The game we know as soccer is called football in most parts of the world. Whatever its name, it is among the oldest team sports known to man. About 2,500 years ago the Chinese had a game called tsu chu, which, loosely translated, means “kick a ball of leather with the foot.” The game was often played for the emporer, and the players went after the ball–and each other–ferociously. The winners received handsome gifts, but the leader of the losing team was sometimes whipped.
The Romans played a game they called harpastium. The “ball” was the inflated bladder of an animal, which was kicked, pushed, carried, batted and punched toward some kind of a marker that served as a goal.
The Romans may have brought kicking games to England. But they don’t appear again in history until centuries after the Romans had left the British Isles. In the 800s, some warlike Danish tribes raided the English stronghold of Kingston (some historians say it was really another stronghold called Chester). The British withstood the attacks of the Danes, and finally reinforcements arrived from London. In the battle that followed, the Danish leader was killed. According to the story, his head was cut off and the British soldiers kicked it all over the village. The victory was achieved on Shrove Tuesday (the day before the beginning of Lent), and the day became a kind of national holiday. Football was a special event on Shrove Tuesday (just as American football has become a special event on New Year’s Day). Naturally, a human head was not used; a shoemaker made a ball out of leather. Whole villages played at once. There were few rules but a lot of kicking, punching and wrestling.
In parts of Scotland a different kind of football was played. It was called melleys. Teams of married women played teams of unmarried women. Almost always the married women won, beating up their unmarried rivals in the process.
British football became so popular that it interfered with the Anglo-Scottish War of 1297. The soldiers stationed in Lancaster had a football feud going with the Scottish troops. How could they play the game if the players were killing each other with arrows or lances? In 1365, King Edward III banned the game completely. But no one could enforce the law. When soldiers weren’t fighting, they were playing football.
Except that “playing” was hardly the proper word. Anything short of murder was allowed, including punching faces, kicking ribs, butting into stomachs–it was all “legal.”
Slowly but surely the violence decreased. Toward the end of the 1700s such schools as Rugby and Eton were playing against each other. There were almost no standard rules. Each school invented rules to suit itself.
In the 1800s several kinds of football developed from the wild early game. One came to be known as Association Football, or “soccer” for short. Another, first played at Rugby School, was called rugby football. It was from rugby football–in which a player could carry the ball with his hands–that the American and Canadian versions of the sport developed. But all of these games look back to the bad old days when English soldiers kicked around the head of a dead enemy.
From The Giant Book of Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
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