Dave’s Football Blog

Part 2 of The Playing Fields, a series on how where we played football shaped the rules of our games.

As we all know, two of our major football codes were formed in England in the 19th century — Association football and Rugby football. The former was a finesse game that involved kicking and dribbling, while the latter was a physical game involving running, tackling, mauling and rucking. But have you ever wondered what made these football games so divergent?

Simply put, they’re products of their environments. The Rugby School had wide open fields where boys could run around and tackle each other, and other public schools in England that had similar fields promoted similar games. Some public schools, though, such as Westminster and Charterhouse, didn’t have wide open fields, so they had to play football inside the only space they had — inside the cloisters.

Here’s a picture of the Charterhouse School cloisters:

You try playing rugby in there. Half the kids would end up like Chris Simms, and back then, life without a spleen wasn’t nearly as easy…

The headmasters of these schools recognized this and decided they had to create a football game that fit the playing field and didn’t get their boys maimed on a regular basis. The result was a game that involved kicking and dribbling the ball with minimal contact between players. To make things interesting, they told the boys that they couldn’t use their hands. After all, this was football. You should move the ball around with your feet, right?

Somehow, this concept managed to catch on elsewhere, and other schools started playing this simple kick-and-dribble game on open fields, too. Before you knew it, the representatives from Westminster and Charterhouse had weight to throw around at the first Football Association meetings, which resulted in the soccer game we see today. The folks at Westminster seem awfully proud of that, too.

Part 1: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Pitch

Trackback URI | Comments RSS