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SOCCER: A HISTORY OF THE GREAT GAME

Many different cultures have played a sport similar to the modern game of soccer, but no one can really say with any certainty when or where soccer began. It is known that the earlier variations of what later became soccer were played almost 3000 years ago.

One of the earliest forms of soccer in which players kicked a ball around on a small field has been traced as far back as 1004 B.C. in Japan. The Munich Ethnological Museum in Germany has a Chinese text from approximately 50 B.C. that mentions games very similar to soccer that were played between teams from Japan and China. The Chinese kicked a leather ball ( hair-filled ) and it is known with certainty that a soccer game was played in 611 A.D. in the then Japanese capital, Kyoto. The Romans played a game that somewhat resembled modern soccer. The early Olympic games in Rome featured twenty-seven men on a side who competed so vigorously that two-thirds of them had to be hospitalized after a fifty-minute game

In King Edward's reign of England (1307-1327), laws were passed that threatened imprisonment to anyone caught playing soccer. King Edward's proclamation said:" For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may 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 future."

Evidently judged to be vulgar and indecent, soccer was at times suppressed by the English sheriffs who followed royal orders describing the game as a useless practice. King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the sport, and Queen Elizabeth I "Had soccer players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance."

Laws, however, failed to stop the sport, which had earned official sanction in England by 1681. The game became so popular by 1800s that, in certain annual contests in northern and middle England, large groups roamed and raged through towns and villages. In 1829, an account of such match in Derbyshire spoke of "broken skins, broken heads, torn coats and lost hats."