Over the last two millennia, humans have dotted the world with football. Connect these milestones and we eventually arrive at the birth of American football.
In the shape of half-moons, two goals stand on opposite ends of an imperial field in ancient China. To their teammates, aristocratic young men kick an inflated round ball, which must not touch the ground. Swooping like a swallow, the ball moves from one player’s foot to another’s, until it is struck and sent through a goal. Cuju (Sue ju) is the game, and it means football.
Centuries later, General Li Guangyan (Lee Gwan Yen)–Medieval China’s Lionel Messi—flies down the Cuju pitch. A poet pens an ode to the star: “Quick as a monkey on the ball field, with a falcon’s grace, three thousand ladies tilted their heads to watch him.”
While the ancient Chinese develop and enjoy their game, Grecian lads toss a ball, run, dodge tacklers, fake throws, lay blocks, tackle, and all the while shout: “Out of bounds, over his head, too short, too far,” and even “back in the huddle.”
*** This is a companion article to the “Who invented this SPORT?” podcast on the Sports History Network, authored by David Neil Drews and co-hosted by Roger Harb. Below is the episode. ***
From Ancient China to Greece and Rome
They are playing Phaininda (Finninda). The ball is an air-filled bladder covered with 12 leather panels, each a different color. Plato tells us that if one could view the world from above, it would appear like such a multi-hued ball. Centuries later that same view would show versions of football covering the Earth.
A variety of team games with balls and goals go from the Greeks to the Romans, who take it up the continent to Britannia. Rumors have it that in the Dark Ages, Saxons play a type of football using the heads of slain Danes for balls.
Medieval London to the Industrial Age
In Medieval London, mob football emerges, hundreds of commoners per side clash on cobblestone streets. They kick and throw a ball and opponents, alike. Amidst the brawling, each team attempts to get a ball across a goal, there are two goals and they’re set a mile apart.
Trampled properties and maimed participants prompt The Lord Mayor of London to ban the sport, but the Londoners resist and reclaim their game, time and time again.
Football spreads to the countryside, where mob play has around 100 a side and the field of play stretches over long common grounds. Enthusiasm rages. And even at the risk of imprisonment, villagers across Great Britain, defy royal and civic decrees to halt the pleasurable mayhem.
All the while, the French and Italians have their folk footballs as well, a sport called La Soule (la soul) in Paris and a football game reserved for the posh to play in Florence.
Throughout the world, people inflate animal bladders and fight to carry or kick them over or into a goal. And the lure to crash into, punch, kick, and drag to the ground another human being is probably deep in the bones we break.
Folk Football serves these passions, but it’s a sucker’s bet. It’s lawless and formless, wholly unsuitable for wagering, another enduring human pleasure.
England’s gamblers’ money flows to the sports of cricket, boxing, and horse racing—not the unorganized and disorganized centuries-old varieties of folk football.
Then the industrial revolution gains steam and pulls footballers off the farms and from the trades and into dark, foul-aired factories. The workers’ leisure time is pinched and their spirit and energy, squashed.
Forces of wealth diminish centuries-old football traditions, leaving lingering matches, found here and there, on coal fields and other barren patches. Some villages hold fast to their annual mass football match during a perennial festival.
Around the 1820s, football’s next stage starts to brew. What follows is a game morphing through decades of reinventions, moving adamantly toward the goal to organize the chaos of folk football.
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