3 Surprising facts about football’s history
Published on Wed Jun 20 2018 in Community
Football is the world’s most popular sport, with billions of people expected to watch World Cup matches this year. We may not be able to tell you who will win, but we can solve a few soccer-related mysteries that may have you stumped!
Ancient origins
Football as we know it today officially started in 1863, when its first governing body was created in England. However, the sport may have evolved from similar games played in Asia and parts of Europe.
Cuju (or Ts’u Chu) is a Chinese game first mentioned in text around 2,300 years ago. It involved kicking a ball through an opening and into a net without using one’s hands. A similar Japanese game, called Kemari, was mentioned around 800 years later. Kemari is non-competitive, with players working together to keep one ball in the air by using any parts of their bodies except the hands and arms.
Ancient Greeks and Romans also played football-like games. In fact, one Roman tombstone in Croatia shows a boy holding a ball with a pattern similar to that found on soccer balls today!
Two names, same sport
In New Zealand, the sport of football is also sometimes referred to as soccer. Whilst this is often thought of as an American term, the word soccer actually originated in England.
Oxford University students in the 1800s and early 1900s liked to shorten words by adding an “-er” to the end of them. This is how Association football (the formal name of the sport) was eventually cut down to soccer sometime in the 1880s. For about a century the term was mostly preferred by the upper class, with football used by working and middle-class Brits.
Competing football codes popped up around the world—like rugby union, rugby league, gridiron and Aussie rules—making soccer a useful way to distinguish exactly which sport you were talking about. But by the 1980s, Brits had decided that football would be their preferred term, leading to the two competing nicknames used today.
European & South American domination
A quick look at FIFA World Cup winners says a lot. There have been 21 World Cups from 1930 and 2018, but just eight countries have ever won: Uruguay, Italy, Germany, Brazil, England, Argentina, France and Spain. Brazil is the leader, with five total wins. Italy and Germany are a close second, with four wins apiece.
Football is popular across the globe, but the selection of host countries also tends to favour Europe and South America. As of 2018, the World Cup has only been held outside of these two continents just four times—in Mexico, the United States, South Africa and jointly between South Korea and Japan. This trend is starting to change, though. The 2022 event will be held in Qatar, and Canada, Mexico and the USA will share hosting duties in 2026.
So, maybe a Trans-Tasman World Cup is in our future? Hosting this event is expensive, but sharing it with Australia could help both countries shoulder the financial burden. However, an NZ-AU World Cup could have one big mark against it: the time difference would make it difficult for fans in the rest of the world to watch live games on television. But, only time will tell!
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Sources
FIFA, History of Football – The Origins
Wikipedia, Harpastum
Encyclopedia Britannica, Why do some people call football “soccer”?
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