Ji, Mary

8East, Gym

May 28, 2003

The History of Soccer

The sport, Soccer, has been played almost 3000 years ago. The sport was similar to the present soccer we play to day in modern society. One of the earliest forms of the game soccer was in 1004 B.C. in Japan where the players had to kick a ball on a small field. A proof of this was in the Munich Ethnological Museum in Germany of a Chinese text from about 50 B.C. mentions a game similar to soccer that were played between teams from China and Japan. The Chinese play soccer by kicking a leather ball filled with hari. A soccer game was played in 611 A.D. in the ancient Japanese capital Kyoto.

In the past, ancient Romans played soccer which was very similar to the modern game of soccer. The early Olympic Games in ancient Rome had twenty-seven men one side and they each will compete forcefully against each other and after a fifty-minute game, two-thirds would be hospitalized instantly.

Many people would not say how soccer spread from Asia to Europe and when the game got to England, it gained a bad reputation among the British royalty that the government were forced to pass laws prohibiting the sport of soccer to be played.

King Edward's reign of England (1307-1327) was an example where there were laws passed that threatened imprisonment to anyone who was caught playing soccer. King Edward's proclamation said:

"For as much as there is a 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 future."

Laws failed to stop people from playing soccer which had earned an official approval in England by 1681. Soccer became extremely popular by the late 1800s that there were contests in northern and middle England whereas large groups roamed and raged through towns and villages.

The Eton College had the earliest rules of the game soccer in 1815. The game gradually became mannerly and the standardized rules of soccer were known as the Cambridge rules which were adopted by England’s major colleges.

In the beginning, England had soccer banned but eventually the game moved all around every continent of the world.

The earliest organized games were massive disagreements between teams consisting of two or three players each, with goals as many as 3 to 4 miles [56.5 km] apart. By 1801 the game had been changed and now requiring a limited and equal number of players on each team and limiting the amount of playing field to 80 and 100 yards [70.90 meters], with a goal at each end of the field. The goal was usually made of two sticks a few feet apart. The first crossbars were merely lengths of tape stretched between the two goalposts. In 1875 the Football Association made the bar mandatory.

In the 1850s the rules still changed often, and as a result the number of players on a side ranged from 15 to 20 which was a whole lot of people. The current 11-player teams were officially established in 1870, with 9 forwards and 2 defenders the most common structure. The 9 forwards are the actual players kicking the soccer ball with there feet while the 2 defenders are the goalkeeper who try to block the ball from getting into there goal and if the ball get into there goal, the opposing team gets the point. Not until the 1880s was the goalkeeper formally distinguished from the other players; at that time the goalkeeper was the only player allowed to touch the ball with his hands.