Football (Soccer) History

The contemporary history of the world's most popular sport, spanning over 100 years. It all started in 1863 in England, rugby football and association football separated from their different courses and the Football Association of England was formed - becoming the first sports car of the Board.

These two codes from a common root and both have a long shaft and branched ancestral complex. A search through the centuries, reveals at least half a dozen different games, varying to different degrees to which the historical development of football has been traced. This can be justified in some cases is questionable. However, the fact is that people have enjoyed kicking a ball around for thousands of years and there is absolutely no reason to consider as an aberration in the most "natural" to play ball with your hands.

On the contrary, apart from the need to recruit the legs and feet in hard Tussle for the ball, often without any laws for the protection, it was recognized from the outset that the art of controlling the ball with feet was not easy, and as such requires no small degree of skill. The oldest form of the game, because there are scientific evidence was an exercise from a military manual dating from the second century BC and the third in China.

The ancestor of the Han dynasty football was called Tsu Chu and was kicking a leather ball stuffed with feathers and hair through an opening, measuring only 30-40cm wide, in a small long poles fixed network bamboo. According to a variant of this exercise, the player was not allowed to point to your target without obstacles, but had to use the feet, chest, back and shoulders to try to resist the attacks of his opponents. The use of the hand is not allowed.

Another type of game, also from the Far East, Japanese Kemari, which started about 500-600 years later and is still played today. It's a sport lacking the competitive element of Tsu Chu 'possession without fighting involved. Standing in a circle, players had to pass the ball to each other in a relatively small space, trying not to let it touch the ground.

The Greek "Episkyros" - which few concrete details survive - was much more animated, as was the Roman "Harpastum." The latter was played with a smaller ball with two teams on a rectangular field marked by boundary lines and a central line. The goal was to get the ball over the boundary lines of the opposition and when the players walked them, tricks were commonplace. The game was popular for 700-800 years, but the Romans took it to England with them, using the feet were so small that they hardly be of consequence.