The Rule Book of Association Football 1863
by
A Group of Former English Public School Men

The game of football has, over the last century, totally changed the worlds of sport, the media and leisure. It was able to do that solely because of a book of laws - more commonly called rules - written by a group of former public school men in 1863 in London. Without that book, 'the beautiful game' as the great Brazilian footballer, Pelé, called it, would not have kicked off. Because of that book and the proselytising enthusiasm of British sailors and merchants and adventurers on their expeditions around the planet, it is now estimated that this year - 2006 - eight out of ten people in the world are expected to watch something of the World Cup being held in Germany.

Football is played worldwide by more than one and a half million teams and three hundred thousand clubs. This does not include the hundreds and thousands of schools and youth clubs. There are over 5 million officials involved in the game. More than 20 million women play the game and their numbers are growing.

It has become part of the national consciousness of almost every country in the world. It would be fair to say that it has become more than just a game: it attracts tribal followings, it produces icons, it provokes passions sometimes not too far removed from extreme politics and a devotion which has religious connotations. It is a colossal money-spinner and money-eater on an ever increasing scale. It drives television channels and radio stations and newspapers national, local and specialised. It is a form of universal language, perhaps the most effective form. It has caused at least one war and many battles, often tragic, off the pitch. It has always triggered outbursts of local and national joy, pride, unity. It is colour blind and its influence on breaking down racial prejudice has been strong and widely noted. And all this flowed from the meeting of a few Victorian Oxbridge graduates in a pub in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London in 1863. Before the afternoon was out they had called themselves 'The Football Association' and the Rule Book was on its way.

This short book made it possible for everyone everywhere to play the same game. Before 1863, football had been a riotous confusion.

There are several versions of how the game began. One is that it has its origin in the Roman city of Chester where, half a millennium after the Romans departed from Britain, the Anglo-Saxons played a sort of football with the heads of the conquered Danes. Some scholars push it back farther, into the time of the Roman occupation, and claim it was a way of celebrating occasional British or Celtic victories against the imperial occupiers, this time a Roman head doing the honours. Religion appears in another early version where we have the football (or blown-up bladder) symbolising the sun. It was punted around the fields to ensure a rich harvest. But Professor James Walvin, author of The People's Game, has little truck with any of this. 'Games of football', he writes, 'were ubiquitous, spontaneous and traditional ... The killing of animals provided people with bladders, unsuitable for most other purposes but ideal to inflate and play with.'

Football emerges more substantially in the written records in the Middle Ages. In the same book Professor Walvin writes, 'The game was simply an ill-defined contest between indeterminate crowds of youths, often played in riotous fashion, often in tightly restricted city streets, provoking uproar and damage to property and attracting to the fray anyone with an inclination to violence.'

It is complained of regularly in medieval chronicles. Between 1314 and 1410 new banning orders had to be passed about every twenty years. Yet it would not be put down. One criticism was that it distracted young men from their real business in leisure hours which was to practise with the bow, to maintain the fearsome reputation of the British archers in the French wars. In 1477 a law was passed banning football outright on the grounds that 'Every strong and able-bodied man shall practice with the bow, for the reason that the national defence depends on bowmen'. In Scotland they were more direct. A law issued from the court of King James I stated, 'Nae man shall play at fute-ball.' It is not stretching a point too much, I think, to see these bans still with us in the many 'No Ball Games' signs on estates.

But the bladder would not be denied. Sometimes it was allowed on Shrove Tuesday, a Saturnalian festival before the start of Christian Lent, and a day on which order was deliberately allowed to be, even encouraged to be, overturned. Football was good at that. In his pamphlet 'The Anatomy of Abuses' in 1583, Philip Stubbs wrote, "Football playing is a devilish pastime.'

He continued:
... it may rather be called a friendly kinde of fight than a play or recreation, a bloody and murthering practice than a felowly sport or pastime. For dooth not everyone lye in wayht for his adversarie, seeking to overthrow him and picke him on his nose though it be upon hard stones? ... So that by these means ... sometimes their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometime their legs, sometime their arms; sometime one part is thrust out of joint, sometime another ... Sometime the noses gush out with blood, sometimes their eyes start out and sometimes hurt in one place, sometimes in another.

A few lines from the eighteenth century indicate that the game had not changed despite all the censures:

I spy the Forces of the Football War: The Prentice quits his shop, to join the Crew,
Increasing crowds the flying Game pursue.