The exact origins of football are still unknown. The current model with two teams of eleven players, facing each other in a delimited playground, was probably born in England in the nineteenth century, but according to some sources a similar game was already practiced in ancient China.

This happened long before Julius Caesar imported into Britain the harpastum, as the football game was called in the Roman world.

It is difficult to establish with certainty the origins of football, as well as to find out who invented it. Were the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, the Florentines or the English?

The first written evidence concerning the history of football comes from China: it concerns chronicles written during the Han period and dating back to about 2000 years ago.

Even Japan, while proposing its candidacy to host the 2002 edition of the World Cup, has claimed an ancient football tradition, attested by some documents dating back to the fourteenth century in which it is narrated a game with the ball known as Kenatt.

This is about the East, but also in the West, the origins of football are not clear. The Greeks have left evidence of a game played with the ball and with the feet dating back three centuries before Christ. It was called episciro and took its name from the central line of the camp, which was called sciro.

The Roman harpastum

Later on, the ancient Romans, who learned teachings in the arts and sciences from the Hellenic experiences, imported this game and spread it in their domains, calling it harpastum, a name that derives from the Greek verb “to snatch”.

In this game, you had to steal the ball from the opponents, and then kick it forward with great force.

Pollux – historian of the second century – describes the game of harpastum as a game where the players formed two groups and where the ball was thrown on the midfield line. At the bottom of the two halves of the field where the players stood, there were two other lines, beyond which one had to try to carry the ball, an act that could not be performed without jostling or scrums.

This leads one to believe that harpastum is linked not only to the origins of football but also to those of rugby. Actually, the Roman harpastum was played without goal football doors, but already at that time, there was a referee who decreed the beginning of the match and had the task of controlling the behavior of the players on the field.

For obvious reasons, the game always became a real battle from the very beginning: the athletes hurled themselves decisively against each other in order to kick the ball, so as to be able to throw it beyond the bottom line. Each ball that surpassed that line - just like the 'goal' in our time - meant the assignment of a point.

The Florentine football

As the years and centuries passed, the men dabbled more and more with the the game of the ball during the Renaissance era until this game arrived in Florence. Here the popular enthusiasm denominated the new sport with the current name “football game”.

The Florentines boast that they are the custodians of the origins of football, especially in the modern sense of the term, and in a certain way, they have several good reasons to assert this. Football in Florence aroused a great passion and a fierce rivalry between the different districts of the city.

In a short time, it became a genuinely popular and social phenomenon, to the point that it was even allowed to play the most important matches on the historic and holy paving of “Piazza della Signoria”, the old square of Florence.

The Florentine football rules were modified and codified. In Florentine football each team consisted of 27 players, similar to Roman gladiators; the use of the feet was certainly predominant, but during the game, it was also allowed the use of hands according to fixed and precise rules.

In 1692 the first "sports journalists" made their appearance around the Tuscan main town. They were literati and poets of the time who, in their prose, exalted or fiercely criticized the men who devoted themselves to the game of football and their doings.

Among the works dedicated to football, there is the Florentinum Harpastum Football, but the most valid and accredited text is without any doubts that of Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, who in chapter XXVII of his most important historical novel “The Siege in Florence” writes about the tradition of playing football during the Carnival in Florence.

Modern English football

Despite the experience of Florentine football and even before the Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Roman, the English are unanimously recognized as “fathers of football”; they were also avid players since the Middle Ages.

This for a simple but important reason: the British in the nineteenth century drafted the first regulation of the game of football, making it rise to a sports level.

Thanks to the British and their rules, we also came to another significant result. Little by little the regulation made disappear the habit of the footballers to go on the field with the primary purpose of only shin-kicking the opponents.

This was the first real step towards football, understood as a modern sport.

@nimol