Football Team

Well, you would be mistaken. All forms of football descend from medieval football, a folk game with as many variants as there were villages: what they had in common was unlimited players (sometimes hundreds), almost no rules, and extreme violence (deaths were not uncommon).* In some places they kicked the ball, in others carried it, in others threw or batted it, in some all three; in some it couldn't be kicked at all, because the "ball" was a log or a large block of wood. At the other extreme, in Norfolk the game was played with a small wooden ball like a croquet ball- easily thrown but, again, unkickable.

Towards the end of the 18th century, the public schools started adopting games as part of the new "healthy mind in a healthy body" approach to education. These schoolmasters tamed mob football, limited the players and the violence and gave it rules. Some, most notably Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham, preserved the carrying game. Others developed a game based on long kicking (Eton, Harrow), and a couple with constrained space (Winchester, Charterhouse) developed a game based on dribbling alone.

But eventually all these boys went on to Uni, and they all had played very different kinds of "football." Eventually, at Cambridge in the 1840s, a meeting was held where rules for intercollegiate play were agreed upon, and these were for the most part the familiar FIFA rules today-- except there was no offside rule, and hacking was legal. These Cambridge laws twenty years later formed the basis of the rules set by the Football Association.

But there were dissenters. Some, mostly northerners, hated the offside rule and for many years there was a professional Sheffield Rules league where there was none. And then there were the old boys who still preferred to carry and toss an egg-shaped ball: these walked out of the Association convention and a few years later formed the Rugby Football Union.

It was rugby which got to North America first, via Canada to the northern US. Had you watched an American college football game circa 1890, it would have looked very much like Rugby League. But the rules evolved over time, most dramatically with the legalization of the forward pass.


*In Florence they still play a version, called Calcio Storico or "historical football." In just the last couple of years they have added some safety rules: you now can only kick a downed opponent below the neck, not in the head; and convicted felons are no longer eligible. Nonetheless, the game still watches like a hybrid of mixed martial arts and Aussie Rules.