" is used to refer to the code of football that is considered dominant within a particular region.
In most English-speaking countries, the word "football" usually refers to association football, also known as "soccer" (the name was originally a slang abbreviation of association). Note, however, that most native English speakers live in countries in which "football" refers not to association football, but to one of the other many variants. (See English Language for a distribution of native English speakers by country.) Of the 45 national FIFA affiliates in which English is an official or primary language, only three (Canada, Samoa and the United States) use "soccer" in their organizations' official names, while the rest use football (although the Samoan Federation actually uses both). However, in some countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, use of the word "football" by soccer bodies is a recent change (or a reversion to a long-abandoned name) and has been controversial.
The different codes are listed below and are described more fully in their own articles.
An indoor soccer game at an open air venue in Mexico. The referee has just awarded the red team a free kick.
International rules football test match in 2005 between Australia and Ireland at Telstra Dome, Melbourne, Australia.
These codes are all united by the absence of an offside rule, the requirement to bounce or solo (toe-kick) the ball while running, handpassing by punching the ball rather than throwing it, and other traditions.
