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| The Birth of Football |
The essence of the game of football is
its simplicity. Despite the commercial and big business implications
of the professional game in the 1960s, and the trend setting
applications of modern coaching methods, football is basically
as simply today as it was in its early history.
It remains a game of the masses. It cuts through international
barriers of language and, in an age of world travel, has pushed
aside religious and political differences to enable a divided
world to meet in the common cause of sport.
A look at the origins of football in countries that today show
world-class skill at the game reveals the English influence
at the source of development.
Where did it all begin? A form of football was certainly played
with a leather ball in China at least as early as 200BC –
according to research. The general emphasis in this game was
placed upon the ability of players to dribble the ball.
Football, in all its varied forms, is a development of such
games and the melees of ancient and medieval Britain in which
a round or oval object – generally the inflated bladder
of an animal – was kicked, punched, carried or driven
towards a goal.
The Roman harpustum game, which derived its name from the Greek
word for ‘handball’, was started by throwing the
ball into the air in midfield, and the players then tried to
force it beyond a line drawn by the opposition.
From early times there was a game of football annually on Shrove
Tuesday at Chester, and historians of the game also refer to
Shrovetide matches in Derbyshire, and at Corfe Castle in Dorset
and Scone in Perthshire. At Chester, it is said, the shoemakers
annually delivered a leather ball and the drapers played football
with it between the hall of Rodehoe and the common hall of the
city.
Tradition also has it that the first ball used was the head
of a dead Danish brigand; but this particular game clearly became
so violent that it was stopped and replaced with a running match.
Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent, was the date on which nearly
all these medieval contests took place. At one centre the married
women of the parish traditionally staged a match against the
spinsters – and usually won.
As their popularity increased, these games were no longer confined
to days of festival. Legend describes how King Edward III decided
in 1365 to prohibit football for military reasons – the
troops preferred playing football to fighting, and their archery
suffered too!
From the apprentices’ games in Smithfield, London, grew
the street games in Cheapside, Covent Garden and the Strand,
and the Shrove Tuesday games at Derby, Nottingham, Kingston-on-Thames
and elsewhere that came to be known as ‘mob football’.
The pitches were the length of the town, the players numbered
up to 500, the conflict continued all day, vast numbers of windows
and legs were broken – and there were some deaths.
A survey of Cornwall published in 1602 records that goals were
set three or four miles apart, and two or three parishes united
to play two or three others ‘hurling over county’.
In this version too, many of the characteristics of soccer were
employed.
In its present day form, football owes its origins to the public
schools of England. Although rules differed from place to place,
it seems fair to record the Eton, Westminster and Charterhouse
really laid the foundations for England’s national sport.
The game spread from schools to universities and eventually
a number of Old Boys joined together and formed the first soccer
club, at Sheffield in 1857.
The Sheffield club was much influenced by local men who went
to Harrow school. It disapproved of handling the ball, which
was not permitted in their school code, and so provided the
opposition with white gloves and silver florins to hold in their
fists.
The Hallam club was formed in 1857, as was Blackheath in the
south. By 1860 the famous Wanderers were in existence, the Old
Harrovians had formed and Forest Football Club, another product
of Harrow missionaries, had started playing in Epping Forest
near Snaresbrook.
Old Boys and university men also played a leading part in the
foundation of the Football Association a few years later. There
was certainly no trace of a cloth-cap-and-muffler approach to
soccer in those early days.
Around 1850 the game was played with fifteen to twenty men on
either side. In the late 1860s, when it was normal practise
to field eleven or twelve, the Queen’s Park club of Glasgow
still turned out fifteen or more.
None forwards and two defenders, or ‘behinds’, was
the line-up formation when the first eleven-a-side matches began,
but eleven players per team did not become an all-round rule
until 1870.
For a time sides consisted of a goalkeeper, who whore the same
kit as the others, a goal ‘cover’, a back and eight
forwards, who roamed the field and relied almost entirely on
mass dribbling and charging. Later, seven forwards and two half-backs
were employed.
The next formation was a goalkeeper, two backs, two half-backs
and six forwards, but from 1883 onwards the accepted formation
became the present three half-backs and five forwards.
In the early days, charging a goalkeeper out of the way of an
expected shot or centre was a recognized feature, and Preston
North End were great exponents of clearing a path to goal.
Of the historic clubs which survive today as Football League
members, Notts County came into being in 1862, followed by Nottingham
Forest (1865) and Sheffield Wednesday and Chesterfield (1866).
The Sheffield FA was formed in 1867.
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World
Soccer Directory
