Dave’s Football Blog

For the first week of this new blog format, we’ll take a look at the six most popular football games on the planet, in no particular order but the one I choose, and give a brief overview of where they come from and where they might be going.

I have a confession to make.

Not too long ago, I used to believe that Association Football — or “soccer,” as the American kids like to call it — was evil. I even wrote as much on this very blog. I had always looked beyond the game itself, choosing to tie it directly to all the violence and hooliganism that happened around it. Those nutters in Italy and France could have given me more ammo for that viewpoint in the last few months, too.

The truth, though, is that I’ve been horribly biased for a very long time, and it’s time I came to terms with that bias. You see, I took a corner kick in the crotch when I was 13.

(More after the jump.)

It was my own fault, too, really, because I confused one form of football with another. I approached the corner kick like it was a field goal in American football, and I honestly thought it was my job to run to that corner, stretch out and “block that kick.” So of course, when the kick hit me square in the nuts at full blast, I just knew I was going to hate this game for the rest of my life.

The worst thing about that incident, though? Nobody on the pitch that day had a video camera. Bob Saget could have paid half my college tuition if someone had just caught that on tape…

Something changed in me in the last year or so, though. Perhaps I finally understood why I hated soccer all these years, accepted it and moved on. Now that I have some sense of the history of this particular football game, I can actually enjoy a well-played English Premier League match.

What’s the history, you ask? Well, the short version is something like this:

When mob football died out in England around the Industrial Revolution, headmasters in English public school took the game, civilized it a bit and made it an organized team sport, allowing their boys to let out some aggression on the field. However, not every school actually had a field. Some schools — Rugby School, in particular — had open spaces where kids could run with the ball and tackle each other, but other schools had to play football within cloisters, and most sideline tackles resulted in broken bones and cracked skulls.

So in order to save the constant embarrassment of telling mothers that their sons brains had seen the light of day, headmasters created football games that removed running and tackling and instead emphasized finesse and ball-handling skills.

This eventually led to the formation of The Football Association in London in 1863, which spent a few days arguing over rules and eventually decided on adopting something called “The Simplest Game,” which eventually eliminated the use of hands all together. This game became known as “Association Football.” (That’s what the FA in FIFA stands for, by the way.)

It’s worth noting, though, that the FA’s earliest attempts at a unified code included some very non-soccer-like rules. For example, the ability to make a fair catch and get a free kick from the spot of the catch was part of the earliest FA rules. They got rid of that rule, but it remains a staple of Australian Football. (More about that later in the week.) Oh, and the gentleman from Blackheath stormed out of the FA in a huff, declaring that it wasn’t “true football” unless you could kick the ball carrier in the shins. Seriously.

At some point along the way, the kids took the “soc” out of “Association” and formed the word “soccer,” but people only call it soccer in places where another form of football is more dominant — meaning not too many places, really. The U.S., Canada, Australia, and sometimes Ireland call it soccer.

Everywhere else, though, it’s the most popular form of football, in no small part because it is the simplest game. All you need is a ball, two goals and a patch of dirt about so big, and you can play this Association Football game. Some of the fans may be unhinged, but the game itself? It’s not so evil after all, is it?

Just don’t run up to block those corner kicks. Trust me on that one.