Dave’s Football Blog

I was going to put this in comments, but really, it deserved its own post, because it gets to the heart of what this blog has become this year…

Commenter JRR thinks Thierry Henry has a point when he said he can’t understand why American football is called “football.” Here are a few lines from his comments under that post:

i hope you can prove me wrong with your history lesson as i am very interested to know how your take on football relates to the technical use of your feet with acheiving the desired objective of scoring a point, try, TD etc what ever you want to call it.

Let’s see. Are you playing the game on foot? Are you playing with a ball? Does the game involve kicking the ball through a goal or reaching a goal on your opponent’s end of the field? Sounds like football to me.

the issue then relates to which game came first - because if the rules for football were developed based on the round ball then where is the relevance with other codes using the same name for their sport.

Well, if you’re going to talk about which game game first, then Australian Football wins. The first official Aussie Rules were written in 1858, a full seven years before the Football Association was formed…

Oh, wait. The Aussie Rules were based on the Cambridge Rules, which were published in England in 1848. In fact, the Cambridge Rules had elements from both Association football and Australian football. So let’s go back and play that, since it came before everything…

Except it didn’t. They were playing ballown back in New Jersey in the 1820s. That came before the Cambridge Rules, so perhaps that should be the one true football…

Until you consider that there were football games in England and Italy centuries before then. The creators of Calcio Fiorentino published the rules of that game in 1580. Perhaps that is the one true football. Let’s convert all our pitches into sand pits and let everyone have it out…

Oh, wait. There’s a football that predates that — mob football, which was played during Shrovetide celebrations in medieval England. 1,000 guys from one side of town vs. 1,000 guys from the other side of town, all in a big struggling mob trying to get the ball to their opponent’s bell tower. That must be first, right? Let’s throw out every other football code and start from there…

Except football didn’t start there. You still had Cuju, Kemari and Harpastum before that, and Cuju probably took even more forms than modern football does today. 1,000 years ago, you probably had whole rooms full of Chinese Cuju fans arguing over which game was “the real Cuju.”

Do you see the problem here? You simply can’t call any one game “football” and leave it at that. All these games we call football evolved over time, but they are all come from the same source, and they all share a common concept — playing on a field, on foot, with a ball, attempting to score a goal. In fact, every modern football game involves kicking the ball through a goal in some way.

Whether you run with the ball or kick the ball, it’s all football. That’s the point that both you and Thierry Henry are missing by a mile. You’ll never see Henry bounce a penalty kick off the corner flag quite like this.

personally i feel what ever you want to call your game needs to reflect what happens in that sport (or atleast differentiate it from other sports) for this reason, “soccer is football” and other codes using the name are harming their global popularity.

Give me one example of how any other code of football is harming its worldwide popularity by calling itself football. How fast did Wembley Stadium sell out for that Giants-Dolphins game? Likewise, I only see soccer getting bigger in places where other football codes dominate, and different types of football are coming into vogue every year. Football adapts and evolves all the time. I can’t be the only one that sees this.

as far as “soccer” goes, we are a country that plays “football” - if you are a historian then you will remember we officially changed the national games name from soccer to football - hence FFA aligning oursleves to the rest of the world.

You’re joking, right? Dude, you even know where the word “soccer” comes from? The answer is right here on this blog. Click here and learn something.

Seriously, they should teach this shit in college or something. “Football Evolution 101″ might start out as a running joke as “another typical class for dumb jocks,” but once people realized what was being taught and the conversations and arguments that came out of it, it would become the most popular elective on campus within two years.

I want tenure, bitches.

(An aside: as I finished typing this, my MP3 player started playing the latest episode of Coverville. First song — Prince’s cover of “What if God Was One of Us?”. I don’t know why, but that seems strangely appropriate right now…)

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