by Cy Bernardi
Two hundred fifty million people play soccer every year. This is 50,000,000 more than the population of Western Europe. To put that in perspective, imagine every single person living in that region getting out and playing soccer all at once! For thousands of years, some form of the sport has been played in almost every culture across the globe. In the ancient Americas, a combination of soccer and basketball was played to please the gods, who we can assume were very entertained by this new human creation. Although these games are not exactly the same as modern soccer, very similar forms of the sport were played in ancient Greece, China, Australia, and Japan. Shockingly, soccer didn’t evolve in Western Europe until the twelfth century. Even more surprising, rules weren’t created for the sport until the mid-1800s. It is truly amazing that so many different versions of the same basic idea could coalesce into the beautiful game we know today.
The first recorded organized ball game was played in Ancient Mesoamerica around 3,000 years ago. During this period, many of the most powerful rulers in Central and South America were devoutly religious and worshiped their gods without question, despite their violent and warlike depictions. Many high priests in these ancient empires devised various sacrificial ceremonies to please the more bloodthirsty deities. One of these rituals was a ball game called Tchatali. This sport was played on a pitch similar to a basketball court with hoops at each end. The goal was to kick the ball, which was made of rubber, through the opposing team’s hoop without using your hands, which were not allowed to touch the ball. It was a brutal game. In some cases, if the match were of particular significance, the losing team’s captain would be sacrificed to the gods. In second or third century Ancient China, a form of soccer was played on a square stone court with a spherical ball.
In other cultures, ball games have been recorded in Aboriginal Australia, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Japan for thousands of years. Although all of these games are different from soccer, with them, the sport could evolve into the form that we know today.
Unsurprisingly, soccer in Europe was first played in England in the 12th century. At this time, it was barely recognizable as a sport. Medieval soccer was played in fields and meadows and was so violent that many participants, who were mainly peasants, died while playing. In large spaces such as towns, huge groups of people, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, would attempt to carry the ball from one side of the “field” to the other, similar to rugby or American football. There were no rules. Oftentimes, the game would get so rowdy that severe damage would be caused to the towns and villages that were being used as the pitch. Because of the dangerously high injury rate among young men, the king banned soccer from being played because so many men were hurt playing that there were not enough uninjured soldiers fit for military service. Because of this law, soccer faded from the public eye for several centuries.
In the eyes of many, modern soccer was officially created in the mid-1800s when the first campaign to create a proper set of rules was launched. Although there were many ball games in different parts of the world, the English were the first to try and create an organized sport with a defined set of rules. The first order of business was to divide the old version of soccer into rugby and what was to become the game we know and love today. The division made the game safer. However, even after this was done, there were still two very different styles of play. The English charged the opposing team and tried to score using rushing tactics. Meanwhile, the Scottish, eager to take this chance to devise their own style of play, one completely different from the English, created a shocking new strategy. The Scotts passed the ball from player to player up the field until they were close enough to the goal to shoot and, hopefully, score. This was a radical tactic at the time. The Scottish way of playing soccer gradually emerged as dominant, rendering the English rugby strategy obsolete. In the wake of the rapidly growing popularity of this new sport, the first club, London, was formed in 1863, paving the way for the rise of the most played sports in history.
“The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this; If it moves, kick it. If it doesn’t move, kick it until it does.” As Phil Woosnam points out here, soccer is not a complex sport. There is something in human nature that yearns to kick objects like rocks, sticks, or whatever else lands at one’s feet. This is the simple base that soccer is built on. From Australia to Europe to Far Asia and the Americas, some form of soccer has been played at nearly every point in time. It is only natural that this passion has evolved into the most played game in history. Surprisingly, rules for the sport have only been created relatively recently compared to the amount of time ball games similar to soccer have been played. Several decades ago, Pele, one of the most famous players of all time, popularized the term “the beautiful game” to describe soccer. This phrase is still used today because, even in all its forms, soccer truly is a beautiful game.
The Lighthouse 