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The History of Soccer
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There is not just one theory as to wear soccer came from. The history
of soccer is a very interwoven tangle of different threads that
have come to make up what we call soccer, today. It is certainly
not solely the English who invented the sport; although, many people
do credit the English with the great feat.
Back in 200 b.c. in China, a form of soccer was played –
players would dribble a leather ball. This is perhaps the earliest
evidence of soccer. Greeks and Romans also played a sort of soccer
– a sort of soccer in which you could actually carry the ball
and have teams of 27 players. Kyoto, Japan has also left evidence
of a field marked out to play a ball-kicking game.
Soccer as we know it today, though, can be greatly credited to
England. One popular story goes that the first ball was the head
of a dead Danish brigand! Trying to describe where soccer came from
can be more confusing than describing to a child where babies come
from – there is not a simple answer. Of course, with soccer,
there are certainly more than just two countries that gave birth
to the game as we know it today.
Some form of soccer, or rather, a ball-kicking game, have been
played at least somewhere at some time on the planet for 3000 years.
Soccer has even been strong enough to withstand laws forbidding
soccer set forth by both English royalty King Edward III and later
Queen Elizabeth and Scottish King James I. No law could stop the
history of soccer from evolving… the game of soccer was just
too popular.
Official rules were set in England a few times during the 1800s.
Different sets of rules varied the game a bit, but the official
rules that we still use today were set in 1869 by the English Football
Association. These rules included a rule that forbade the handling
of the ball.
Where did the name “soccer” come from? Well, under
the national Football Association in England, and sort of soccer
played under its jurisdiction was called association football. As
time passed, people tended to abbreviate the ward “association”
into “assoc.” which eventually led to the word “soccer.”
Of course, most of the world still calls soccer “football,”
it is mostly just in North America that the sport is known by the
name of “soccer.”
There is much more to the history of soccer than what is listed
here, of course. Soccer was played in the Western world as well.
As you can see from this small taste, though, the history of soccer
is very rich and wide-spanning.
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