The Old Days
Take yourself back to, say, 1850 in England. All over the country, people are kicking around a ball or a pig’s bladder or something else round, and calling this activity “football.” Some form of this had been going on for centuries, but it became focused at this point, in clubs and at schools.
Since nobody was in charge, there were no agreed-upon rules. Each set of rules, or code, had slight variations in number of players, length of game, way to score, and so on. They were generally sorted into two camps. In one, using hands was not allowed, nor was “hacking” one another to the ground. The most common of these were known, for their geographical origin, as the Cambridge Rules and the Sheffield Rules. In another version, you could hold the ball and hack each other down; these came from a school called Rugby.
Finally it was decided that having proper competitions required a common set of rules, so the Football Association was formed in London in 1863. This took a while, and a series of votes – I should also point out this happened in a tavern – but the “no hands, no hacking” crowd won, and the Laws of the Game were written. But the “hands and hacking” crowd wanted to play their way, so in 1871 they formed the Rugby Union.
From this point forward, there were two official versions of the game: Rugby Football and Association Football. Soon enough, nicknames emerged to simplify things: rugger and soccer. So soccer comes from “association” and was invented by English people. Remember that, my fellow Americans.
Leave a Comment