To shut all lies that soccer isn't true football (facts)

[Medicus Atrum]

lol, Don't try to defend Soccer and say your point is American Football is boring, LMAO!

Seriously, I'd rather watch paint-dry then watch a soccer game, Mainly 'cause the paint will dry first! @.@

The only time I DO watch soccer is on the 15-second highlight reel on Sports Center.

[Cole]

lol, Don't try to defend Soccer and say your point is American Football is boring, LMAO!

Seriously, I'd rather watch paint-dry then watch a soccer game, Mainly 'cause the paint will dry first! @.@

The only time I DO watch soccer is on the 15-second highlight reel on Sports Center.

At least Soccer isn't stopping each minute!
Ah!

[Medicus Atrum]

lol, Don't try to defend Soccer and say your point is American Football is boring, LMAO!

Seriously, I'd rather watch paint-dry then watch a soccer game, Mainly 'cause the paint will dry first! @.@

The only time I DO watch soccer is on the 15-second highlight reel on Sports Center.

At least Soccer isn't stopping each minute!
Ah!

Lol, we don't stop, we set up for another attack. You have 60 seconds to set a defence and offence up, and if you make one slight mistake, the other team scores.
With soccer you could put the wrong pin on a kick, and your screwed, but there is 0 skill in kicking a ball. Anywho, cya later. ig2g. We'll continue this later.

[KnowLedge]

[spoiler]Early history

[edit] Ancient games

Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Warring States Period in about the 476 BC–221 BC. It describes a practice known as cuju (蹴鞠, literally "kick ball"), which originally involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30-foot (9.1 m) poles. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), cuju games were standardized and rules were established. Variations of this game later spread to Japan and Korea, known as kemari and chuk-guk respectively. By the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618–907), the feather-stuffed ball was replaced by an air-filled ball and cuju games had become professionalized, with many players making a living playing cuju. Also, two different types of goal posts emerged: One was made by setting up posts with a net between them and the other consisted of just one goal post in the middle of the field.

The Japanese version of cuju is kemari (蹴鞠), and was adopted during the Asuka period from the Chinese. This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari several people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground (much like keepie uppie). The game appears to have died out sometime before the mid-19th century. It was revived in 1903 and is now played at a number of festivals.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or phaininda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388–311 BC) and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. These games appears to have resembled rugby.
An illustration from the 1850s of Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherers. Children in the background are playing a football game, possibly Marn Grook.
An illustration from the 1850s of Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherers. Children in the background are playing a football game, possibly Marn Grook.[2]

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, and/or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit (Eskimo) people in Greenland.[3] There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey of the Jamestown settlement, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. In Victoria, Australia, indigenous people played a game called Marn Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian rules football (see below).

Games played in Central America with rubber balls by indigenous peoples are also well-documented as existing since before this time, but these had more similarities to basketball or volleyball, and since their influence on modern football games is minimal, most do not class them as football.

These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football codes appear to lie in western Europe, especially England.

[edit] Medieval and early modern Europe

Further information: Medieval football

The Middle Ages saw a huge rise in popularity of annual Shrovetide football matches throughout Europe, particularly in England. The game played in England at this time may have arrived with the Roman occupation, but the only pre-Norman reference is to boys playing "ball games" in the ninth century Historia Brittonum. Reports of a game played in Brittany, Normandy, and Picardy, known as La Soule or Choule, suggest that some of these football games could have arrived in England as a result of the Norman Conquest.
An illustration of so-called "mob football".
An illustration of so-called "mob football".

These forms of football, sometimes referred to as "mob football", would be played between neighbouring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people, struggling to move an item such as an inflated pig's bladder, to particular geographical points, such as their opponents' church. Shrovetide games have survived into the modern era in a number of English towns (see below).

The first detailed description of football in England was given by William FitzStephen in about 1174–1183. He described the activities of London youths during the annual festival of Shrove Tuesday:

After lunch all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game. The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth vicariously: you can see their inner passions aroused as they watch the action and get caught up in the fun being had by the carefree adolescents.[4]

Most of the very early references to the game speak simply of "ball play" or "playing at ball". This reinforces the idea that the games played at the time did not necessarily involve a ball being kicked.

In 1314, Nicholas de Farndone, Lord Mayor of the City of London issued a decree banning football in the French used by the English upper classes at the time. A translation reads: "[f]orasmuch as there is great noise in the city caused by hustling over large foot balls [rageries de grosses pelotes de pee] in the fields of the public from which many evils might arise which God forbid: we command and forbid on behalf of the king, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city in the future." This is the earliest reference to football.

The earliest mention of a ball game that involves kicking was in 1321, in Shouldham, Norfolk: "[d]uring the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his... ran against him and wounded himself".[5]

In 1363, King Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball, football, or hockey; coursing and **Filtered**-fighting, or other such idle games", showing that "football" — whatever its exact form in this case — was being differentiated from games involving other parts of the body, such as handball.

King Henry IV of England also presented one of the earliest documented uses of the English word "football", in 1409, when he issued a proclamation forbidding the levying of money for "foteball".[5][6]

There is also an account in Latin from the end of the 15th century of football being played at Cawston, Nottinghamshire. This is the first description of a "kicking game" and the first description of dribbling: "[t]he game at which they had met for common recreation is called by some the foot-ball game. It is one in which young men, in country sport, propel a huge ball not by throwing it into the air but by striking it and rolling it along the ground, and that not with their hands but with their feet... kicking in opposite directions" The chronicler gives the earliest reference to a football field, stating that: "[t]he boundaries have been marked and the game had started.[5]

Other firsts in the mediæval and early modern eras:

* "a football", in the sense of a ball rather than a game, was first mentioned in 1486.[6] This reference is in Dame Juliana Berners' Book of St Albans. It states: "a certain rounde instrument to play with ...it is an instrument for the foote and then it is calde in Latyn 'pila pedalis', a fotebal."[5]
* a pair of football boots was ordered by King Henry VIII of England in 1526.[7]
* women playing a form of football was in 1580, when Sir Philip Sidney described it in one of his poems: "[a] tyme there is for all, my mother often sayes, When she, with skirts tuckt very hy, with girles at football playes."[8]
* the first references to goals are in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In 1584 and 1602 respectively, John Norden and Richard Carew referred to "goals" in Cornish hurling. Carew described how goals were made: "they pitch two bushes in the ground, some eight or ten foote asunder; and directly against them, ten or twelue [twelve] score off, other twayne in like distance, which they terme their Goales".[9] He is also the first to describe goalkeepers and passing of the ball between players.
* the first direct reference to scoring a goal is in John Day's play The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (performed circa 1600; published 1659): "I'll play a gole at camp-ball" (an extremely violent variety of football, which was popular in East Anglia). Similarly in a poem in 1613, Michael Drayton refers to "when the Ball to throw, And drive it to the Gole, in squadrons forth they goe".[/spoiler]

If you're too lazy to read all, just take a look at dates, and then at americn football:

[spoiler]History

Main article: History of American football

An early American football team, from the turn of the twentieth century
An early American football team, from the turn of the twentieth century

The history of American football can be traced to early versions of rugby football and soccer. Both games have their origin in varieties of football played in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, in which a ball is kicked at a goal and/or run over a line. Also like soccer, American football has twenty two players on the field of play. Furthermore, some player position references from soccer are used, such as the term "halfback" and "fullback".

American football resulted from several major divergences from rugby football, most notably the rule changes instituted by Walter Camp, considered the "Father of American Football". Among these important changes were the introduction of the line of scrimmage and of down-and-distance rules. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gameplay developments by college coaches such as Amos Alonzo Stagg, Knute Rockne, and Glenn "Pop" Warner helped take advantage of the newly introduced forward pass. The popularity of collegiate football grew as it became the dominant version of the sport for the first half of the twentieth century. Bowl games, a college football tradition, attracted a national audience for collegiate teams. Bolstered by fierce rivalries, college football still holds widespread appeal in the US.[3][4][5]
Walter Camp
Walter Camp

The origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892, with William "Pudge" Heffelfinger's $500 contract to play in a game for the Allegheny Athletic Association against the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. In 1920 the American Professional Football Association was formed. The first game was played in Dayton, Ohio on October 3rd, 1920 with the host Triangles defeating the Columbus Panhandles 14-0. The league changed its name to the National Football League (NFL) two years later, and eventually became the major league of American football. Initially a sport of Midwestern, industrial towns in the United States, professional football eventually became a national phenomenon. Football's increasing popularity is usually traced to the 1958 NFL Championship Game, a contest that has been dubbed the "Greatest Game Ever Played". A rival league to the NFL, the American Football League (AFL), began play in 1960; the pressure it put on the senior league led to a merger between the two leagues and the creation of the Super Bowl, which has become the most watched television event in the United States on an annual basis.[6][/spoiler]

Between 1324 and 1667, football was banned in England alone by more than 30 royal and local laws.

That sentance only shows how old what you americans call soccer is...550 years older than american football, if we don't take a look at ancient forms of TRUE football.


Come again please?

lol more like read http://www.tutor.com.my/tutor/daily/eha ... =BI&ft=FTN

[Wolf359]

lol - quite an argument - with some silly points. This is how American Football evolved from Football (I recall this from an essay I wrote on the sport when I was a kid)...

True 'Football' is the version with the spherical ball - and it's called football because the ball is kicked with the foot (nothing to do with the shape of the ball). It has existed in the UK, in more or less it's current format, for in excess of 700 years.

The rules of Football were not fully written down and formalised until the mid 1800s by the English Football Association - The term 'Soccer' comes from 'assoc' - being the abbreviation for 'association' - and was used primarily in English public schools in the late 1800s. The term 'Soccer Football' went on to be used mainly in other English-speaking nations that developed their own version of 'Football' - most notably the US dropped the word 'Football' from the name in 1974, and it has been known there only as 'Soccer' ever since

The game of Rugby (otherwise known as 'Rugby Football') developed from Football when in 1823 William Ebb Ellis decided to pick up the ball and run with it.

Rugby Football was introduced to North America by the British Army in Montreal in the late 1860s, when they played a few games against McGill University.

In the mid 1870s, McGill played Harvard - with Harvard going on to play Yale a year or so later. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met shortly after to agree some minor changes to the rules (Around 1876) and formed a College Football Association - it was at this point that the name 'Rugby' was dropped from the full name of 'Rugby Football' and the US version of Football, otherwise known as 'American Football' was born.

It was not until the intervention of a chap called Camp (first name escapes me) that 'American Football' began to change drastically from Rugby. Camp introduced the 'downs' system, the new scoring system, and also reduced the number of onfield players in each team from 15 (as in Rugby) to 11. The introduction of 'downs' led to forward passing being allowed - another major difference from Rugby - and also brought about with it more vicious tackling (with dozens of players reportedly killed in the early 1900s), hence the introduction of protective gear. Another change to make the game safer was remove interlocking scrums as they have in Rugby - and this developed into the protective lineout we have at the line of scrimmage (scrum - scrimmage) today.

The game caught on and became more and more popular - although was still only played at colleges until the first professional league was created around 1910. The NFL stood up in 1922.

Having played a lot of Football, and American Football in my time, I can safely say that they are both excellent games. I can also say that American Football players are not 'sissys' because of the padding they wear. Tackling in American Football is significantly different, and more vicious, to that in Rugby. I'm quite happy not to wear protective gear when playing Rugby (although it has to be said that a lot of pro Rugby players now wear some kind of padding - but there is absolutely no chance of me playing a proper game of American Football without the right kit - it's too damned dangerous!

American Football does have its origins in the 'original' Football game - and although the 2 sports are now drastically different, they can both be called versions of Football - as can Rugby.

[facepie]

pfft, u all seem to be forgettin true football is Australian Rules Football!!!

and american football is a copy of rugby, rugby is so much better, and im Victorian!

it would be rare for you to see any Victorian saying that (victoria as in a state of australia)

but yea, Australian Rules Football FTW!!!

edit

also jim, wen was this Rugby vs Gridiron game you were talkin bout?

[Davian Thule]

aussie rules?
pfft
nothing beats gaelic football
GAA FTW

[facepie]

SIF! the hybrid version of AFL and Gaelic is much better then Gaelic and AFL pwns hands down

[Biscuit]

I agree with Pops - American Football isn't "football". Americans just don't understand that they have taken words and completely changed their meaning and think their way is the right way.

Example - faggot actually means a bundles of twigs tied together with twine... of oucrse Americans changed that. What Americans call Jelly is actually Jam.. etc.. etc..

But I've had this argument many times.. which is the "real football". True Football is..

There's no point in arguing which has more "talent" because it's simply a matter of opinion. In which I obviously think someone like Messi is 100 times more talented than any NFL player

[Cole]

pfft, u all seem to be forgettin true football is Australian Rules Football!!!

and american football is a copy of rugby, rugby is so much better, and im Victorian!

it would be rare for you to see any Victorian saying that (victoria as in a state of australia)

but yea, Australian Rules Football FTW!!!

edit

also jim, wen was this Rugby vs Gridiron game you were talkin bout?

I guess you mean American football vs Rugby match? Well I don't know, my uncle told me about it. Didn't tell me when, but told me the end of the match...rugbymen slaughtered the american footballers.

Didn't say american footballers were sissies, just said that they wear protections while rugbymen don't..so as much as american footballers are tough, rugbymen are tougher.

[Wolf359]

I don't agree - you have to realise that they are now completely different games - and the tackling in US Football is significantly different, and more vicious. And, as I pointed out above, Rugby players are increasingly wearing more padding with their kit - so does that mean they are becoming less tough?

It's actually nothing to do with being tough - I have played dozens of games of Rugby without padding - and I've played dozens of games of US Football - and there's no way on this Earth I would ever play a proper game without proper gear - if I did, I'd be in fear of my life!!

So does that make me tough on one hand, and not so tough on the other? Or just a person who has a sensible opinion based on a playing perspective of both games?

@ Biscuit - the Americans haven't simply changed the words - their game is a version of football, which evolved from 'Rugby Football' (Rugby) - which evolved from the original game of Football - all they did was remove the word 'Rugby' when they altered the rules.

[facepie]

I don't agree - you have to realise that they are now completely different games - and the tackling in US Football is significantly different, and more vicious.

how is it done differently?

the aim of a tackle is to bring someone down to the ground so... ??

[Davian Thule]

:lol: SIF! the hybrid version of AFL and Gaelic is much better then Gaelic and AFL pwns hands down

that sir is slander
all you lot do is try and beat the living daylights out of our lads when we are winning

[facepie]

slander? im sayin it as in "As If"

and it's so true i remember a game where one of our guys gave one of yours a massive clothesline, then the year after which was last year i think, you guys called it off

but i read in an article, apparently your team is gona be beefed up this year

[Demeisen]

football is the real one peeps. american football is jus a bunch of dudes, putting on a bunch of armour to play rugby

i think the breaks in american football are made as they are solely for advertising. basing a sport around adverts sucks royally.

we need to see the top nfl team play the top rugby team in both their games. id pay mad cash to see that