In Greece, there were four names for what may have been ultimately a single game: harpastum (ἁρπαστόν), episkyros (ἐπίσκυρος), phaininda (φαίνινδα) and epikoinos (ἐπίκοινος, “the common” or “people’s game”). Yet these cultures clearly were addicted to their ball games, which were usually played naked ( gymnasium, from γυμνάσιον, means “nude training place”, after all). 1150 (National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan). In the meantime, sit back and marvel at just how raucous football once was…ĭetail from Su Hanchen’s One Hundred Children in the Long Spring, AD c. Yes yes, we know that there is a tangled web of parallel and intermingling threads running through the history of European ball games at large – such as the medieval French game seault (or soule or choule?), which may even be a survival of a Celtic game – but that’s a story for another day.

Antigone has set out to tell the story of the sport from the Greeks and the Romans through to Twenty-first Britain. And indeed the evolution of both games continues: for example, the introduction of the backpass rule appeared only in the 1990s, and this season we have of course seen another important – if contested – innovation: Video Assistant Refereeing (VAR). The modern gap between these sports – not just in their rules but in their crowds and culture – remains stark. This decision brought order to the messy and organic evolution of those two ‘football’ siblings, “Soccer” (Association Football) and Rugby Football. By contrast, the “Sheffield Rules” endorsed a lot more physical force, reflecting the spirit of the “Rugby game”, which the schoolboy William Webb Ellis had inspired by going rogue and picking up the ball in 1823. The outcome was an endorsement of the “Cambridge Rules”, which prohibited handling the ball and hacking, i.e. It was of course this Football Association that decided in 1863 – over a London pub table and with a toast of “success to football, irrespective of class or creed” – to stamp some rules on a chaotic game.

So, to put things all in context, and to bang the drum for the historic home of Association Football, Last month, Wembley hosted the oldest football competition of them all, the FA Cup Final, which swung around for the 140th time. What’s more, with both England and Scotland playing host, some of our readers were given to dream. When Euro 2020 at last arrived, however fashionably late, it marked the first time in the competition’s history that the three countries of Great Britain all made the finals.

Scshape latin modern roman