A Brief History of Football..........

 

A Brief History of Football...

Football: A game in which two teams of 11 players each try to score a ball into the opponent's goal using all parts of their body except their hands and arms. Only the goalkeeper is allowed to touch the ball with his hands, and only in the penalty area around the goal. The team that scores more goals wins.

Carlos Alberto Torres

Captain Carlos Alberto Torres lifting the Jules Rimet Trophy after Brazil's victory in the 1970 World Cup.

Football is the world's most popular ball game in terms of participation and spectator numbers. The sport has simple basic rules and equipment, and can be played almost anywhere, from official soccer fields to gyms, streets, schoolyards, parks, and beaches. Football's governing body, the International Football Association (FIFA), estimated that there were approximately 250 million soccer players as of the beginning of the 21st century, and more than 1.3 billion people were "interested" in soccer. In 2010, a total of more than 26 billion television viewers watched the month-long finals of the FIFA World Cup, the most important soccer tournament held every four years. For the history of the origin of the sport of soccer, see "soccer".

Modern soccer originated in England in the 19th century. Even before the Middle Ages, "folk football games" were played in towns and villages following minimal rules, according to local customs. Industrialization and urbanization limited the leisure and space of the working class, and a history of legal bans on particularly violent and disruptive forms of popular football undermined the status of football from the early 19th century. However, football was incorporated as a winter match between halls at public (and private) schools, such as Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Eton College. Each school had its own rules; some allowed limited ball play, others did not. The differences in rules made it difficult for public school students to continue playing, except with their former schoolmates, when they transferred to a university. In 1843, an attempt was made at Cambridge University to standardize and codify the rules of the game. As with most public schools, students at the university adopted these "Cambridge Rules" in 1848, and they were further popularized by Cambridge graduates who founded football clubs. In 1863, a series of meetings by clubs from Greater London and the surrounding counties produced a printed set of football laws that banned the carrying of the ball. This meant that the "handling" game of rugby remained outside the newly founded Football Association (FA). Indeed, in 1870 the FA banned ball handling except by the goalkeeper. However, the new rules were not widely accepted in Britain, particularly in and around Sheffield, where many clubs kept their own rules. This northern English city was home to the first local clubs to join the FA, as well as being the site of the founding of the Sheffield Football Association in 1867, the precursor to the later County Association. In 1866, Sheffield and London clubs played two matches against each other, and a year later, under revised rules, a match was played between Middlesex clubs and Kent and Surrey clubs. In 1871, 15 FA clubs accepted an invitation to join the cup competition and contribute to the purchase of the trophy. By 1877, the British Association had agreed to uniform regulations, 43 clubs were participating in the competition, and the initial dominance of London clubs had faded.

Professionalism

The development of modern football was closely linked to the processes of industrialization and urbanization in Victorian Britain. Most of the new workers in Britain's industrial cities gradually lost old pastoral pastimes such as badger hunting and sought new forms of communal leisure. From the 1850s onwards, industrial workers increasingly had Saturday afternoons off, and many turned to watch and play a new game: football. Major urban institutions such as churches, trade unions and schools organised working-class boys and men into recreational football teams. Rising adult literacy rates encouraged organised coverage of the sport, and transport systems such as railways and urban trams made it possible for players and spectators to travel to football matches. Average visitor numbers to Britain rose from 4,600 in 1888 to 7,900 in 1895, to 13,200 in 1905, and reached 23,100 by the outbreak of World War I. Football's popularity undermined public interest in other sports, especially cricket. Leading clubs, especially those in Lancashire, began charging spectators admission fees as early as the 1870s, and thus were able to attract highly skilled working-class players, many of whom were from Scotland, by paying illegal wages, despite the FA's amateurism regulations. Working-class players and clubs in the north of England sought a professional scheme that provided financial compensation to compensate for "down time" (time spent doing other work) and the risk of injury. The FA maintained a strict elitist amateur policy to protect the influence of the upper and upper middle classes on the game.

In England, the issue of professionalism reached a critical point in 1884, when the FA expelled two clubs for fielding professional players. But paying players had now become so commonplace that, despite initial attempts to limit professionalism to compensation for lost time, the FA was forced to approve the practice a year later. As a result, northern clubs, with larger fan bases and the ability to attract better players, grew in importance. As working-class players grew in influence in football, the upper classes fled to other sports, notably cricket and rugby union. Professionalism also sparked a further modernization of the game through the creation of the Football League, which allowed dozens of leading teams from the north and midlands to compete against each other in an organized way from 1888.....