Association football

• 1. Introduction

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  Association football draws an estimated 250 million players across more than 200 countries and territories, which makes it the most popular sport on the planet. Two teams of 11 face each other on a pitch, and almost everything they do, they do with their feet. Touch the ball with your hands or arms and you have broken the game's oldest instinct, unless you are the goalkeeper standing inside your own penalty area. The objective is simple. Push the ball past a line into a rectangular goal that the other side is guarding, and do it more often than they do. Yet beneath that simplicity sits a tangle of questions. Why does the same game answer to two different names, football and soccer, depending on where you stand in the world? Where did a sport with no classical pedigree actually come from? How did a set of rules drafted in a London tavern grow into the framework for the most-watched sporting event on Earth? And how did a women's game, once outlawed outright, claw its way back to draw more than a billion viewers? The answers run from ancient China to a survey published in 2001, from a goalkeeper who kicked the ball away to run down the clock to a national team that helped halt a civil war.

• 2. Football Or Soccer

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  The word association in the sport's full name points back to the Football Association, founded in London in 1863, which published the first set of rules that same year. The term was coined to separate the game played under FA rules from rival codes catching on at the time, rugby football chief among them. So association football was, from the start, a label of distinction rather than description. The name soccer has a more playful root. It comes from Oxford slang built on the suffix -er, common at the University of Oxford in England from about 1875 and thought to be borrowed from the slang of Rugby School. It began as assoccer, a clipping of association, then shrank to its modern form, passing through early spellings like socca and socker along the way. The same habit produced rugger for rugby football, fiver and tenner for five pound and ten pound notes, and the now-archaic footer, another old name for the game. Which word people use today tends to track which other football codes surround them. In Great Britain and most of Ulster in the north of Ireland, it is simply football. In Australia, Canada, South Africa, most of Ireland outside Ulster, and the United States, where rival codes hold sway, it is usually soccer. New Zealand is the exception worth watching. In the first two decades of the 21st century, under the pull of international television, football has been gaining ground there despite the local dominance of rugby union and rugby league.

• 3. Ancient Kicks

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  Cuju, whose name literally means kickball, is the earliest kicking game for which historical evidence survives, and it was played in China long before anything resembling the modern sport existed. It was first recorded as an exercise in the Zhan Guo Ce, a military history from the Han dynasty. Players passed the ball among themselves without letting it touch the ground, then sent it to a designated player who tried to kick it through the fengliu yan, a circular goal mounted atop poles 10 to 11 meters high. During the Han dynasty, between 206 BCE and 220 CE, the rules of cuju were standardised. The Silk Road carried the game beyond China, especially the version popular in the Tang dynasty, the period when the inflatable ball was invented and replaced the older stuffed one. Cuju's influence rippled outward to neighbouring cultures. Kemari in Japan and chuk-guk in Korea both grew from it. Kemari originated after the year 600, during the Asuka period, and was ceremonial rather than competitive, built around kicking a mari, a ball made of animal skin. Far across the world, the Algonquians of North America played pasuckuakohowog, described as almost identical to the folk football being kicked through goals in Europe at the same time. The Mediterranean had its own ball games, though they leaned closer to rugby, wrestling, and volleyball. Phaininda, episkyros, and the Roman harpastum all involved hands and violence. The Greek writer Athenaeus mentions harpastum in 228 CE. An image of an episkyros player, carved in low relief on a stele dated to around 375 to 400 BCE in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, found a modern afterlife. It appears on the trophy for the UEFA European Championship.

• 4. The Tavern Rules

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  On the morning of the 26th of October 1863, the Football Association first met at the Freemasons' Tavern on Great Queen Street in London, and the only school represented that day was Charterhouse. The meeting did not appear out of nowhere. The Cambridge rules, drawn up at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1848 by representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and Shrewsbury, had already proved influential, though never universally adopted. Through the 1850s, clubs unconnected to any school or university formed across the English-speaking world. The Sheffield Football Club, founded by former public school pupils in 1857, devised its own code and led to a Sheffield FA in 1867. In 1862, John Charles Thring of Uppingham School wrote another influential set of rules. The London meetings ran on. The Freemasons' Tavern hosted five more gatherings between October and December 1863, and out of them came the first comprehensive Laws of the Game. The new laws banned running with the ball in hand and outlawed hacking, the practice of kicking an opponent in the shins, along with tripping and holding. Eleven clubs, under FA secretary Ebenezer Cobb Morley, ratified the original 13 laws. Hacking was the sticking point. A twelfth club, Blackheath FC, wanted to keep it and withdrew from the FA, and other rugby clubs followed, forming the Rugby Football Union in 1871 alongside Blackheath. From this foundation the competitions grew. The FA Cup, founded by the footballer and cricketer Charles W. Alcock, has been contested by English teams since 1872, making it the world's oldest football competition. The first official international match also took place in 1872, between Scotland and England in Glasgow, again at Alcock's instigation. England is home to the world's first football league too, founded in Birmingham in 1888 by Aston Villa director William McGregor, with an original lineup of 12 clubs from the Midlands and Northern England.

• 5. Who Makes The Rules

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  The International Football Association Board was formed in 1886 after a meeting in Manchester of the Football Association, the Scottish Football Association, the Football Association of Wales, and the Irish Football Association. It still holds authority over the Laws of the Game, which now run to 17 laws covering everything from the players to misconduct. The board's makeup reflects a careful balance of power. It consists of four representatives from FIFA and one representative from each of the four British associations, with each UK association holding one vote and FIFA collectively holding four. FIFA itself was formed in Paris in 1904 and declared from the outset that it would adhere to the FA's Laws of the Game. As the international game grew, FIFA representatives were admitted to the IFAB in 1913. Today FIFA is the recognised international governing body for football and related games like futsal and beach soccer, with headquarters in Zürich, Switzerland. Six regional confederations sit beneath it. The Asian Football Confederation, the Confederation of African Football, the Union of European Football Associations, the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football, the Oceania Football Confederation, and the South American Football Confederation. National associations oversee the game country by country, and 211 of them are affiliated both with FIFA and with their continental confederations. FIFA publishes the Laws of the Game, but the IFAB still maintains them, a division of labour that has held since the board's founding.

• 6. Inside The Ninety Minutes

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  A standard adult match runs for two halves of 45 minutes each, for 90 minutes in total, and the clock never stops when the ball goes out of play. Between the halves comes a break, usually 15 minutes, and the whole game ends at full-time. The referee is the official timekeeper, holding full authority to enforce the laws, and the referee alone signals the end of the match. Two assistant referees help, and in many high-level games a fourth official assists as well. Goals are scarce, which is part of the game's character. In the 2022-23 season, the English Premier League produced an average of 2.85 goals per match. Around the goalkeeper and the goal, specialised roles have grown up even though the laws name no position except goalkeeper. Strikers, or forwards, exist to score. Defenders specialise in stopping opponents from scoring. Midfielders dispossess the other side and keep the ball moving toward their forwards. The arrangement of these ten outfield players is a formation, and defining it is usually the manager's prerogative. The clock has its own quirks of history. Stoppage time, added by the referee for substitutions, injuries, and other delays, exists because of a single incident in 1891 during a match between Stoke and Aston Villa. Stoke trailed 1-0 with two minutes left and won a penalty, but Villa's goalkeeper deliberately booted the ball far out of play. By the time it was recovered the clock had run out, and Stoke never got their kick. The same law now states that a half is extended until any penalty kick is completed, so no game can end with an uncompleted penalty. When regulation cannot separate two teams in a knockout, extra time adds two further 15-minute periods, and if the score is still level, some competitions turn to a penalty shoot-out. Goals scored in extra time count toward the final score, but shoot-out kicks decide only who progresses and do not.

• 7. The Women's Game

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  Women have been playing football and similar games for as long as those games have existed, and frescoes from the Han dynasty, between 25 and 220 CE, depict female figures playing cuju. Reports describe annual football matches played by women in Midlothian, Scotland, during the 1790s. The best-documented early European team was the British Ladies' Football Club, founded in England in 1894 by the activist Nettie Honeyball, who saw women's involvement in football as part of the emancipation movement. The British football associations frowned on the women's game, and it carried on without their support. The First World War changed the picture. Female employment in heavy industry spurred the game's growth, just as it had done for men decades earlier. The most successful team of the era was Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. of Preston, England, who played in one of the first women's international matches against a French XI in 1920 and, the same year, beat a Scottish Ladies XI 22-0. Popularity bred backlash. One match drew a crowd of 53,000 in 1920, yet in 1921 the Football Association outlawed the game on its members' pitches, declaring that football was quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged. Players and writers have argued the real motive was envy of those large crowds and the fact that the FA had no control over the money the women's game made. The ban pushed play onto rugby grounds and spawned the short-lived English Ladies Football Association. Other countries imposed their own bans, including Brazil from 1941 to 1979, France from 1941 to 1970, and West Germany from 1955 to 1970. The thaw came in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The Italian women's football league was established in 1968, the Women's Football Association formed in England in December 1969, and in 1971 UEFA members voted to recognise women's football while the FA rescinded its ban. The FIFA Women's World Cup was inaugurated in 1991, held in China with 12 teams from the six confederations. By 2019 it had grown to 24 national teams watched by 1.12 billion viewers, and the 32-team 2023 tournament was targeted at an audience of 2 billion, selling more than 1.5 million tickets for a record. North America leads the women's game, with the United States holding the most World Cups and Olympic titles.

• 8. Passions And Stakes

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  Football evokes great passions and plays an important role in the lives of fans, local communities, and even whole nations, and at times it has shaped the course of conflict. The writer Ryszard Kapuściński observed that Europeans who are polite, modest, or humble fall easily into rage when playing or watching the game. Sometimes that intensity bends toward peace. The Ivory Coast national football team helped secure a truce in the nation's civil war in 2006, and in 2007 it helped ease tensions further by playing a match in the rebel capital of Bouaké, an occasion that brought both armies together peacefully for the first time. The same intensity can cut the other way. Football is widely considered the final proximate cause of the Football War in June 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. It also sharpened tensions at the start of the Croatian War of Independence, when a match between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade collapsed into rioting in May 1990. The stage on which these passions play out is enormous. The men's World Cup, inaugurated in 1930 and held every four years apart from the cancelled 1942 and 1946 tournaments, is the world's most widely viewed sporting event. The 2022 tournament in Qatar was estimated to be watched by 5 billion people, more than 60 percent of the global population, and Argentina won their third title there. The 1958 World Cup saw the emergence of Pelé as a global sporting star, a moment that coincided with the explosive spread of television, which massively amplified his presence everywhere. The same screens that carried Pelé now carry billions to the next match, where the game keeps writing causes for both wars and truces.