Muhammad Rahmatullah Maulidi

A sport similar to football (called soccer in the United States and elsewhere) was played 3000 years ago in Japan. Chinese text from 50 BC mentions football-type games between teams from Japan and China. A text dating from 611 AD confirms that football was played in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan.

Ancient Greeks and Romans also played a game that resembled football – although the Greeks permitted carrying of the ball. Olympic games in ancient Rome featured a 50-minute football game with twenty-seven men on a side.

How the sport spread from the East to Europe is not clear but England became the home of modern football. At first the game had a bad reputation among English royalty – possibly because of the noise the fans made – by whose insistence the government passed laws against it. King Edward (1307-1327) proclaimed, “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city.” In 1365 King Edward III banned football because of its excessive violence and for military reasons playing took time away from archery practice the game had become too popular to be curtailed. King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the sport, and Queen Elizabeth I “had football players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”

Laws failed to slow the popularity of football and by 1681 it received official sanction in England. The games were still ruff and noisy, with players hardly ever leaving the field without broken bones or even being spiked. There was no standard set for the size of teams or the field; the earliest organized games, usually bitter confrontations between teams from two or three parishes, had goals as far as 5 km (3 miles) apart. It was only by 1801 that it was (somewhat) agreed that teams should have an equal number of players and that the playing area should be about 91 metres (100 yards). Records show that Eton college drew up the first written rules of football in 1815. (The modern standardized rules are known as the Cambridge rules.)

Until the mid-1800s football rules still varied across regions. Team sizes ranged from 15 to 21. The 11-player team was standardized in 1870. The crossbar between two goal posts became mandatory in 1875. The goalkeeper was formally distinguished in the 1880s.

The first football club was formed in Sheffield, England in 1857. The Football Association was founded on 26 October 1863 by 11 clubs meeting in London. (The word association was abbreviated to assoc., which became “soccer.”)

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in the rear of the headquarters of the Union Française de Sports Athlétiques at the rue Saint Honoré 229 in Paris on 21 May 1904. The first World Cup was held in 1930 in Uruguay.

In the 1880s students of Oxford university abbreviated words by adding “er” to the end; for instance, breakfast became “brekkers” and “rugby rules” was referred to as “rugger.” When one student, Charles Wreford Brown, was asked if he’d like to play rugger, he was the first to abbreviate “association rules” (Football Association rules) by answering, “No, soccer.” Brown later became an England international and Football Association vice-president.

Football is the biggest spectator sport in the world, with angling as the world’s biggest participant sport. While Formula 1 is the sport most watched on television, the World Cup is, after the Olympics, the most watched sporting event on television globally.

This bit of information may be painful to the macho among us, but the history of football inAmerica - at least of the game we recognize today - begins with the Ivy League. In fact, the man considered to be the Father of American Football is the great Yale athlete, Walter Camp (the man holding the football in the middle of the picture below). 

But wait. It gets worse. In the history of football in America, we see that - yes! - football was too violent for those namby-pampy Ivy Leaguers. So when the game wasbanned in the colleges for being too dangerous, it was taken up by (you're gonna love this!) EAST COAST PREP SCHOOL BOYS!!! We kid you not!

Here's how the timeline worked. In the 1820's, Princeton and Harvard, joined by Dartmouthin the 1830's, were each playing different variations of the game. At this point in thehistory of football in America, the games were still mob-style, with huge numbers of players and very little in the way of rules. Not surprisingly, this free-for-all version ofplay was violent in the extreme, resulting in serious injuries that led tothe banning of the game first in Yale (1860) and then Harvard (1861). 

But even as the game was being banned at the college level, it was being embraced by the prep school kids, those violent little rascals.

Now, the history of football in America still hadn't gotten us within shouting distance of the game we watch today. As noted with theearly college versions, not everybody used the same format. At that point in the history ofAmerican football, there were kicking games (more like today's soccer) and running/carryinggames. No one had yet come up with what has become the centerpiece of modern American football: the forward pass.

The next step in the history of football in America was again made by schoolboys, this time schoolboys of Boston, who played a form of football on Boston Commons that included both running and kicking, that is, it was more like rugby than soccer. Not surprisingly, this hybrid version of American football became known as the "Boston Game." In 1862, they organized what was known as the Oneida Football Club, thought to be the first formal football club in the United States.

The Boston kids got themselves some press coverage, so this hybrid version began getting traction. Still, when the college boys decided to give it another try in the late1860's, they stayed primarily with the kicking game, and Rutgers vs Princeton (played November 6, 1869), although more soccer than American football, is usually considered to be the first game of intercollegiate football played in the United States.

When the competitions became intercollegiate, each school continued to have its own rules, with the home team's rules applying for each game.

When rules were first codified at a meeting in New York City's Fifth Avenue Hotel onOctober 20, 1873, the approach continued to more closely resemble soccer. But while Yale, columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers were on board with this kicking version, Harvard refused to join them, preferring to stay with the kick and carry Boston game.

Harvard then went on to play a series of rugby-style games (akin to the Boston format) against Montreal's MacGill University, incorporating the rugby 'try,' the origin of today's touchdown, into their version.

"Touchdown," by the way, simply refers to the physical act of touching the football down on the ground beyond the goal line.

Which brings us back to Yale and to Walter Camp.

It was Walter Camp who, in 1878, proposed reducing the number of players from fifteen to today's eleven, and established the now-familiar line of scrimmage, with the snap fromcenter to quarterback as the starting point for each play.

But Walter was a clever guy. He changed the rule so that a team had to advance the ball a minimum of five yards in three plays (now, of course, it's ten yards in four plays).

Bottom line, though, it was Yalie Walter Camp who, with his introduction of these new rules, moved the history of football in America ever closer to the game we recognize today.

The forward pass was still to come in 1906. It was meant not only to open up the game, butalso to reduce injuries, which, largely due to such mass formation plays as the flying wedge, had gotten so bad that 19 fatalities were reported in 1905,prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to threaten shutting down the game if the rules were not changed to limit the carnage.