Before the Rules · 400 BC-1848
For two thousand years people kicked balls in ceremonies, in army training and in village brawls, and no two places played to the same rules.
How a chaotic village brawl became the biggest game on earth. From Han-dynasty cuju and Florentine street battles, through the London tavern where eleven men wrote the rules in a single evening, to a game watched by half the planet. The closing chapter is about why football, of all the games ever invented, is the one that spread. Images: Wikimedia Commons. See also the World Cup 2026 timeline.
For two thousand years people kicked balls in ceremonies, in army training and in village brawls, and no two places played to the same rules.
The Greeks play episkyros, a rough team ball game on a pitch marked with a centre line, and the Romans take it up as harpastum and carry it around their empire. A marble relief in Athens from about 400 BC shows a young man balancing a ball on his thigh, the oldest surviving image of anything like keepy-uppy.
Soldiers in Han-dynasty China train with cuju (蹴鞠, “kick-ball”), a leather ball stuffed with feathers, played without the hands. In later centuries players aim it through a small opening in a net strung between poles. FIFA recognises cuju as the earliest documented form of the game. It is played for some fifteen hundred years and dies out under the Ming.
Medieval mob football sets whole villages against each other, with hundreds of players, goals miles apart, few rules and many broken bones. English kings ban it again and again from 1314, chiefly because the men are playing it when they should be practising archery. The bans do not work. A version is still played every Shrovetide in Ashbourne, Derbyshire.
Renaissance Florence gives its own violent version a fixed form: calcio fiorentino, 27 players a side in the Piazza Santa Croce, played by noblemen and, by repute, by three future popes. In 1580 Giovanni de' Bardi publishes its rules, one of the first written codes for any ball game.
In fifty-six years the English turn a mob game into a sport with written laws, clubs, a cup, a league and paid players.
Students from rival English public schools arrive at Cambridge each knowing a different game called football. In 1848 they meet to agree a single code and produce eleven rules, among them no carrying the ball and no hacking (kicking shins). By tradition the rules were pinned to the trees around Parker's Piece. They chose skill over force, and the codes that followed kept that choice.
Two cricketers, Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, found Sheffield FC, which FIFA recognises as the oldest football club in the world. Sheffield writes its own laws, and those laws give the game corner kicks, free kicks, a crossbar and heading.
Representatives of eleven London clubs and schools meet at the Freemasons' Tavern on 26 October and found the Football Association. Over six meetings they write the Laws of the Game, drawing on the Cambridge rules. When the FA votes to ban running with the ball and hacking, the Blackheath delegate withdraws his club, and the clubs that wanted those things go on to form the Rugby Football Union in 1871.
FA secretary Charles Alcock proposes a knockout cup open to every member club. The FA Cup is the oldest national football competition in the world, and its knockout format means a small club can, in principle, put out anyone.
Scotland 0-0 England at Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow on 30 November, the first official international match, watched by about 4,000 people. The Scots pass the ball between players while the English dribble alone, and over the following decades the passing game wins the argument.
Northern clubs have been paying working-class players under the table for years. In 1885 the FA gives up and legalises professionalism. From then on football is a job for the men who play it and a business for the clubs that pay them.
Twelve clubs from the Midlands and the North form the first Football League, with a fixed calendar of home-and-away fixtures that guarantees each club regular gate money. Preston North End win the first season unbeaten and are called the Invincibles. Nearly every national league since has copied the format.
In one year the penalty kick, the goal net and a referee on the pitch, in place of two umpires on the touchline, all enter the game. The penalty gives football its simplest contest: one player, one goalkeeper, twelve yards.
The British Ladies' Football Club, organised by Nettie Honeyball, plays the first recorded women's match, at Crouch End in north London, in front of about 10,000 spectators. Most of the press disapproves. The crowd does not.
Large crowds, a fifty-year ban by the FA, and a recovery that has made the women's game one of the fastest-growing sports in the world.
Seven associations, from France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, meet in Paris and found FIFA. Britain wrote the rules, and the governing body of the world game was set up without it. England joins in 1905.
FIFA is founded, the World Cup begins, and the game passes out of British control.
Football becomes an official Olympic sport at the London Games, with national teams, in the first real international tournament. The demand it shows for nations playing nations is more than the Olympics can satisfy, and in 1930 FIFA starts its own.
Women's football grows during the First World War, when women fill the munitions factories and the factory teams play for charity. On Boxing Day 1920 the Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston play St Helens at Goodison Park in front of 53,000 people, with thousands more locked outside. No women's club match draws more for 98 years. Their forward Lily Parr is said to have scored around a thousand goals.
With women's matches drawing bigger crowds than many men's, the FA declares the game “quite unsuitable for females” and bans it from the grounds of all its member clubs. Without stadiums, the women's game in England survives only on parks and recreation grounds. The ban is lifted in 1971.
FIFA president Jules Rimet gives the first world championship to Uruguay, the reigning Olympic champions. Only 13 teams enter, and the four from Europe spend two weeks at sea getting there. In the new Estadio Centenario, Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 in front of 68,000 people.
Brazil need only a draw at home, in a Maracanã holding some 200,000 people, the largest crowd ever recorded at a football match. Uruguay win 2-1. Brazil gives the defeat a name, the Maracanazo, and by 1954 the national team has dropped the white shirt it wore that day for the yellow one.
The World Cup in Switzerland is the first to be televised. West Germany beat Hungary 3-2 in the final, the “Miracle of Bern”, and a country nine years out of the war watches at home. From here the growth of the sport and the growth of television run together.
An idea from Gabriel Hanot, a journalist at L'Équipe, becomes the European Cup: the champions of each country playing one another, midweek, under floodlights. Real Madrid win the first five.
Brazil win their first World Cup, in Sweden, and a 17-year-old scores twice in the final. Pelé, born poor in Minas Gerais, becomes the first footballer known in every country.
Mexico 1970 goes out live, in colour, by satellite, and the world watches a Brazil side that many still call the best ever assembled beat Italy 4-1 in the final. For many viewers on every continent, it was the first World Cup they saw.
Johan Cruyff and the Netherlands lose the final to West Germany and change how the game is played. In Total Football any outfield player can take any other's role, the team squeezes the pitch, and space becomes the thing to attack. Most modern tactical ideas descend from it.
In a quarter-final against England, four minutes apart, Diego Maradona punches the ball into the net and then runs from his own half past five England players to score. He credited the first goal to the hand of God. The second was voted the goal of the century in a FIFA poll in 2002.
Television money, free movement of players, and a game watched by more people than any other.
Twenty years after the FA ban ends, FIFA holds the first Women's World Cup, in China. The United States win, the first of a record four titles.
In 1992 the top English clubs break away to form the Premier League, and the European Cup becomes the Champions League. Both are built around the sale of television rights. Over the next thirty years that money turns the leading clubs into global brands and multiplies transfer fees.
Jean-Marc Bosman, a Belgian midfielder few had heard of, wins his case at the European Court of Justice: players out of contract can move for free, and quotas on EU players per team are unlawful. Power moves from clubs to players and their agents, and the best players gather in a handful of rich leagues.
Korea and Japan host the first World Cup outside Europe and the Americas. South Africa follows in 2010, the first in Africa, and Qatar in 2022, the first in the Arab world.
VAR, video assistant refereeing, is used at a World Cup for the first time, alongside goal-line technology, and semi-automated offside follows in 2022. More decisions are correct, and goals are celebrated a little later. The argument over whether that is a fair exchange has not stopped.
Argentina beat France on penalties after a 3-3 final in Lusail. Lionel Messi, 35, wins the World Cup at his fifth attempt, and FIFA puts the audience at about 1.5 billion people. Four years later he plays a sixth.
Spain beat England 1-0 in Sydney to win their first Women's World Cup, and FIFA reports a tournament audience of close to two billion. At the medal ceremony the president of the Spanish federation kissed a player without her consent. Within a month, after a boycott by the national team and a FIFA suspension, he had resigned.
A football can be made from rags, plastic bags, tape or a bundle of socks. The game needs no bat, stick, net, ice, horse or pool, and no protective kit. That is the main reason it took hold fastest in the places with the least money: a child can play it with nothing that has to be bought.
Put the ball in their goal and do not use your hands. A five-year-old can follow the object of the game after one sentence, and offside is the only rule that takes real explaining. Cricket and American football need study. A game that fits in a sentence can be taken up by a whole country within a generation, which is roughly what happened in South America between the 1880s and the 1920s.
A professional match produces about 2.7 goals. Because goals are scarce, the better team loses more often than in most sports, and an underdog always has a real chance. Statisticians call it a high-variance sport. It also means each goal counts for far more than a basket does in a basketball game, where each team scores about a hundred points.
Football was codified in 1863, when Britain ran the largest trading empire in the world. British sailors, railway engineers, mill managers and mining crews took the game to the ports and towns where they worked, which is why Athletic Club in Bilbao, Genoa and River Plate still carry English names. The rules were written in the country with the most ships at sea.
Two halves of 45 minutes with almost no stoppages fit a broadcast slot, and the game has no natural breaks for advertising, so the viewer sees an unbroken match. Satellite television then gave local clubs audiences on other continents, and the World Cup became one of the most watched events of any kind.
Most people inherit a club, from a parent, a street, a city or a diaspora. It gives them a side they did not choose and rarely leave, something to care about every week, and a way of saying where they are from. Cost and simplicity explain how the game spread. Inherited loyalty explains why it stayed.
An often-cited estimate puts the number of people who follow football at about four billion. The 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico was the largest ever staged, with 48 nations and 104 matches, and Spain won it, beating Argentina 1-0 after extra time at MetLife Stadium on 19 July. The whole tournament is in our World Cup 2026 timeline.