The Second Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson

Author:John Lloyd & John Mitchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Where was football invented?

Not in England, but in China.

The Chinese played football for over 2,000 years before the English claimed it. Cuju or tsu’ chu – literally ‘kick-ball’ – began as a military training exercise but was soon popular all over China. It used a leather ball (stuffed with fur or feathers) and two teams trying to score goals at opposite ends without using their hands. According to some accounts, each goal was a hole cut into a sheet of silk hung between bamboo posts. Cuju was first recorded in the fifth century BC and was at its peak during the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1279), when cuju players became the world’s first professional footballers. The sport eventually fell into oblivion during the Ming period (AD 1368–1644).

In twelfth-century Japan cuju was adapted into a new game called kemari. Essentially a formal version of ‘keepy-uppy’, it was played in a square with trees at the corners. The eight players, in pairs, had to keep the ball in the air as long as possible, bouncing it off the trees. There was an umpire who gave extra points for particularly stylish play.

There are also claims of a game even older than cuju, called marngrook (‘game ball’), played by the Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia. Involving over fifty players, the aim was to prevent the ball (made of possum-skin) from touching the ground. The long punts and high catches of Australian Rules football may owe something to marngrook.

In medieval England football involved so many players, so few rules and so much violence that it was regularly banned: no fewer than thirty royal and local laws were enacted against it between 1314 and 1667. This didn’t reduce its popularity among all classes – even the young Henry VIII shelled out 4 shillings for a pair of leather football boots (worth about £100 today).

Modern football started in England in 1863, when rugby football and association football (or ‘soccer’ for short) diverged and England’s Football Association was founded. The world’s oldest football club is Sheffield FC, founded six years earlier (in 1857) as an amateur club.

Although the 1863 rules of the English game provided the template for today’s international sport, it took a long time to shake off its violent origins. In the nineteenth century you could shoulder-barge players even if they didn’t have the ball, and if a goalkeeper caught the ball, he could be shoved over the line to score.

One of the rules proposed in 1863 allowed players to approach the man with the ball and ‘to charge, hold, trip or hack him, or to wrest the ball from him’. This was eventually dropped, despite the objections of Blackheath FC who argued that, without it, ‘you will do away with the courage and pluck of the game, and it will be bound to bring over a lot of Frenchmen who would beat you with a week’s practice’.

How prescient that has proved to be.

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