The Birth of Football

By Malcolm Walker

Who invented football? The ancient Greeks, the Italians, the Scots, a group of bored Iron Age Chinese soldiers? No, the English, and they did it in Cambridge. This is the story of how the world's most popular sport was born. It was at Cambridge University that football first became football. Every ex-public school boy who “went up” to Cambridge took with his old school rules with him. Some allowed hacking, in many you could carry the ball, while in others the mob still prevailed. When they ran out for a game on the city's Parker's Piece, chaos ensued. Over a twenty-year period generations of students thrashed out a set of compromise rules - the 'Cambridge Rules'. These rules put skill above force, limited the movement of the football to the boot and were used as the founding principles of association football.

Malcolm Walker charts the tortuous gestation and birth of association football from its primeval beginnings to the six tempestuous meetings of 1863 that saw its official foundation. This is a story of violence, religion, bizarre behaviour, feuding and a dodgy stitch-up that marked football's difficult birth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483595658

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1 - ANTHROPOLOGY, THEOLOGY AND THE MOB

From mysticism to mayhem

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that. - Bill Shankly

IT’S usually considered wise to start a story at the beginning.

For us this means travelling back through the mists of time to the very dawn of our existence - as the simple act of kicking a ball goes back to the earliest periods of human history and turns out to have been one of the first things that marked us out from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The general theory goes that shortly after humans realised their world was an unpleasant place and that practice makes perfect, we stared to play games and soon after that invented the notion of sport. In fact, our forbearers may well have devised the trap rule long before they worshipped gods and almost certainly constructed the ball before the wheel.

The detailed mechanics of the evolutionary process that concluded with the curled free kick commenced back when the act of play provided the main learning tool for our young, a process through which they learnt the basic skills involved with catching dinner or stopping oneself from becoming dinner.

From these humble beginnings games progressed at quite a pace, but still concerned themselves almost exclusively with the rehearsal of survival techniques and those that helped produce better hunters. A large proportion of them therefore involved weapons in the guise of spears, clubs, rocks etc., all of which required a target, preferably of the moving type. Apart from floating things in water, most targets were provided by throwing and rolling everyday objects such as fruit, rocks, animal heads etc. Unfortunately, most of these were erratic, messy and not reusable. If humankind was to continue its rise to the top of the global food-chain, then another solution was required.

Happily, for the future of humanity it didn’t take too much of a Neanderthal genius to come up with the answer…… the ball, (well a bundle of rolled up animal skin). A simple invention that we clearly took to with great relish as it quickly became an essential piece of early human kit.

Having been designed to improve physical agility and visual co-ordination, ball games soon took on the additional role of tribal cabaret and mutated into a multitude of dance routines. In Africa, the explorer George Stow described one such variety - the San ball game. It used balls made of hammered hippopotamus hide that were small, round and very bouncy (very unlike the animal from which they came). During san the ball was thrown at a hard flat rock so that it bounced up in the air at which point as George recalled the participants ‘commenced a series of antics, throwing themselves into all kinds of positions, imitating wild dogs, and like them making a noise che! che! che!.’ - Well let’s face it there wasn’t much to do in the evenings.

And this could have been as far as it ever went if the embryonic concept of sport hadn’t been given new impetus from our need to practice the skills necessary for our next great evolutionary leap forward - warfare (something else we invented before the wheel).

The most obvious piece of equipment for killing another human in prehistoric times was undoubtedly a pointy stick. So, pointy stick games became very popular, particularly in Africa where they came to dominate and generally involved the men of the tribe fighting pitched battles against one another while the women folk watched on from the terraces with a view to identifying good husband material.

But, games that involved whacking your fellow tribe members with a lump of wood made the whole business somewhat self-defeating. If the chief wanted to field a skilful yet fully fit fighting force, he needed to find another training method. As it so happens the favoured solution turned out to be football - well not exactly football but, we have to start somewhere and if Americans can call their game football so could wondering hunter gathers.

Whatever the classification of these football(ish) games, they appear to have been extremely popular and displayed amazing staying power with many still being played by indigenous peoples at the time of their discovery by modern men. For instance, the North American Cherokee game of anetsa that translates as ‘little brother of war’; or the Ghuru Guma people of New Guinea who played theirs until both sides had recorded an equal number of victories; community games that allowed players to bash the hell out of each other while minimising casualties; with the hope of building a bit of team spirit - the original esprit de corps.

The Australian Aborigines had countless ball games including Kai, Parndo, Buroinjin, Woggabaliri, Keentan and most famously Marn Grook that reputedly still survives today in the form Australian rules football. A claim supported by this account given by a British settler in 1841, which certainly describes a kicking game in which players punted the ball to each other in much the same way as they do in the modern day Australian code:

The men and boys joyfully assemble when this game is to be played. One makes a ball of possum skin, somewhat elastic, but firm and strong. The players of this game do not throw the ball as a white man might do, but drop it and at the same time kicks it with his foot. The tallest men have the best chances in this game. Some of them will leap as high as five feet from the ground to catch the ball. The person who secures the ball kicks it. This continues for hours and the natives never seem to tire of the exercise.

Another well-known example of this type of game was the snappily named North American Indian game of Pasuckaukohowog, which translates as ‘they gather to play ball with the foot.’ Pasuckaukohowog typically involved whole villages in large-scale contests that bore more resemblance to minor battles than organized sport. So violent in fact, that players sometimes disguised themselves with war paint to avoid recognition during the traditional post-match dinner of roasted buffalo.

Yes, the plain truth is that if one looks at the entire history of human contests involving a ball, by far the majority of it has been in as semi organised tribal punch-ups and only a very recently as organised team sports.

It’s difficult to underestimate the extent to which these crude ball games became entwined with tribal ritual and their religious beliefs, in some instances they shaped the very religions themselves. The reason for this being the fact that ballgames actually pre-dated many cultures’ attempts to explain the mysteries of life, the universe and everything – It’s not beyond the bounds of possibly that Adam and Eve had been booting apples from the Tree of Knowledge around the Garden of Eden long before the serpent suggested them as a food source.

European explorers encountered countless examples of ball games, ritual and religion going hand-in-hand in every part of the world. Such as the North African Berber tribes who played Koura, a game linked to fertility rights in which villages fought over the head of a sacrificed animal, the Pacific Islands where they used coconuts, pigs’ bladders and oranges as the ball. Or the Indo-Chinese tribes who kicked a scarified bull head over the bodies of dead chieftains.

This association was to characterise the next stage of football’s formative years as the relationship between footy and various celestial beings would reach new heights in humanities early and classical civilisations

Classical Games

Many people moan about how much our society is dominated by football – they should thank their lucky stars that they weren’t born 4000 years ago as most large scale civilizations were positively obsessed with it.

We will start our tour with possibly the most fanatical of them, the peoples of South and Central America circa 2000 BC. They had numerous games with many different names the Aztec’s Tlatchli, the Incas Tlaxtli or Ullamalitzli, the peoples of Sinaloa Ulama and the Mayans poc-ta-tok. Because they all shared many similarities experts lump them altogether under the title of Mesoamerican ballgames.

Every level of society played them from children for fun, to kings for kingdoms with thousands of ball courts being constructed across the region. They were dangerous, exciting, contests at the very heart of the religious and cultural lives of these South American civilisations. The winners of the games became heroes, whilst the losing captain was often decapitated and his skull used as the core around which a new ball was made. The scale and grandeur of their ruins are a testament to just how popular the games were. Gambling played a very important part of the matches with Aztec records recalling that spectators often risked all they owned on the outcome of a single match including their wives, children even their own lives. The most famous instance of this relates to the wager between Axayacatl, emperor of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and Xihuitlemoc, king of Xochimilco for the entire yearly income of their respective kingdoms. Even if you steered clear of the bookies watching the games remained a costly business as on some occasions the winning team had the right to run through the crowd seizing whatever pieces of jewellery and clothing that took their fancy.

The game’s religious importance stemmed from the believe that it symbolised the eternal conflict between good and evil in which the ball signified the sun and the pitch a gateway to the underworld. The Maya Bible’s equivalent to the Book of Genesis has lengthy sections that chronicle the long and complicated story relating to the creation of humanity, a story that had at it’s very centre the mesoamerican ball game. Just for the record, and if you’re wondering how you can weave a quasi game of football into the creation story – the tale goes something like this……..

Two brother gods Hun and Vucub Hunaphpú were keen but noisy ball players, in fact they made such a racket that it annoyed the gods all the way down in the underworld. They became so irritated that they challenged the brothers to a game. A challenge accepted by the duo who agreed to play an away fixture underground. Fortunately for the neighbors the brothers lost and were subsequently sacrificed by the evil death gods, who added insult to injury by using their heads for a quick kick around before sticking them on a mystical tree.

But all was not lost, as sometime later the goddess Xquic happened to pass by and stopped to look at the dangling heads on the tree; and while she did this Hun Hunaphpú’s head grabbed (metaphorically) its opportunity and managed to impregnate her by spitting into her hand. Subsequently, she gave birth to twin boys who grew up and in time arranged a return match against the evil gods of death. Unlike their fathers, they were victorious in a two game series, but for some reason rather than doing a lap of honour decided to throw themselves into a fire in an act of self-sacrifice giving the evil (bad loser) gods the chance to grind up their bones, scatter them into a river and claim victory for themselves. It was however part of a cunning (if not slightly complicated) master plan, as the two twins then returned to life as traveling performers and made their way back to the underworld where they convinced the evil gods that they could perform a fantastic new trick that involved beheading the gods and then bringing them back to life. This intrigued the evil gods who dutifully formed an orderly queue and let the brothers lop off their heads one-by-one. Having performed the first half of the trick, the twins very sensibly decided not to bother with the finale, they instead resuscitated their father Hun Hunaphpú, the Maize God and ascended into the heavens with him to become the sun and the moon so paving the way for the creation of humanity.

Because of this legend, the Aztec and Mayan cultures saw the ball games as embodying the struggle between life and death, summer and winter with the flight of the ball representing the movement of the planets. The ball courts themselves were assumed to be portals to the underworld and were usually built at the lowest point in a temple complex with this all in mind.

As might be expected with a game boasting such a long history and that was played across several different cultures, it’s details varied. The earliest versions were played on open fields and in time moved to formal stone built courts constructed to reflect the cultural importance of the game and cater for the crowds. Throughout South and Central America, the same basic court configuration was used, the overall shape of which was that of a capital ‘I’, comprising two long parallel walls enclosing a long narrow alley. The walls were either straight or sloped and often decorated with stone skeletal heads, animals and birds. The size of court varied but was typically between 80 – 120 feet long being no more than 30 feet wide. Courts often had a single stone ring jutting out of the wall half way down the alley that acted as a goal.

Three main versions were played, one that used a bat, another padded arms and the most popular variant that required the players to return the ball with their hips, buttocks, knees or elbows. The general idea was to hit the ball past the opposition and into their end zone, or in such a way that they couldn’t return it in accordance with the rules. Points were scored by faults, incurred by the other team when returning the ball with the wrong part of the body, rally points, (scored if the ball went beyond the baseline of the opposition) and service faults incurred if the service was taken incorrectly. The first team to get to 8 ‘Rayas’ won the game. Getting 8 Rayas was extremely difficult as scores could go up or down, or switch between teams depending upon the combination of points at any part of the game. It could take all day for a game to be concluded - if at all. If a player managed to get the ball through the stone ring then the game was immediately won.

The balls varied in size from the size of a tennis ball to that of a medicine ball and were usually made from solid rubber except for those that had a human skull as their core which was bouncier, if not somewhat erratic.

Due to the weight of the ball and ritual significance of the game, the players wore a range of decorative and protective clothing. Headdresses or helmets were used to protect the head, while quilted padding was usually worn on the elbows and knees. The most unusual attire were heavy belts or yokes made of leather, basket and even stone worn around the waist designed to increase the force with which a player could hit the ball.

The game was very much in evidence during the time of the Portuguese and Spanish conquest and the infamous adventurer Cortez took two teams back to Spain and introduced the game, along with the bouncing rubber balls to the Spanish court. The Catholic Church considered the game unholy (bearing in mind the decapitations perhaps they were right) and as a result the courts were torn down and the game driven underground. Fortunately, it proved quite resilient and still survives today in the form of hand, bat and hip Ulama played in several regions of Central America.

Over on the other side of the Pacific Ocean many parts of Asia used balls for both sport and entertainment. The Ancient Chinese were big football fans, reputedly playing the game as far back as 2000 BC. The first recorded game was of Cuju or Tsu Chu. Translated Cu means, to kick while a ju was a leather ball stuffed with feathers and was played by the military as a means of getting the feeling back into their legs after a hard day in the saddle and to foster a bit of blood lust amongst the soldiers. As with most games cuju evolved a great deal over it’s 2,500 year life. Initially there were two versions; a team game with six crescent shaped goals to defend. Each goal constructed by a net strung between two bamboo poles with a 30-40 cm hole in the centre. The second game may have been more combative in which a single player had to keep the ball in the air and score while being pursued by three to four adversaries. Cuju even made it into ancient Chinese literature, one of the earliest tracts of poetry from 136 BC goes like this.

The ball round,

The playing ground square,

Just like the sky and earth.

The ball flies over us just like the sun,

While the two teams face each other.

The Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 AD) introduced an air filled double skinned ball, reduced the goals to one per team, created a version of the game with a shared goal in the middle of the pitch and encouraged female teams. The women showed an aptitude for the game and records include an account of a seventeen-year-old girl beating a team of soldiers on her own.

During the Song Dynasty cuju moved to another level of popularity whereby professional clubs were formed in large cities. These clubs combined both professionals and amateurs, with the clubs insisting that the amateurs paid for lessons in order to finance their professional club mates. The peak of the professional life was to perform non-competitive games of keepy-uppie at the Imperial court for the Emperor on his birthday. Two games were played during the Song Dynasty the first was called baida, this was played within a fabric-screened area by a circle of players all competing against one another, baida was won by the player who made the least number of mistakes. The other version Zhu Qiu was played between two teams on either side of a goal created by two tall bamboo posts with a net stretched between them with a small 30-40 cm hole in its centre. Each team kicked the ball amongst themselves in a strict order of rotation ending with a shot at the opening. For important games the winning side’s captain was given silver bowls and brocades while the losing team’s captain was publicly whipped (why should the South Americans have all the fun).

During the Ming Dynasty about 300-400 years ago, the game fell from favour and eventually died out. This minor fact hasn’t stopped the Chinese from claiming that association football was their invention a view, according to the Chinese People’s Daily Newspaper that was supported by Sepp Blatter who reputedly claimed that cuju is the true origin of the sport.

Anyway, back to the real world…..

The game of cuju spread to Japan by the Chinese between 1000 – 500 BC where the game was called Kamari. Recently discovered records mention a game played between Chinese cuju (baida) players and Japanese Kemari players in approximately 50 BC. Kamari was taken up by Buddhist monks who were largely responsible for its spread throughout Japan. No offence to Buddhists, but they’re not exactly the most competitive of people, so under their guidance Kamari was never going to be a rip roaring spectator sport, instead it was used as an aid to meditation. Just for the record it goes something like this.

First the ball, which is made of deerskin and stuffed with sawdust, is blessed at a shrine, then in a garden called the Mariniwa the players perform a ceremony called Tokimari during which the Edayaku prays for prosperity and world peace. After this, the game can start which involves the players, all wearing extremely elaborate costumes, stand in a circle and kick the ball to each other without it touching the ground. The ball can only be kicked once by each player except for the Mariashi who is allowed to kick it as many times as he likes before passing to another player. When a player receives the ball and while keeping it in the air, he shouts ariyaaa every time he kicks it. When he passes it he shouts ari. The pitch is called a kikutsubo and its boundary is marked out by trees. The game is still played today so if you’re ever in Japan make sure you don’t miss out on the fun.

There is a legend that an emperor and his kemari team once kept the ball up for over one thousand kicks, poets wrote of the day claiming that the ball seemed suspended, hanging in the sky. According to the myth the emperor was so pleased that he retired the ball, and gave it a high-ranking office within his court. There’s no mention of what he did to the player who had miss-kicked the ball. Kamari migrated to Malaysia about 500 years ago where they made a much better job of it and created the fast moving and impressive foot-volleyball game of Sepal Takraw.

Incidentally, the Japanese also claim to have invented football, they believe that Marco Polo saw their game while on his travels and brought it back to Europe where it subsequently evolved into association football. Unfortunately for the Japanese Marco Polo didn’t make any mention of this and now doubts are being expressed as to whether he even made it to the far East at all.

Let’s shift our gaze in a more realistic direction towards the Mediterranean.

Europe

The first recorded use of balls in this in this part of the world appears to have been as an accompaniment to dance. A view based on the lack of any evidence regarding competitive ball games and a scattering of images depicting dancers using balls on Assyrian pottery and in a couple of Egyptian tombs. Of particular note are the wall paintings, artefacts and texts uncovered by archaeologists in the ancient Egyptian region of Beni-Suef and the tomb of Beni-Hasan. These refer to