Before we get started, I feel we need an appropriate intro:

This post came about because this YouTube video popped up on my feed:

I got interested and then went down a rabbit hole that has led to this post. I found that I disagree with the YouTube video. It appears to me that all the different variations of the game of “football” have a common ancestry. And, in contrast to what the English claim, it’s not English.

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We begin a long long time ago in a faraway land called China. Yes, China. China has already claimed it invented spaghetti (Marco Polo, noodles, etc.) and there is a legitimate claim to it birthing the various sports of football/fútbol.

It is known that there was a sport called “Tsu Chu” being played around 250 BC that involved a net, a ball, a target (a hole), and the use of feet to place the ball in the target. From what I could gather, the point of the game was to propel the ball through the target and have it hit the ground before the other team could do the same to you. FIFA has deemed it the “earliest form of soccer”.

The setup is like so:

Honestly, that seems more like a complicated version of “foot-volley” so I’m not counting it. You already have pasta, China, don’t get greedy.

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We should probably go back hundreds of years earlier to Ancient Greece where a game called Episkyros was played. The point of this game was to kick or throw the ball to a teammate and get it over an end line. However, you could not run with it. The other team would, of course, try to intercept the ball. If the ball dropped to the ground or was intercepted, possession changed.

As all y’all know, the Ancient Romans greatly admired the Ancient Greek culture and adopted many things from it. Gods are the most commonly-known things that the Romans took from the Greeks and made their own. This sport is a lesser-known thing the Romans adopted from the Greeks.

The Romans took Episkyros and created Harpastum. It’s interesting to note that both games were meant to be exercise and training for militaries. You can see how Episkyros promotes teamwork and cooperation. Apparently, the Spartans played it and held tournaments to determine the best teams.

Harpastum differed from Episkyros in that there was no end line, you could run with the ball, and we don’t really know how they kept score. The intent of the game was to keep the ball in possession by throwing it, kicking it, or otherwise passing it to a teammate. The opponents were allowed to tackle, wrestle, or fight in order to get the ball in possession. Think of it as a brutally violent game of keepaway or Team Smear The Queer.

Yes, I realize that name is probably not PC but that’s what we called it when we played it in the 80s. And yes, I was fucking good at it. No one could catch me or tackle me. Eventually, I would kick the ball in the air when I was tired/bored so someone else could have a go.

Harpastum was played for centuries, crossing over from BC to AD. It eventually died out with the Roman Empire but not before being introduced to and played in all the far corners of the Roman Empire.

Including England.

See where I’m going with this?

But before we get to England, we need to make a small pit stop in Italy.

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During the Middle Ages in Italy, there was a little thing happening known as the Renaissance. Literally, it means “rebirth” in French. In general, the Renaissance movement featured a return to the ways of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Naturally, that meant that Harpastum got a revival and was developed into the game of Calcio. This new game blended together features of Harpastum and Episkyros. The end lines of Episkyros were brought back, along with a scoring system while the fighting, wrestling, and tackling of Harpastum were incorporated. Calcio was started in Florence, as many things in the Renaissance did, and flourished for hundreds of years until the early 17th century.

HOWEVAH, the story of Calcio did not end there.

In 1930, Benito Mussolini brought the game back for similar military reasons as the previous incarnations. This time, it was called Calcio Storico (Historic Calcio) and was mostly played in Florence, so it is also called Calcio Fiorentino.

There are several fascinating videos and TV shows focusing on this sport which continues to be played in the present day between teams from the four ancient neighborhoods of Florence. Please view the video below. You won’t be disappointed.

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Alas, while a fun diversion, we can’t really say Calcio is the forebearer of modern football games. I would consider it more of a separate branch of the family tree that went out for smokes and stayed at the bar.

To get to where we are today, we do have to go to England (happy, English people?). But we also need to go back to the Middle Ages to a game called Medieval Football.

Around the 12th century, the sport of Harpastum evolved into something that has been labeled as “mob football” or “Medieval football”. This game would be played in towns or villages with an unlimited number of players and with a ball made out of a pig’s bladder. The object of the game was for two teams to get the pig’s bladder to their respective markers/targets somewhere in the town or village. This incorporated Harpastum’s Episkyros roots and was the key evolution of the game.

The ball could be advanced by running with it, kicking it, throwing it, or hitting it with sticks. True to its Harpastum past, anything short of outright murder was allowed to prevent this from happening. In Northern France, this game was referred to as La Soule. As the years progressed, variations emerged but the essence of the game remained the same.

In both England and France, modern revivals of these games exist.

During the 16th century, English private schools transformed the “mob football” games into team sports that could be played on fields within the schools that would be beneficial to schoolboys. The purpose remained to take a ball and advance it towards a target. The targets were simply confined to a field of play.

The mob football games played by the masses continued to be played until they were dealt a mighty blow in 1835 when Parliament passed the Highway Act of 1835 which forbade football from being played on roads/highways. This meant that you couldn’t just play in the street like before.

While this meant the death of “mob football” between villages, it didn’t mean the end of football games. Instead, the focus went to the public school games.

One must remember that the 19th century was when the Industrial Revolution was happening. This meant that regular people did not have the same amount of leisure time to devote to sports as before. The people that did have the time, however, were students of elite English public schools and universities. These were the people that had been at the forefront of adapting the various games that had been played previously and developing rules for them.

Since bureaucracy loves bureaucracy these various and sometimes conflicting rules were written down and formalized. We actually get the term “football code” from the fact that the rules were written down or “codified”.

In the 1800s is when we start to see the birth of the modern games we see today. They emerged from rules created by the various English public schools. We begin with the Eton rules of 1815 and the Aldeham rules of 1825. Shortly after the Highway Act of 1835, the Cambridge Rules of 1838 went into effect. It is believed that the Cambridge rules formed the basis of association football/soccer. While these old rules have been lost to history, they did set the stage for other schools to define their own rules.

Some of the earliest documented rules were the Rugby (Yes, Rugby was the name of a school) rules of 1845, which is where the modern game of Rugby comes from as well as American football, Canadian football, Australian football, and Gaelic football. In 1895, there was a split in the Rugby rules and Rugby League was born. The old version of rugby was called Rugby Union.

The Industrial Revolution allowed faster travel around the world and students of elite English schools (and ruling members of the British Empire) were the ones that traveled the most. They took with them their rules and their games to the rest of the world. This is how soccer spread to become the most popular sport on earth and how the Canadians, Americans, and Australians decided they could do better than the English.

It is important to note that most cultures throughout the world developed their own games using balls. Evidence of ancient ball games has been found in Asia, Central America, South America, Australia, and Africa. Playing with a ball seems to be a part of being a human being.

The cool part of how the modern sports have evolved to where they are now is that the ancient roots have mixed with these local games and both have influenced each other for the better. Think Darwin but for sports.

Another thing to keep in mind is that part of being a human being is thinking you’re smarter or better than the other person. Hence, for all recorded time, people have disagreed with rules and come up with new rules they prefer that have led the different games going in different directions. This will become super evident when we discuss the games that grew out of rugby.

Let’s tackle all the variations in chronological order

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Australian Rules (1859 codification)

Yes, Australian Rules is the oldest form of codified football after rugby. In 1858, there was a series of games held in Melbourne between elite Australian schools that was loosely based on rugby rules learned by men who had gone to school in Rugby, England. It is also said that an aboriginal game called Marn Grook helped shape the rules of these games. The main feature that distinguished the rules of these games from rugby was that there was no offside.

The Melbourne Football Club was formed in 1858 and it developed its own rules. Geelong formed a club in 1859 as did Melbourne University and the rules of Australian Rules football were codified in 1859 to promote the development of the game and the creation of other clubs.

Yes, I am a fan of one of the oldest sports clubs in the world.

Obviously, and this will be the case for all the sports I discuss, the rules have evolved and continue to evolve. However, the foundation of Australian Rules was laid in 1859.

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Association Football / Soccer (1863 codification)

As I mentioned earlier, the Cambridge rules of 1838 laid the foundation for the game of soccer. However, it was the mingling of the Cambridge rules and the Sheffield Rules of 1858 that gave rise to the Football Association rules of 1863. These drastically moved the game away from a rugby-style sport that used the hands as the primary mode of ball movement to the kick-based sport we know today. That still remains the biggest and most important difference in the two types of “football”.

This early codification of association football drove its spread throughout the world. English miners, trainworkers, and other working-class English immigrants throughout the globe brought the game and the formal rules with them and helped found the oldest soccer clubs in most of the world including Pachuca in Mexico, Yokohama in Japan, Sao Paolo in Brazil, Lima in Peru, and many others.

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Canadian Football (first match in 1861) and American Football (first match in 1869)

I’m putting them together because they are uniquely intertwined yet grew completely separately. In Canada, a game was played in 1861 at the University of Toronto which used rules considered to be a hybrid of rugby and soccer. More games were played in 1862 and in 1864 the first set of rules for this hybrid were developed. As happened in England, different schools developed different rules for their teams. In 1869, the Hamilton Football Club (which became what is now the Hamilton Tiger-Cats) was formed.

In the same year of 1869, the first American Football game was played between Rutgers and Princeton. The American version at this time was also a hybrid of soccer and rugby yet it was different from the hybrid developed and played in Canada. This game spread to other American universities with, again, each developing their own rules. In 1873, representatives of Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers all met to create a standard set of rules for American football.

Keep in mind that these early versions of football were still hybrids of soccer and rugby. Nowhere near what we know today.

In 1874, McGill University challenged Harvard University to a game using McGill’s rules. The Harvard team liked McGill’s rules and incorporated some of them into their rules. Shortly thereafter, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia decided to play intercollegiate games under a set of common rules. In 1880, Walter Camp, a Yale player, fully developed and codified these rules into the earliest version of what is now football. This is known as the “American code”.

It is important to note that Canadian football greatly influenced American football at its birth. American football continued its evolution under Walter Camp and more rules were developed to further distinguish it from rugby. In the meantime, Canadian football continued as a soccer/rugby hybrid until the Burnside rules took effect in 1903. These Burnside rules were similar to Camp’s rules in that they really broke the game away from rugby yet they were not exact copies of the American rules. More like variations of Camp’s rules. Thus, years later it was the American game that greatly influenced the Canadian one.

Through the years, both codes have made rule changes to their games. American football adopted the forward pass early while Canadian football adopted it late. American football increased the downs from the three in Walter Camp’s time to four while Canadian football remained at three. In general, Canadian football resembles more closely the game of the early 1900s than American football. American football keeps constantly changing while Canadian football proceeds at its own slower more methodical pace.

That right there tells you a lot about the differences between the two countries.

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Gaelic Football (codified in 1884)

As I’ve noted before, individual cultures have always had ball games. The game of Gaelic Football is a perfect example of old games being combined with new games to form something new and cool. Ireland had its own tradition of games resembling the medieval “mob football” and they were collectively called “caid”. These were popular in the 1800s.

As Irish workers traveled the world, they brought back to Ireland some of the games they discovered including Australian Rules. Rugby and soccer were popular, but they were English and there’s a long history there so the Irish were not too keen on adopting those English games outright.

So, they did what I would expect we all would in that situation and took the best out of all those sports and created their own brand of Irish Football. Gaelic football incorporates elements of Australian Rules such as the mark and the multiple posts/scores, elements of soccer like the round ball and the kicking, and elements of rugby like the use of the hands.

The rules were codified in 1884 and generally distributed in 1887 by the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is a super fun game to watch:

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So, there you have it. A history of our favourite games as best I can tell based on the research I did. Below, I am including a Bibliography because I used many sources for this and each of those links can take you in multiple directions and teach you a lot of things you probably didn’t know.

Please be kind because I haven’t done a formal bibliography since college. And I probably haven’t done a good one since high school.

I hope you enjoyed this and I do hope you hop down into those rabbit holes. There is a lot of interesting information to discover.

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Bibliography

Embedded Link Sources

• Episkyros
• Harpastum
• Ancient Soccer
• Smear The Queer

Wikipedia Sources

• Calcio Fiorentino
• Harpastum
• English Public School games
• Medieval Football
• American Football
• Canadian Football
• Australian Football
• Gaelic Football
• Rugby Football
• Foot Volley
• La Soule
• Royal Shrovetide Football
• Highway Act of 1835
• Cambridge Rules
• Marn Grook
• Sheffield Rules
• Football Association