→ Main article: History of football
Early forms of play
In the second millennium BC, a football-like game called Cuju (Ts'u-chü) ("cu" = to push with the foot; "ju" = ball) was played in China. Nothing is known about the rules of the game at that time. However, it is considered certain that it was conducted as a military training program to train soldiers. In the course of the Zhou dynasty, the sporting game spread among the people, and an attempt was made to limit violence and rowdiness by means of rules. The ball was made of leather pieces sewn together and stuffed with feathers and animal hair. In the Qin to Sui dynasties, the game of soccer grew in popularity. Between the years 220 and 680, the air-filled ball was invented and football rules (goals, goalkeepers and captains) were recorded for the first time. About 100 years later, however, the game fell into oblivion again.
Images of ball games on reliefs and vases have survived from the cultural sphere of ancient Greece, primarily from Sparta, where physical training was highly valued. The Romans of antiquity also knew ball sports, which, like the Chinese Cuju, were played in a military context.
The Turkish scholar Mahmud al-Kajgharī describes in his book dīwān lughāt at-turk that in the 11th century among the Turkic peoples living in the Central Asian region a game called tepük (Old Turkic for: kick or footstep) enjoyed great popularity.
In the early Middle Ages in England, an early type of today's football game was practiced in which inhabitants of two towns tried to get a ball through the opposing town gate. The "playing field" was always between two towns, even if they were several miles apart.
With the discovery of America, Europeans came into contact with the ancient ball games of Central America, which had a long tradition across different cultures, sometimes had a religious or judicial function, and were played in fortified stadiums.
Even though England is considered the "mother country of football", there were also fighting games in France and Italy that were already related to the game of shooters. Since the 15th century, the Calcio Storico has been practiced in Florence, a kind of football game in which things can get quite rough. Scaino wrote in 1555:
"The runner who runs through the field with the ball in his hand should be given space by those who are strong enough so that their man has free passage without hindrance. But if he sees himself attacked by a large crowd, he shall slacken his pace and ... push the ball, and he will be able to do this more quickly with the push of the foot than in any other way, since a push in this way is safer. “
However, Scaino also specified the size of the pitch (the church square in front of Santa Croce (Florence) = about 100 × 50 m), determined that goals decide (and not the beautiful game or the particularly beautiful outfit) and that the game is excluded from normal life (subordination relations of real life do not apply on the pitch, i.e. the master cannot order the servant to give him the ball).
The roots of football in the 19th century
In 1848, students at Cambridge University wrote the first football rules. After that, a team consisted of 15 to 20 players. In 1857, cricketers founded Sheffield FC, the world's first official football club. England is therefore considered the "motherland of football", not least because it was here that the Football Association (FA), founded in London in 1863, was formed, a comprehensive set of rules was created and the development of the sport was sustainably promoted.
The term soccer as the English name for football is derived from the term association football for the sport, which was coined as a contrast to rugby, in the sense of playing football according to the rules of the Football Association.
In 1866 the offside rule was introduced, and in the Sheffield Code the rules were extended to include the corner kick and the free kick. In 1870, the FA limited the number of players to eleven. A year later, the English Football Association banned all field players from playing with their hands; only the goalkeeper was still allowed to play the ball with his hand in his own half, but had to release it after two steps. In 1872, a uniform ball size was established. With these rules, the game of football was increasingly differentiated from rugby, which was much more widespread at the time.
In 1872, the first official international match was played in Glasgow between Scotland and England (final score 0-0). The same year saw the introduction of the FA Cup, the first national football competition, and two years later the football referee, who officiated the match.
In 1878 the first match under electric lighting (by so-called floodlights) took place in Sheffield at Bramall Lane. One year later the first professional league in England was founded (first champion was Preston North End). In 1891, penalty kicks were introduced into the regulations in Ireland. Since 1897, a deciding match could be extended in the event of a draw. Two years later, the English FA allowed paid club transfers in England, but initially only at a maximum of ten pounds.
In continental Europe, football first became established in Switzerland. In the Lake Geneva region, Englishmen studying at private schools there introduced football from around 1855. The oldest club still in existence, FC St. Gallen, also founded by English students in 1879, subsequently played a central role in administrative matters relating to football. From Switzerland, football was exported to surrounding countries. Stade Helvétique Marseille, founded by Swiss, became French champions in 1909; the team consisted of 10 Swiss and one Englishman. FC Barcelona, in turn, was founded by the Swiss Joan Gamper.
In 1895, eleven Swiss clubs, including university teams made up of British players, formed the Swiss Football Association. The first Swiss championship was held in the 1897/1898 season under the sponsorship of La Suisse Sportive, a French sports newspaper.
In Germany, the game of football was still in its infancy at the time. It was first introduced by the grammar school teacher Konrad Koch in 1874 at the Martino-Katharineum in Braunschweig. Koch himself was a supporter of rugby throughout his life. His biographer Malte Oberschelp stresses that Koch did not introduce football to Germany, but rugby. That is why he had his pupils play this variant of football with picking up the ball with their hands. In the western Rhineland, resident English merchants and industrialists brought the "sport of football" into the country alongside the traditional equestrian sport. It had to struggle for social recognition here for much longer than in the mother country England, because until the 20th century German physical training and education was synonymous with gymnastics, which had been firmly anchored in schools and the military since the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. The team sport imported from England was a new and modern form of physical culture in the German Empire.
For a long time, the first football club in Germany was considered to be the Dresden English Football Club, which was founded in 1873 by Englishmen living and working in Dresden. However, an English source reveals that although the Dresden Football Club was founded in October 1873, it played according to rugby rules. Football also established itself very early in the Imperial Navy, which was closely aligned with the English model and world political rival. The first evidence of a football match in Germany played according to the rules of the Football Association (FA) comes from Lüneburg and dates from 1875. At the Johanneum there, the teacher Wilhelm Görges and the young Englishman Richard Ernest Newell Twopeny, who had come from Marlborough College, introduced the game of football. Several games are documented, the first of which was reported in the Lüneburgsche Anzeiger in September 1875. However, the club founded at the Johanneum only existed for a short time and then fell into oblivion.
Early clubs were also founded in the vicinity of the old technical universities, for example in Dresden, Karlsruhe, Aachen and Munich. The up-and-coming footballers adopted corporate student customs and songs to their sport, but distanced themselves from the classical fraternity business of the traditional universities as well as from conventional gymnastics. Thus the song line O alte Burschenherrlichkeit became the lyrics O wonnevolles Fußballspiel.
The sport of football in those years was predominantly practiced in bourgeois circles and was considered a fashionable sport of the middle classes as well as of upwardly mobile people, not least of Jewish origin (cf. Kurt Landauer). Workers had neither enough free time nor financial means for the equipment. It was not until the social legislation of the Weimar Republic that football, along with other sports, reached the working classes in the 1920s and thus became a mass phenomenon.
Organised football in the 20th century
In 1900, football was given a higher-level association for the first time in Germany with the founding of the German Football Association (DFB). In the same year, two football matches were played at the Olympic Games in Paris.
On 31 May 1903, the Altonaer Fußballclub von 1893 (Altona 93) hosted the final match for the German football championship between VfB Leipzig and DFC Prague at the Exerzierweide in Bahrenfeld (then a district of Altona).
From 1908 onwards, the military also discovered football and its function of strengthening soldierly group cohesion. The first military teams were formed within the infantry, including the sailors.
On 21 May 1904, a world association, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), was founded in Paris to organise international matches and draw up international football rules, but it also had to align itself closely with the much older English FA and the other British associations. This also resulted in the International Football Association Board, which to this day is made up of representatives of the four British associations and four representatives of FIFA. FIFA defined dangerous play, introduced the direct free kick and removed the requirement for players' trousers to cover their knees. Other new rules from world football's governing body prohibited the goalkeeper from leaving the goal line when taking a penalty kick, but allowed him to move to irritate the shooter. Furthermore, metal insoles in football boots were banned, the ball had to be made of leather, and referees were required to keep a record of the game. In 1907, offside in one's own half of the field was abolished. Two years later, rules on sending off were established. In 1913, FIFA introduced the so-called due distance (10 yards, roughly 9.15 metres) between the kicker and the opponents at free kicks. In 1920, offside at throw-ins was abolished. Since 1924, the corner kick may be taken directly into the goal.
With the introduction of a professional league in 1924, Austria became the first continental European country with a league for professional footballers. Three years later, the Austrian Football Association initiated the Mitropapokal, the first major international competition for club teams in Europe. The Mitropapokal is considered the forerunner of today's European Cup.
Football has been an Olympic discipline since 1900, and in 1920 Egypt became the first non-European nation to participate. With 22 competitors, including the USA and Uruguay, the 1924 Olympic tournament in Paris was the first global competition. The winner was Uruguay, who repeated their Olympic victory in Antwerp in 1928.
In 1930, on the initiative of Enrique Buero and Jules Rimet, FIFA organised the first World Cup, in which the hosts Uruguay became world champions. 13 teams took part in the World Cup, but the German team, like almost all European teams, decided not to travel to South America for reasons of cost.
UEFA, the European football association, was founded in Basel in 1954. UEFA organised the first European Champion Clubs' Cup (now the UEFA Champions League) in 1955/56 and the European Cup of Nations competition from 1960 onwards, which was renamed the European Championship in 1968.
In 1970, the German Football Association allowed women's football in Germany after an increasing number of women's football teams had formed under sometimes creative "cover names".
On 15 December 1995, the so-called "Bosman decision" shook up the usual transfer practice in football. The European Court of Justice ruled that football players are normal employees. Since then, transfer fees can only be demanded for football players if they have a current contract.
After several invitational tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s, the first Women's World Cup was held in 1991, and since 1996 the Olympic champion has also been determined among the women's national teams.
