Before i can really start talking about the history of football, you need a little backstory. Originally there was a game called Harpaston. It was played by the ancient Greeks. It was on a rectangle shaped field and had lines on either end that acted as goal lines. It was essentially a combination of modern day football and soccer, and you scored when the ball crossed the other teams goal line(in any way shape or form). Fast forward a few thousand years. Every schoolboy in Britain was playing soccer, an adapted version of the game the Ancient greeks used to play. During a scoreless game being played at Bigside Field, which had been going on for hours, one of the players [named William Webb Ellis] caught a ball that had been airborne and ran into goal of the other team. Many of the players were angry about him breaking the rules, but just as many were excited for this new twist in the game. Eventually after arguing for years, the two sports split one into soccer and the other into rugger(now called Rugby).rom Rugby is where the base of football really comes from. The running portion of football that is really the core(or at least i think it is) of any good team has been developed from rugby style of game. The game we now know as football was first officially played competitively between Princeton college and Rutgers college.
Picture of Rutger's team they fielded against princeton
These two colleges had fierce rivalries. They had decided to play a three game series, to decided the winner. Princeton won the first, and Rutgers the second. The third was never played, because the people in charge of each school respectively decided that football wasn't good for the health of their students
Information from "The Story of Football" By Robert Lee.Copyright, 1965, by Radom House, Inc
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