The making of the world's game

How a violent village pastime became the most widely played sport on earth

For most of its existence the game now played in every corner of the world possessed no history in the sense historians prefer: no governing body, no agreed laws, no records of results. What existed instead was a scattered family of local pastimes, remembered collectively as folk football, in which large and largely unregulated crowds attempted to move an inflated animal bladder towards a landmark at the far end of a parish. The boundaries of the pitch were the boundaries of the village; the number of participants was however many happened to arrive; and the contests, generally staged on feast days, were sufficiently destructive that magistrates spent several centuries attempting, with conspicuous lack of success, to suppress them altogether.

The transformation of this pastime into a codified sport began not in the villages but in the reformed public schools of nineteenth-century England, and it began as an administrative inconvenience rather than an act of invention. Each school had adapted the inherited game to the peculiarities of its own premises. At Rugby, where the playing field was extensive and the turf forgiving, carrying the ball became an accepted manoeuvre. At Charterhouse, where boys were confined to a narrow stone cloister, the ball had to be worked forward by the feet in tight spaces, and a tradition of intricate dribbling developed instead. Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Shrewsbury each produced further variations, every one of them internally consistent and mutually incompatible.

The difficulty surfaced when these boys progressed to university. A young man arriving at Cambridge in the 1840s discovered that his companions had been trained in codes whose most basic provisions contradicted his own, and that a match therefore required an hour of negotiation before it could begin, followed by disputes that frequently ended it. In 1848 a group of undergraduates representing several of the schools met to resolve the problem by committee. The document they produced, subsequently known as the Cambridge Rules, was less an inspired creation than a treaty: it conceded something to every faction and thereby offended all of them moderately rather than any of them fatally.

Codification proceeded in parallel outside the universities. Sheffield Football Club, founded in 1857 by two former pupils of Collegiate School and generally recognised as the oldest club in the world still in existence, drew up a code of its own, elaborated it steadily over the following decade, and organised the earliest sustained programme of competitive fixtures anywhere. Sheffield's laws contributed several features now regarded as essential — the corner kick and the crossbar among them — and the city's players continued to observe their own regulations for years after a national body existed, joining the wider game only when the terms suited them.

That national body was constituted on an autumn evening in 1863, when representatives of a dozen clubs and schools assembled at the Freemasons' Tavern in London and resolved to establish the Football Association. Its stated purpose was modest and procedural: to settle a single code that its members would all consent to observe. Over six meetings that autumn the enterprise nearly collapsed, and it did so over a question that appears trivial at a distance of a century and a half.

The question was hacking — the deliberate kicking of an opponent's shins, permitted at Rugby and defended by its adherents as the guarantee of the game's masculinity. Blackheath's representative warned the assembly that abolishing the practice would strip the sport of its courage and leave it, in a phrase remembered ever since, to men who preferred safety to spirit. For a time the argument went his way. What turned it was the appearance of a freshly revised version of the Cambridge Rules, which prohibited hacking outright and demonstrated that a code without it was neither unmanly nor unplayable. In December 1863 the Association published its first Laws of the Game, forbidding both hacking and the carrying of the ball. Blackheath resigned in protest, and the clubs that shared its preferences went on to found the Rugby Football Union eight years afterwards.

Agreement on paper did not settle everything. The Association's authority grew only as it acquired something worth administering: a knockout competition from 1871, the reluctant legalisation of payment to players in 1885 after northern clubs were caught compensating them in defiance of the amateur ideal, and a league championship from 1888. Each concession transferred the game a little further from the schoolmasters who had codified it towards the industrial towns whose spectators now financed it.

What followed was not planned by anyone in that room. The Association had produced a set of laws short enough to be printed on a few pages, requiring no special surface, no expensive equipment and no official interpretation, and this portability proved decisive. British engineers laying railways, merchants opening offices and sailors ashore for a week carried the printed laws to Europe and South America, where local enthusiasts adopted them without the slightest interest in the social distinctions the schools had encoded. Within four decades the game had acquired an international federation, and the men who had argued about shin-kicking in a London tavern had unknowingly settled the rules of the most widely played sport on earth.