It is often said that the most popular sport in the world is English. But only the rules of modern football come from treacherous Albion…
Football is without a doubt the most popular sport in the world and the easiest to play on the globe. It is not the easiest technically, but to indulge in this sport, all you need is a ball. The more complex rules come from Great Britain: football as we know it today in competition comes from the British bourgeoisie, who developed this sport, which became national first and then international.
A series netflix was even produced about it a few years ago. It is The English Game, which follows the itinerary of workers opposed to high society in the 19th century. The series mainly depicts the beginnings of football, which we guess, obviously, strongly rooted on the other side of the Channel.
Yet the deep origin of football would be much more distant, geographically but also historically. The Chinese would indeed have developed the concept as early as the 3rd century BC, being, according to history, the first men to kick a ball with their feet and even adding nets which therefore served as goals. . However, we have no knowledge of the rules they applied to play this ancestor of football.
What we do know, however, is that the notion of team was established in Mesoamerica. This was recently demonstrated by Mary Miller, a professor of art history at Yale University, who gave some explanations to the National Geographic on June 13, 2023. The game that preceded or gave its first principles to collective sports would have been popular and widespread in the Teotihuacan, Aztec and Mayan cultures. Peoples who lived about 3000 years ago.
According to certain archaeological archives, it has even been possible to determine the constitution of the balls used at the time. They would have been made of rubber and would have weighed seven kilograms. For comparison, in 2023 a football does not exceed 500 grams…
This means that it took changes and modifications to arrive at the football we know today. And it’s not over: the game also continues to evolve over time and is constantly subject to revisions.