Football is the world’s most popular sport, both in terms of participants and followers. The sport is simple in its principal rules and requires minimal equipment to be played, thus leading to its huge popularity.
Moreover, the sport can be played on almost any playing surface (playing fields, lawns, artificial turfs, tar or beaches) or playing condition (rain, fog, snow, spring), further leading to its global reach.
In fact, FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association), football’s global governing body, estimated that there were roughly 250 million football players across the world with a further 1.3 billion ‘interested’ in the sport.
The total viewership for the 2018 World Cup final between France and Croatia was watched live by over 1.12 billion people, with FIFA claiming that a combined 3.572 billion viewers tuned in to watch the extravaganza for at least a minute from June 14 when it started.
Before Sir Alex Ferguson took over in 1986, Championship club Aston Villa was more successful than Manchester United. Villa had previously won seven domestic league crowns and FA Cups, three League Cups, and the European Cup by that time. United, on the other hand, went on to win 20 league crowns in total, 12 FA Cups, and four European Cups.
Football History:
Historically, football was played in some form or the other in at least half a dozen different games, in varying to different degrees. It can be safely said that people have been kicking the humble ball about for thousands of years.
The earliest traces of the game can be dated back to the second and third centuries BC in the Han Dynasty China in an exercise from a military manual. Back then, football was called as TsuChu and involved kicking a leather ball that was filled with feathers and hair. The posts were made of long bamboo canes.
Another variation of the game can be found in neighboring Japan – the Japanese Kemari. The sport that began roughly 500-600 years later is still being played today.
The only major difference between TsuChu and Kemari is that the latter lacks the competitive element of the former, with the least struggle for possession involved. The sport involves a group of players standing in a circle and passing the ball to each other without letting it touch the ground.
The third major variation of football, and much closer to the modern sport, was the Roman game, it was played out with relatively smaller ball between two teams on a rectangular field marked by boundary lines and the center line.
The objective of the game was to get the ball past the opposition’s boundary lines. It involved players passing the ball between themselves, with trickery being the order of the day. The game enjoyed popularity for 700-800 years before the Romans took it to Britain.
It was there that the modern sport of Football evolved. The modern history of the football, however, spans over an century. It all started in 1863 in England, as the ‘rugby football’ and ‘association football’ split and the Football Association (F.A.) was born, becoming the sport’s first official governing body.
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