Football (world)

Some of the many different codes of football.

Football is the name given to a number of different team sports. The most popular of these worldwide is association football (also known as soccer). The English word "football" is also applied to American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby league, and rugby union) and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules) is referred to as "football."

These games involve:

• a large spherical or prolate spheroid ball, which is itself called a football.
• a team scoring goals and/or points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field and either into a goal area, or over a line.
• the goal and/or line being defended by the opposing team.
• players being required to move the ball mostly by kicking and — in some codes — carrying and/or passing the ball by hand.
• goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts.
• offside rules, in most codes, restricting the movement of players.
• in some codes, points are mostly scored by players carrying the ball across the goal line.
• in most codes players scoring a goal must put the ball either under or over a crossbar between the goalposts.
• players in some codes receiving a free kick after they take a mark/make a fair catch.

Peoples from around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball, since ancient times. However, most of the modern codes of football have their origins in the United Kingdom.

Etymology

While it is widely believed that the word "football" originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, there is an alternative explanation, which has it that football originally referred to games in medieval Europe which were played on foot as oppposed to on horseback.

Globally, the word "football" usually refers to association football, also called soccer, as this is the most widely played type of football. The name "soccer" was originally a slang abbreviation derived from "association" and is now the prevailing term in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where other types of football are dominant.

History

Early history

Football-like games predate recorded history in all parts of the world, and thus the earliest forms of football are not known. Documented evidence of an activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Warring States Period in about the 476 B.C.E.-221 B.C.E. It describes a practice known as cuju, which involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30-foot poles.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games, some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed while having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or pheninda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388-311B.C.E.), and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. These games appears to have resembled rugby.

Kemari being played at the Tanzan Shrine, Sakurai, Japan.

Another Asian ball-kicking game, which was influenced by cuju, is kemari. This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 C.E. In kemari several people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground. The game appears to have died out sometime before the mid-nineteenth century. It was revived in 1903, and it can now be seen played for the benefit of tourists at a number of festivals.

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient ball games played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586 C.E., men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit (Eskimo) people in Greenland. There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey of Virginia,s Jamestown settlement, recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. In Victoria, Australia, indigenous people played a game called Marn Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth describes this game as involving drop-kicking "a ball made from the skin of a possum" and "players leap[ing] into the air in order to catch it"—not dissimilar to what occurs in Australian Rules football today.

These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football codes appear to lie in western Europe, especially England.

Medieval and early modern Europe

The Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England. The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the Roman occupation, but there is little evidence to indicate this. Reports of a game played in Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy, known as La Soule or Choule, suggest that some of these football games could have arrived in England as a result of the Norman Conquest.

An illustration of mob football.

These archaic forms of football, typically classified as "mob football," would be played between neighboring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated pig's bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town (sometimes instead of markers, the teams would attempt to kick the bladder into the balcony of the opponents' church). There is no evidence to support the legend that these games in England evolved from a more ancient and bloody ritual of kicking the "Dane's head." Shrovetide games have survived into the modern era in a number of English towns.

The first detailed description of football in England was given by William FitzStephen in about 1174-1183. Most of the very early references to the game speak simply of "ball play" or "playing at ball." This reinforces the idea that the games played at the time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked.

In 1314, Nicholas de Farndone, Lord Mayor of London issued a decree banning football (in the French used by the English upper classes at the time. The earliest mention of a ball game that involves kicking was in 1321, in Shouldham, Norfolk: "[d]uring the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his... ran against him and wounded himself". In 1363, King Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball, football, or hockey; coursing and cock-fighting, or other such idle games," showing that "football" — whatever its exact form in this case — was being differentiated from games involving other parts of the body, such as handball.

King Henry IV of England gives the earliest documented use of the English word "football," in 1409, when he issued a proclamation forbidding the levying of money for "foteball".There is also an account in Latin from the end of the fifteenth century of football being played at Cawston, Nottinghamshire. This is the first description of a "kicking game" and the first description of dribbling. The first references to goals are in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. In 1584 and 1602, respectively, John Norden and Richard Carew referred to "goals" in Cornish hurling. Carew is also the first to describe goalkeepers and passing of the ball between players. The first direct reference to scoring a goal is in John Day's play The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (performed circa 1600; published 1659): "I'll play a gole at camp-ball" (an extremely violent variety of football, which was popular in East Anglia). Similarly in a poem in 1613, Michael Drayton refers to "when the Ball to throw, And drive it to the Gole, in squadrons forth they goe."

Calcio Fiorentino

An illustration of the Calcio Fiorentino field and starting positions, from a 1688 book by Pietro di Lorenzo Bini.

In the sixteenth century, the city of Florence celebrated the period between Epiphany and Lent by playing a game which today is known as "calcio storico" ("historic kickball") in the Piazza della Novere or the Piazza Santa Croce. The young aristocrats of the city would dress up in fine silk costumes and embroil themselves in a violent form of football. For example, calcio players could punch, shoulder charge, and kick opponents. Blows below the belt were allowed. The game is said to have originated as a military training exercise. In 1580, Count Giovanni de' Bardi di Vernio wrote Discorso sopra 'l giuoco del Calcio Fiorentino. This is sometimes said to be the earliest code of rules for any football game. The game was not played after January 1739 (until it was revived in May 1930).

Official disapproval and attempts to ban football

Numerous attempts have been made to ban football games, particularly the most rowdy and disruptive forms. This was especially the case in England and in other parts of Europe, during the Middle Ages and early modern period. Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws. The need to repeatedly proclaim such laws demonstrated the difficulty in enforcing bans on popular games. King Edward II was so troubled by the unruliness of football in London that on April 13, 1314 he issued a proclamation banning it: "Forasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid; we command and forbid, on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future."

The reasons for the ban by Edward III, on June 12, 1349, were explicit: football and other recreations distracted the populace from practicing archery, which was necessary for war.

By 1608, the local authorities in Manchester were complaining that: "With the ffotebale...[there] hath beene greate disorder in our towne of Manchester we are told, and glasse windowes broken yearlye and spoyled by a companie of lewd and disordered persons ..."

King James I of England's Book of Sports (1618) however, instructs Christians to play at football every Sunday afternoon after worship.

Establishment of modern codes of football

British public schools

While football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain, its public schools (known as private schools in other countries) are widely credited with four key achievements in the creation of modern football codes. First of all, the evidence suggests that they were important in taking football away from its "mob" form and turning it into an organized team sport. Second, many early descriptions of football and references to it were recorded by people who had studied at these schools. Third, it was teachers, students, and former students from these schools who first codified football games, to enable matches to be played between schools. Finally, it was at British public schools that the division between "kicking" and "running" (or "carrying") games first became clear.

The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools — mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle, and professional classes — comes from the Vulgaria by William Horman in 1519. Horman had been headmaster at Eton and Winchester colleges and his Latin textbook includes a translation exercise with the phrase "We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde." Richard Mulcaster, a student at Eton College in the early sixteenth century and later headmaster at other English schools, has been described as “the greatest sixteenth Century advocate of football."

File:RendallsHarrowFootball.jpg

Harrow football players after a game at Harrow School

In 1633, David Wedderburn, a teacher from Aberdeen, mentioned elements of modern football games in a short Latin textbook called "Vocabula." Wedderburn refers to what has been translated into modern English as "keeping goal" and makes an allusion to passing the ball ("strike it here"). There is a reference to "get hold of the ball," suggesting that some handling was allowed. It is clear that the tackles allowed included the charging and holding of opposing players ("drive that man back.")

A more detailed description of football is given in Francis Willughby's Book of Games, written in about 1660. Willughby, who had studied at Sutton Coldfield School, is the first to describe goals and a distinct playing field: "a close that has a gate at either end. The gates are called Goals." His book includes a diagram illustrating a football field. He also mentions tactics ("leaving some of their best players to guard the goal"); scoring ("they that can strike the ball through their opponents' goal first win"); and, the way teams were selected ("the players being equally divided according to their strength and nimbleness"). He is the first to describe a "law" of football: "they must not strike [an opponent's leg] higher than the ball."

English public schools also devised the first offside rules, during the late-eighteenth century. In the earliest manifestations of these rules, players were "off their side" if they simply stood between the ball and the goal which was their objective. Players were not allowed to pass the ball forward, either by foot or by hand. They could only dribble with their feet, or advance the ball in a scrum or similar formation. However, offside laws began to diverge and develop differently at the each school, as is shown by the rules of football from Winchester, Rugby,

Rugby School

William Webb Ellis]]

By the early nineteenth century, football was adopted by a number of public schools as a way of encouraging competitiveness and keeping youths fit. Each school drafted its own rules, which varied widely between different schools and were changed over time with each new intake of pupils. Two schools of thought developed regarding rules. Some schools favored a game in which the ball could be carried (as at Rugby, Marlborough and Cheltenham), while others preferred a game where kicking and dribbling the ball was promoted (as at Eton, Harrow, Westminster, and Charterhouse).

The first football clubs

During this period, the Rugby school rules appear to have spread at least as far, perhaps further, than the other schools' codes. For example, two clubs which claim to be the world's first and/or oldest football club, in the sense of a club which is not part of a school or university, are strongholds of rugby football: the Barnes Club, said to have been founded in 1839, and Guy's Hospital Football Club, in 1843. Neither date nor the variety of football played is well-documented, but such claims nevertheless allude to the popularity of rugby before other modern codes emerged.

In 1845, three boys at Rugby school were tasked with codifying the rules then being used at the school. These were the first set of written rules (or code) for any form of football. This further assisted the spread of the Rugby game. For instance, Dublin University Football Club — founded at Trinity College, Dublin in 1854 and later famous as a bastion of the Rugby School game — is the world's oldest documented football club in any code.

Cambridge rules

In 1848, at Cambridge University, Mr. H. de Winton and Mr. J.C. Thring, who were both formerly at Shrewsbury School, called a meeting at Trinity College, Cambridge with 12 other representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and Shrewsbury. An eight-hour meeting produced what amounted to the first set of modern rules, known as the Cambridge rules. No copy of these rules now exists, but a revised version from circa 1856 is held in the library of Shrewsbury School. The rules clearly favor the kicking game. Handling was only allowed for a player to take a "clean catch" entitling them to a free kick, and there was a primitive offside rule, disallowing players from "loitering" around the opponents' goal. The Cambridge rules were not widely adopted outside English public schools and universities, but it was arguably the most significant influence on the Football Association committee members responsible for formulating the rules of Association football.

The first modern balls

Richard Lindon (seen in 1880) is believed to have invented the first footballs with rubber bladders.

In Europe, early footballs were made out of animal bladders, more specifically pig's bladders, which were inflated. Later leather coverings were introduced to allow the ball to keep their shape. However, in 1851, Richard Lindon and William Gilbert, both shoemakers from the town of Rugby (near the school), exhibited both round and oval-shaped balls at the Great Exhibition in London. The exact name of Mr Lindon is in dispute, as well as the exact timing of the creation of the inflatable bladder. It is known that he created this for both association and rugby footballs. Lindon also won medals for the invention of the "Rubber inflatable Bladder" and the "Brass Hand Pump."

In 1855, the U.S. inventor Charles Goodyear — who had patented vulcanized rubber — exhibited a spherical football, with an exterior of vulcanized rubber panels, at the Paris Exhibition Universelle. The ball was to prove popular in early forms of football in America.

Sheffield rules

By the late 1850s, many football clubs had been formed throughout the English-speaking world, to play various codes of football.

Sheffield Football Club, founded in 1857 in the English city of Sheffield, by former Harrow School pupils Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, was later recognized as the world's oldest club playing association football. However, the club initially played its own code of football: the Sheffield rules. There were some similarities to the Cambridge rules, but players were allowed to push or hit the ball with their hands, and there was no "offside" rule at all, so that players known as "kick throughs" could be permanently positioned near the opponents' goal. The code spread to a number of clubs in the area and was popular until the 1870s.

Australian rules

An Australian rules football match at the Richmond Paddock, Melbourne, in 1866. (A wood engraving by Robert Bruce.)

The invention of Australian rules football is usually attributed to Tom Wills, who published a letter in Bell's Life in Victoria & Sporting Chronicle, on July 10, 1858, calling for a "foot-ball club" with a "code of laws" to keep cricketers fit during winter.

Wills had been educated in England at Rugby School, and had played cricket for Cambridge University. The extent to which he was influenced by the various British and Irish football games is unknown, but there were similarities between some of them and his game. Australian football also has some similarities to the Australian Aboriginal game of Marn Grook, which he reportedly witnessed as a child in western Victoria. On July 31, 1858, Wills and people responding to his letter met and experimented with various forms of football.

Melbourne Football Club was founded on August 7, and is the oldest surviving Australian football club, but the rules it used during its first season are unknown. On May 17, 1859, at the Parade Hotel, East Melbourne, members of the club drew up the first set of laws for Australian rules football. The drafters included Wills, W.J. Hammersley, J.B. Thompson, and Thomas Smith. Although their code also had pronounced similarities to the Sheffield rules, most notably in the absence of an offside rule, it is not known if they were influenced by it. A free kick was awarded for a mark (clean catch). Running while holding the ball was allowed and although it was not specified in the rules, a rugby ball was used. The club shared many members with the Melbourne Cricket Club, which was based at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and cricket ovals — which vary in size and are much larger than the fields used in other forms of football—became the standard playing field for Australian rules. The 1859 rules did not include some elements which would soon become important to the game, such as the requirement to bounce the ball while running.

Australian rules is sometimes said to be the first form of football to be codified but, as was the case in all kinds of football at the time, there was no official body supporting the rules, and play varied from one club to another. By 1866, however, several other clubs in the Colony of Victoria had agreed to play an updated version of the Melbourne FC rules, which were later known as "Victorian Rules" and "Australasian Rules." The formal name of the code later became Australian rules football (and, more recently, Australian football). By the end of the nineteenth century, the code had spread to the other Australian colonies and around other parts of the world. However, rugby football would remain more popular in New South Wales and Queensland.

The Football Association

The first football international, Scotland versus England. Once kept by the Rugby Football Union as an early example of rugby football.

During the early 1860s, there were increasing attempts in England to unify and reconcile the various public school games. In 1862, J. C. Thring, who had been one of the driving forces behind the original Cambridge Rules, was a master at Uppingham School and he issued his own rules of what he called "The Simplest Game". (These are also known as the Uppingham Rules). In October 1863, another new revised version of the Cambridge Rules was drawn up by a seven-member committee representing former pupils from Harrow, Shrewsbury, Eton, Rugby, Marlborough, and Westminster.

On October 26, 1863, representatives of several football clubs in the London Metropolitan area met for the inaugural meeting of The Football Association (FA). The aim of the Association was to establish a single unifying code and regulate the playing of the game among its members. Following the first meeting, the public schools were invited were sent to to join the association. All of them declined, except Charterhouse and Uppingham. In total, six meetings of the FA were held between October and December 1863.

The first FA rules still contained elements that are no longer part of football, but which are still recognizable in other games: for instance, a player could make a fair catch and claim a "mark," which entitled him to a free kick, and; if a player touched the ball behind the opponents' goal line, his side was entitled to a "free kick" at goal, from 15 yards in front of the goal line.

Rugby football

File:Football London Ilustrated News.gif

A rugby scrum in 1871.

In Britain by 1870, there were about 75 clubs playing variations of the Rugby school game. There were also rugby clubs in Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. However, there was no generally accepted set of rules for rugby until 1871, when 21 clubs from London came together to form the Rugby Football Union (RFU). (Ironically, Blackheath now lobbied to ban hacking.) The first official RFU rules were adopted in June 1871. These rules allowed passing the ball. They also included the try, where touching the ball over the line allowed an attempt at goal, though drop-goals from marks and general play, and penalty conversions were still the main form of contest.

The International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) was founded in 1886, but rifts were beginning to emerge in the code. Professionalism was beginning to creep into the various codes of football.

In Britain, by the 1890s, a long-standing Rugby Football Union ban on professional players was causing regional tensions within rugby football, as many players in northern England were working class and could not afford to take time off to train, travel, play, and recover from injuries. This was not very different from what had occurred 10 years earlier in soccer in Northern England but the authorities reacted very differently in the RFU, attempting to alienate the working-class support in Northern England. In 1895, following a dispute about a player being paid broken-time payments, which replaced wages lost as a result of playing rugby, representatives of the northern clubs met in Huddersfield to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (NRFU). The new body initially permitted only various types of player wage replacements. However, within two years, NRFU players could be paid, but they were required to have a job outside sport.

The demands of a professional league dictated that rugby had to become a better "spectator" sport. Within a few years the NRFU rules had started to diverge from the RFU, most notably with the abolition of the line-out. This was followed by the replacement of the ruck with the "play-the-ball ruck," which allowed a two-player ruck contest between the tackler at marker and the player tackled. Mauls were stopped once the ball carrier was held, being replaced by a play-the ball-ruck. The separate Lancashire and Yorkshire competitions of the NRFU merged in 1901, forming the Northern Rugby League, the first time the name rugby league was used officially in England.

Over time, the RFU form of rugby, played by clubs which remained members of national federations affiliated to the IRFB, became known as rugby union.

Rugby league rules diverged significantly from rugby union in 1906, with the reduction of the team from 15 to 13 players. In 1907, a New Zealand professional rugby team toured Australia and Britain, receiving an enthusiastic response, and professional rugby leagues were launched in Australia the following year. However, the rules of professional games varied from one country to another, and negotiations between various national bodies were required to fix the exact rules for each international match. This situation endured until 1948, when at the instigation of the French league, the Rugby League International Federation (RLIF) was formed at a meeting in Bordeaux.

During the second half of rwentieth century, the rules changed further. In 1966, rugby league officials borrowed the American football concept of downs: a team could retain possession of the ball for no more than four tackles. The maximum number of tackles was later increased to six (in 1971), and in rugby league this became known as the six-tackle rule.

With the advent of full-time professionals in the early 1990s, and the consequent speeding up of the game, the five-meter, off-side distance between the two teams became 10 meters, and the replacement rule was superseded by various interchange rules, among other changes.

The laws of rugby union also changed significantly during the twentieth century. In particular, goals from marks]] were abolished, kicks directly into touch from outside the 22-meter line were penalized, new laws were put in place to determine who had possession following an inconclusive ruck or maul, and the lifting of players in line-outs was legalized.

In 1995, rugby union became an "open" game that allowed professional players. Although the original dispute between the two codes has now disappeared — and despite the fact that officials from both forms of rugby football have sometimes mentioned the possibility of re-unification — the rules of both codes and their culture have diverged to such an extent that such an event is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

North American football codes

The "Tigers" of Hamilton, Ontario circa 1906. Founded 1869 as the Hamilton Foot Ball Club, they eventually merged with the Hamilton Flying Wildcats to form the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a team still active in the Canadian Football League.

As was the case in Britain, by the early nineteenth century, North American schools and universities played their own local games, between sides made up of students. The first game of rugby in Canada is generally said to have taken place in Montreal, in 1865, when British Army officers played local civilians. The game gradually gained a following, and the Montreal Football Club was formed in 1868, the first recorded football club in Canada.

In 1869, the first game played in the United States under rules based on the English FA (soccer) code occurred, between Princeton and Rutgers. This is also often considered to be the first American game of college football, in the sense of a game between colleges, although the eventual form of American football would come from rugby, not soccer.

Modern American football grew out of a match between McGill University of Montreal and Harvard University, in 1874. At the time, Harvard students are reported to have played the Boston Game — a running code — rather than the FA-based kicking games favored by American universities. This made it easy for Harvard to adapt to the rugby-based game played by McGill and the two teams alternated between their respective sets of rules. Within a few years, however, Harvard had both adopted McGill's rugby rules and had persuaded other American university teams to do the same. In 1876, at the Massasoit Convention, it was agreed by these universities to adopt most of the Rugby Football Union rules. However, a touchdown only counted toward the score if neither side kicked a field goal. The convention decided that, in the American game, four touchdowns would be worth one goal; in the event of a tied score, a goal converted from a touchdown would take precedence over four touchdowns.

Princeton, Rutgers, and other schools continued to compete using soccer-based rules for a few years, before switching to the rugby-based rules of Harvard and its competitors. American colleges did not generally return to soccer until the early twentieth century.

Rutgers College Football Team, 1882

In 1880, Yale coach Walter Camp, devised a number of major changes to the American game, beginning with the reduction of teams from 15 to 11 players, followed by reduction of the field area by almost half, and; the introduction of the "scrimmage," in which a player heeled the ball backwards, to begin a game. These were complemented in 1882 by another of Camp's innovations: a team had to surrender possession if they did not gain five yards after three downs (i.e. successful tackles).

Over the years Canadian football absorbed some developments in American football, but also retained many unique characteristics. One of these was that Canadian football, for many years, did not officially distinguish itself from rugby. For example, the Canadian Rugby Football Union, founded in 1884 was the forerunner of the Canadian Football League, rather than a rugby union body. (The Canadian Rugby Union was not formed until 1965.) American football was also frequently described as "rugby" in the 1880s.

Gaelic football

In the mid-nineteenth century, various traditional football games, referred to collectively as caid, remained popular in Ireland, especially in County Kerry. One observer, Father W. Ferris, described two main forms of caid during this period: the "field game" in which the object was to put the ball through arch-like goals, formed from the boughs of two trees; and, the epic "cross-country game," which took up most of the daylight hours of a Sunday on which it was played, and was won by one team taking the ball across a parish boundary. "Wrestling," "holding" opposing players, and carrying the ball were all allowed.

By the 1870s, Rugby and football had started to become popular in Ireland, with Trinity College, Dublin being an early stronghold of Rugby. The rules of the English FA were being distributed widely. Traditional forms of caid had begun to give way to a "rough-and-tumble game" which allowed tripping.

There was no serious attempt to unify and codify Irish varieties of football, until the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in 1884. The GAA sought to promote traditional Irish sports, such as hurling and to reject imported games like Rugby and Football. The first Gaelic football rules were drawn up by Maurice Davin and published in the United Ireland magazine on February 7, 1887. Davin's rules showed the influence of games such as hurling and a desire to formalize a distinctly Irish code of football. The prime example of this differentiation was the lack of an offside rule, an attribute which, for many years, was shared only by other Irish games like hurling, and by Australian rules football.

The globalization of football: FIFA

The need for a single body to oversee Association football had become apparent by the beginning of the rwentieth century, with the increasing popularity of international fixtures. The English Football Association had chaired many discussions on setting up an international body, but was perceived as making no progress. It fell to associations from seven other European countries: France, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, to form an international association. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) was founded in Paris on May 21, 1904. Its first president was Robert Guérin. The French name and acronym has remained, even outside French-speaking countries.

The reform of American football

Both forms of rugby and American football were noted at the time for serious injuries, as well as the deaths of a significant number of players. By the early twentieth century in America, this had resulted in national controversy and American football was banned by a number of colleges. Consequently, a series of meetings was held by 19 colleges in 1905–06. This occurred reputedly at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt. He was considered a fancier of the game, but he threatened to ban it unless the rules were modified to reduce the numbers of deaths and disabilities. The meetings are now considered to be the origin of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

One proposed change was a widening of the playing field. However, Harvard University had just built a concrete stadium and therefore objected to widening, instead proposing legalization of the forward pass. The report of the meetings introduced many restrictions on tackling and two more divergences from rugby: the forward pass and the banning of mass- formation plays. The changes did not immediately have the desired effect, and 33 American football players were killed during 1908 alone. However, the number of deaths and injuries did gradually decline.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Fleder, Rob. Sports Illustrated: The Football Book, Sports Illusrated, 2005. ISBN 978-1932994742
• Green, Tim. Football Genius, HarperCollins,2007. ISBN 978-0061122705
• Mandelbaum, Michael. The Meaning of Sports, Public Affairs, 2004. ISBN 1-58648-252-1
• Williams, Graham. The Code War, Yore Publications, 1994. ISBN 1-874427-65-8

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