Truth be told, humans have been playing games that resemble soccer for thousands of years. From Southeast Asia to ancient Rome, history is littered with images and stories of people kicking things around, and as such, it's impossible to trace any one culture or time as being the origin of soccer.
Texts give reports of the ancient Chinese military kicking leather sacks stuffed with hair around as part of a training exercise as far back as the 2nd and 3rd century B.C.E. Later on, Greek philosophers give accounts of a violent form of the sport called Episkyros that was later adopted by the Roman Empire. A famous depiction of this sport is, in fact, engraved onto the European Cup soccer trophy.
Nonetheless, the modern game is said to be established when the Cambridge Rules were refined by a group of Englishmen who had recently founded The Football Association in 1863. Prior to this, the sport more closely resembled contemporary rugby. When an agreement couldn't be reached on whether handling the ball should be allowed, rugby and association football were forced to split. It is here that a global sport was born.
By now, you're probably wondering how the sport came from being called association football to being referred to as "soccer" in many part of the world. The truth is that the word "soccer" is a short form of the word association. The -ssoc part of the word was taken and the -er suffix was added to indicate an action was being performed. The word was born out of casual use and was really a slang term at heart. However, soccer's emergence in North America came at the same time another sport was gaining momentum - American rules football. To avoid confusion, the term soccer generally came to refer to the European inspired game.
International matches began shortly after, with England and Scotland playing to a 0-0 score line in the first ever international game in 1972. FIFA was organized shortly thereafter in 1908 as a way to standardize the rules, act as a sanctioning body, and promote the game worldwide. This paved the way for the Olympics to officially declare soccer an Olympic event, with the sport first being played at the 1908 summer games in London, England.
Of course, soccer itself has become synonymous with the world's largest sporting event - the FIFA World Cup. First held in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1930, the event was organized by FIFA president Jules Rimet as a response to soccer being dropped as an event in the Summer Olympics. The first World Cup was admittedly small by today's standards with many European teams unable to compete as a result of the difficulty in international travel at the time. Nonetheless, the tournament captured international attention, and laid the ground work for soccer to today grow into the world's most popular sport!
Texts give reports of the ancient Chinese military kicking leather sacks stuffed with hair around as part of a training exercise as far back as the 2nd and 3rd century B.C.E. Later on, Greek philosophers give accounts of a violent form of the sport called Episkyros that was later adopted by the Roman Empire. A famous depiction of this sport is, in fact, engraved onto the European Cup soccer trophy.
Nonetheless, the modern game is said to be established when the Cambridge Rules were refined by a group of Englishmen who had recently founded The Football Association in 1863. Prior to this, the sport more closely resembled contemporary rugby. When an agreement couldn't be reached on whether handling the ball should be allowed, rugby and association football were forced to split. It is here that a global sport was born.
By now, you're probably wondering how the sport came from being called association football to being referred to as "soccer" in many part of the world. The truth is that the word "soccer" is a short form of the word association. The -ssoc part of the word was taken and the -er suffix was added to indicate an action was being performed. The word was born out of casual use and was really a slang term at heart. However, soccer's emergence in North America came at the same time another sport was gaining momentum - American rules football. To avoid confusion, the term soccer generally came to refer to the European inspired game.
International matches began shortly after, with England and Scotland playing to a 0-0 score line in the first ever international game in 1972. FIFA was organized shortly thereafter in 1908 as a way to standardize the rules, act as a sanctioning body, and promote the game worldwide. This paved the way for the Olympics to officially declare soccer an Olympic event, with the sport first being played at the 1908 summer games in London, England.
Of course, soccer itself has become synonymous with the world's largest sporting event - the FIFA World Cup. First held in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1930, the event was organized by FIFA president Jules Rimet as a response to soccer being dropped as an event in the Summer Olympics. The first World Cup was admittedly small by today's standards with many European teams unable to compete as a result of the difficulty in international travel at the time. Nonetheless, the tournament captured international attention, and laid the ground work for soccer to today grow into the world's most popular sport!