Football is more French than you might think.
France has been part of my life since my birth, probably, but, through the years, this feeling grew stronger and stronger. There is actually a year where it started, and that's 2015, but it peaked in the summer of 2016, thanks to the European championship which took place in France. That tournament ended with France losing the final against Portugal, but that inspired me to research for the story of this sport I had just begun following (end of 2015). So I did. I am a perfectionist, so I wanted to dig as deep as possible into this mystery, the first of a long series of origin stories of inventions, sports and more, which, to be honest, were the main reason why I created this blog in the first place. So, I thought that the first one of these stories to share with you had to be the first I researched.
So, we will start from the very beginning and with the premise that, since the dawn of times, every civilisation having roamed Planet Earth has played games, and many of them involved a ball. There are evidences of ball games everywhere in the world, from Pre-Columbian America, where Mayans played the Tlachtli, the probable precursor of basketball, to Asia, and this is where our tale begins.
The civilisation is the Chinese one. The dynasty reigning is the Han. The century is the third B.C. The name of the game is Cuju. Born as a military training, this game, officially recognised by FIFA as the earliest form of the game, initially saw players trying to kick a feather-stuff ball into a goal made of two wood sticks planted on the ground. This game spread from the army to the royal courts and upper classes, always during the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD. Cuju evolved into something more complex where its popularity during the Tang Dynasty, and it started to resemble football even more. It became a team-oriented game and clubs started to be established, but its popularity exploded during the Song Dinasty (960-1279) and in the X century the first Cuju league was created, 800 years earlier than the British Football Association. Not bad. Eventually, cuju began to fade around the XVII century and soon disappeared.
In the same period cuju was being invented in China, in Europe the spiritual father of European football and rugby was being developed by the Greeks. Despite the image of the lone Greek athlete trying to reach for glory by himself, like a mythological hero, Greeks also played team-oriented games, and Episkyros was one of these. The teams of this violent game, especially in Sparta (where else?), were usually made up of 12-14 players. The field and the teams were divided into two by a line, and another line was behind them. The goal of the game was to push the ball to the other end of the field. This game incorporated, therefore, elements of both football and rugby, which actually were two sports of the same root at the time of their "inception" in XIX century England. But, according to some sources, even the atmosphere was similar back in Ancient Greece. One of these comes from the Egyptian writer Athenaeus of Naucratis' Deipnosophistae, which contains an excerpt dating from the IV century by Antiphanes, the famous comedy writer who describes a moment during an Episkyros game and the consequent reactions from the supporters, all written in a modern television commentary style:
"Once he took and passed the ball, he was enjoying that, while he was dodging an opponent and making another one of them fall on the ground. Then, he helped one of his team mates lift off the ground. All around were strong yells saying "out!", "long ball!", "high!", "low!", "short ball!", "shoot it back to the fray!"
Episkyros never was an Olympic sport in Ancient Greece, but, as you can read above, the agonism was all there, both from the athletes and the audience, unlike cuju, which was merely an exercise, a game. Sports and games always were a serious thing for the Greeks.
Once the Romans conquered Greece in 146 BC, one of the many things they "borrowed" from the Greeks was this game. Romans renamed it Harpastum and it is said that they introduced the rule which forbade to touch the ball with the hands. Plus, when Rome built the empire we all know, this game got immensely popular among the centurions defending the limes of the Roman Empire. This means that, while Greeks invented this game, Romans spread all over Europe (which means the British Isles, naturally).
Actually, the first mention of an unidentified ball game in Britain comes from the IX century AD. We cannot know whether it had anything to do with football, but probably this game was the Harpastum of some game deriving from it. What we know, though, is that the game which officially started it all came from... France.
In fact, if we want to find the actual origins of modern football we have to move to Northern France where, around the same time above mentioned, a new game developed and spread in Normandy and Picardy named Soule (or choule). This game was usually played after a religious function or during the holidays between two teams composed of people coming from two villages, usually close and rivals, but also between two different social statuses or situation (for instance, married men against bachelors et cetera). The game ended when one of the teams, composed of a potentially unlimited number, managed to push the ball with any means (besides the feet, sticks and hands were also allowed) towards the opponents' village, and then shot the ball into the portal of the local church, scoring de facto one gol. The ball disputed in a Soule game was made either of leather or animal bladders, filled with bran, hay, moss or horsehair. The field was of variable dimensions and could include ditches, streams, woods and wetlands, but the game started in the "midfield", which could be the border between the two churches (or "goals", in this case), the square of the village, a graveyard or even the castle of the local landlord.
As my description of this game may suggest, la Soule was a manly, violent game. While this was true, it was unexpectedly regulated and accompanied by an actual code of rules. Surely, it was much less violent than believed, since any type of violence towards the opponents was allowed. If today this sport is remembered as a barbaric, medieval game is surely thanks to the infamous, so called "remission letters", in which real court cases involving injuries and, some times, deaths, were evoked and told. When we actually think about the amount of players involved in a single game of this ancient sport, though, these sad cases were possible, as they are in every sport up to this day. Despite this, these letters helped give this game a bad, and equally unjustified, fame.
The first mention of the Soule in France dates back the year 1147, but it's almost sure that it was played in Northern France way before that date, since scholars are nowadays sure that this game was introduced in England by the Normans after William the Conqueror invaded the island in 1066. Moreover, this theory sounds incredibly plausible because the so-called "mob football", medieval English ball game from which modern football as we know it today descends, has no anterior mentions than 1174 on British soil, and, also, this mob football was characterized by almost identical features and rules than the French soule. However, I think it is right to specify that from the moment the soule was introduced in Britain, every development of the game that eventually led to the codification of modern football, the establishment of the Football Association in 1863 and the birth of the first football clubs (the first of which is Sheffield F.C.), all occured in the British Isles, even though soule kept being played, with discontinuity, on French soil at least until the XIX century.
A special mention goes to all the other subsequent ball games which were played throughout the history of Europe, from the Icelandic Knattleikr, first mentioned in XII century (but probably older) to the Italian Calcio Fiorentino from the Renaissance.
Finally, we can say that this long story tells us that we should never write or talk about history with the verb to be. Football, as in many other inventions and other things in history, is not English. This verb sounds like something definitive, an ended argument, as sure as death. As we can learn from this story, instead, history can surprise us with a lot of beautiful "maybes", "ifs", "actuallys", by showing us Ancient Chinese people kicking a ball, an Ancient Greek young man freestyling and medieval French people scoring goals by shooting balls inside churches, by playing a primitive form of the sport which eventually became the most popular one in our world.
