ABSTRACT
Historical accounts of football go back thousands of years, and, despite historians’ best efforts, the complete origins of the game are shrouded in mystery (Walvin, 1994). It is likely that ancient civilizations lay claim to the earliest origins of some variant of football (Giulianotti, 1999). Some of the earliest evidence suggests that there were numerous informal games in which a ball-often in the form of dead animals’ bladders, which provided the ideal material to inflate-was kicked and/or handled. The oldest balls in existence hail from Ancient Egypt, from around 2000 bc, and were made from wood, leather and papyrus (Lanfranchi et al., 2004). Forms of football occurred across the world, with most records indicating inconsistent, spontaneous and localized variations. Some of the earliest evidence of football points toward indigenous Amazonian tribes who played several ball games as far back as 1500 bc (Galeano, 1995). FIFA’s official history of football credits the earliest recorded version of a ballkicking game to China, in the form of tsu’-chu or, most commonly, cujusimply translated as “kick-ball”—a game which allegedly spans back to the Han dynasty in 206 bc, although FIFA only recognize it from the second and third centuries (Goldblatt, 2006). According to Giulianotti’s (1999) historical outline of football, it is this version which has rules extremely similar to football as we know it today (for example, a set of players kicked a ball into a designated space in order to “score”). Other global variations of football also existed across time and space: kermari was played in medieval Japan from the twelfth century, although Goldblatt (2006) wrote that several Japanese historians have insisted its origins lay as far back as the sixth century bce. In Europe, La Soule was typically played on religious holidays across the Northern regions of France-Brittany, Normandy and Picardy. A game of uncertain origins, evidence possibly exists from as far back as the twelfth century (Williams, 2015). More famously, calcio or calcio fiorentino was played in medieval and early modern Florence, Italy until its disappearance in the mideighteenth century (Rowley, 2015). Revived by fascists in the 1930s, it continues to be played annually throughout Florence (Goldblatt, 2006).
