Football may be named for being played on foot, not for kicking
The obvious story is that football got its name because players kick the ball. Another explanation holds that the word simply meant a game played on foot rather than on horseback. Either way, the label now covers a whole family of sports, from soccer and rugby to Gaelic and Australian rules.
These football codes share a basic aim: move a ball over a line, into a goal or between posts using only the body, with no bats or sticks. They split into two broad camps. Carrying codes such as American, Canadian and Australian football and both rugbies let players run with the ball in hand, while kicking codes like association and Gaelic football move it mostly by foot and tightly restrict handling. Teams usually field between 11 and 18 players. Which sport someone means by the bare word depends on where they live, which is why association football is called soccer in the United States, Canada and Australia.
Ball games with feet are ancient and widespread. FIFA cites the Chinese game cuju, attested in a military manual from around the second or third century BC, as the earliest form of football; in its competitive version teams kept the ball airborne before kicking it through a circular hole in the middle of the pitch. Japan's courtly kemari, played in Kyoto from about 600 AD, had players in a circle keeping a ball aloft. Greeks and Romans played rougher games resembling rugby, and Romans already had an air-filled ball. Cicero even recorded a man killed while being shaved when a ball flew into a barber's shop.
Far-flung peoples had their own versions. In 1586 sailors under the English explorer John Davis played football with Inuit in Greenland. Aboriginal Australians played kicking and catching games with possum-skin balls, grouped by historians as Marn Grook, and Māori played Kī-o-rahi on a circular field.
Modern codes, however, grew mainly from England. Medieval mob football pitted whole villages against each other, an unlimited crowd shoving an inflated bladder toward a rival parish's church at festivals like Shrovetide. Nineteenth-century English public schools wrote those brawls into rules, and the British Empire carried them abroad.
Source: Football
