Soccer

Soccer, known by various versions of the word football in most of the world, is a global contemporary cultural phenomenon. Since its standardization in the late 19th century in England, the sport has traveled with remarkable verve and speed, anchoring itself in almost every society on Earth. What explains its popularity? What institutions have shaped and been shaped by it in various contexts? And how has it impacted the world?

Various kinds of ball games have existed in societies throughout the world for millennia. The oldest written rules governing such games known today come from China, and archaeological and documentary evidence makes clear their importance in the societies of Mesoamerica. The immediate ancestors of the contemporary game of soccer, however, are a diverse set of games played in England, which were increasingly channeled and codified within the English school system in the 19th century. As these schools began to play against one another, they worked to agree on a set of norms and practices that could be shared across institutions to avoid the confusions that resulted from the panoply of different rules in existence.

In 1863, the “Cambridge Rules” were codified at a London meeting of alumni from various universities. Although adjustments to these rules followed, this set of rules formed the basis of what became known as “association football.” The fundamental aspect of this game was that it codified the use of the feet rather than the hands—except by the goalie—thus eliminating the carrying of the ball. Rugby, which came out of the same broad set of games as association football, maintained ball carrying. Out of rugby there emerged, in North America, the sport of [Page 1556]American football, codified at elite universities there in the late 19th century. Of the three sports, American football remains contained to North America. Rugby and association football, however, spread rapidly throughout the English colonial and commercial empires starting in the late 19th century.

Interestingly, however, association football did something that rugby did not: It extended beyond the cultural and social boundaries in which it first traveled and was appropriated and embraced by a wide range of social groups. In Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, for instance, the sport was first played within English merchant communities and was quickly taken up by other local groups. Local clubs were formed in many areas, including among marginalized sectors of the population, such as people of African descent in Brazil. They spread from large urban areas into smaller cities and the countryside. By the early 20th century, in Latin America, national teams were established to play against one another, and, in 1916, a regional confederation—the first of its kind—was created to organize international matches on the continent. In Africa, where some European colonists and missionaries envisioned the sport as an ideal way to inculcate the colonized with European values of discipline, solidarity, acceptance of rules, and cooperative effort, the sport rapidly spilled out of its colonial quarters. From Cameroon to Algeria, communities created clubs; in many cases, these clubs became centers for community expression and, at times, anticolonial politics. Indeed, football played a significant role in some anticolonial struggles, most famously in Algeria where the Front de Libération National, fighting for independence from France, created a football team in 1958 that toured the world as a representative for the revolutionary movement.

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