Geographically speaking, the answer is a simple one: Asia. The earliest historical accounts of a game similar to soccer date back to Ancient China, mentioning balls made of animal skin that were kicked through a gap in a net stretched between poles 30 feet high. Today in China soccer is called “zuqiu”, literally translated “foot ball”. Records show that zuqiu was played as part of the emperor’s birthday festivities and celebration. Another account of one of the earliest soccer games in recorded history can be traced back to 1004 B.C. in Japan. The Munich Ethnological Museum in Germany a 50 B.C. classical Chinese writing describes a game very similar to soccer that was played between teams from Japan and China. The Chinese kicked a hair-filled leather ball and it is historically documented that played in 611 A.D., in the then Japanese capital, Kyoto, a soccer game was played.

The Romans played a game that somewhat resembled today’s soccer. The early Olympic games in Rome featured twenty-seven men on a side who completed so vigorously that two-thirds of them had to be hospitalized after a fifty-minute game.

Historians keep better records of wars, discoveries and religious trends and thus pretty much ignored origins and evolution of soccer or other sports for that matter, so it remains a mystery as to the exact mechanism that brought about soccer’s spread from Asia to Europe and its ultimate growth to today’s status as the most popular sport on earth.

Opposition to the Game

During King Edward’s reign of England (1307-1327), laws were enacted that punished anyone caught playing soccer with imprisonment. King Edward’s legal document read: “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.”

“Deemed 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 boasted her opposition to the sport stating that she had soccer players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”

As is so often the law of human nature, with Prhibition being a good example, legal efforts failed to eradicate the sport, which in 1861 earned official sanction in England. The game became so popular that by the 1800s, large groups of impassioned soccer enthusiasts roamed and raged through towns and villages participating as players and spectators in annual contests in northern and middle England. One such match in Derbyshire in 1829 mentioned, “broken skins, broken heads, torn coats and lost hats.”

The history of the evolution of the game of soccer in England cites Eton college as having the earliest known rules of the game in 1815, and tactfully alluding in the text that prior to this effort chaos was preferred over order. Those standardized rules known as the Cambridge rules were later adopted by England’s major colleges.

Perhaps you can say that although it was England that originally banned soccer, it was also England that did much to promote modern soccer to every continent in the world. Today, indisputably soccer is the most watched and played sport in the world enjoyed by nearly nine million people.

International Competitions

The world’s first international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England, with the first international tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, taking place in 1884. At this stage the sport was rarely played outside the United Kingdom. As football began to increase in popularity in other parts of the world at the turn of the century, it was held as a demonstration sport with no medals awarded at the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however, the IOC has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at the 1906 Intercalated Games.

After FIFA was founded in 1904, there was an attempt made by FIFA to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside of the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.

At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football became an official competition. Planned by The Football Association (FA), England’s football governing body, the event was for amateur players only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat in 1912 in Stockholm, where the tournament was organized by the Swedish Football Association.

With the Olympic event continuing to be contested only between amateur teams, Sir Thomas Lipton organized the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy tournament in Turin in 1909. The Lipton tournament was a championship between individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations, each one of which represented an entire nation. The competition is sometimes described as The First World Cup,[5] and featured the most prestigious professional club sides from Italy, Germany and Switzerland, but the FA of England refused to be associated with the competition and declined the offer to send a professional team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur side from County Durham, to represent England instead. West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully defend their title, and were given the trophy to keep forever, as per the rules of the competition.

In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic tournament as a “world football championship for amateurs”, and took responsibility for managing the event. This paved the way for the world’s first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, contested by Egypt and thirteen European teams, and won by Belgium. Uruguay won the next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928.