the birth of football
Who invented football? The ancient Greeks, the Italians, the Scots, a group of bored Iron Age Chinese soldiers? No, the English, and they did it in Cambridge. This is the story of how the world's most popular sport was born.
Malcolm Walker charts the tortuous gestation and birth of association football from its primeval beginnings to the six tempestuous meetings of 1863 that saw its official foundation.
This is a story of violence, religion, bizarre behaviour, Victorian feuding and a dodgy stitch-up that marked football's difficult birth that was the invention of football.
The cambridge university football rules
It was at Cambridge University that football first became football. Every ex-public school boy who “went up” to Cambridge took his old school rules with him. Some allowed hacking, in many you could carry the ball, while in others the mob still prevailed. So, when they tried to play each other on the city's Parker's Piece, chaos ensued.
But, over a twenty-year period generations of students thrashed out a set of compromise rules - the 'Cambridge Rules'. These rules put skill above force, limited the movement of the football to the boot and were used as the founding principles of association football.
THE AUTHOR
Several years ago Malcolm Walker was involved with an attempt to get some form of recognition on Parker’s Piece, Cambridge to commemorate the fact that it was the birth place of Association Football after he and a friend discovered that there was nothing there.
During the project he helped organise, and took part in a re-enactment match to the 1863 Cambridge University rules on Parker’s Piece.
…. He became something of an anorak on the subject.