A Global Game: How Soccer Won Over the World

Soccer is a truly global sport. And this summer, the world will be watching games in Mexico, Canada and the United States as teams gather for the World Cup, which is played every four years.

How did this game, which began in British "public schools," become a favorite sport in every corner of the globe?

This month on Short Talks from the Hill, U of A political scientist Thomas Adam explores how students in the late 19th century turned this game into the world's favorite sport.

"This is why students, wherever they went in the 19th century, had a ball in their backpack, and they carried the football and the game — and the moment they started playing it, it basically brought new students into the fold," Adam said.

Adam's recent book, The Global Spread of Football From the 1860s to the 1880s, looks at the origins of football in England and explores how it was embraced in Germany, Argentina and the United States - three countries outside the British Empire.

You can hear the entire conversation with Adam by visiting ArkansasRearch.UArk.edu or downloading Short Talks wherever you get your podcasts.

Short Talks from the Hill highlights research, scholarly work and economic impact news at the U of A.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Todd Price: Well, let's get a little personal to begin. Are you from Germany?

Thomas Adam: Yes, I am.

TP: Did you grow up playing soccer? Do you follow it? Will you be watching the World Cup? Who are you going to be rooting for?

TA: Yes, I was born in Germany. I grew up in Germany. I actually grew up in East Germany. And yes, soccer was part of physical education in any school in Germany, so I grew up with it. I had to play it. But very early in my life, I realized that writing about soccer is more of what I can do than playing it. So I'm better at writing than actually practicing.

TP: Your recent book — you have many books — but this one, The Global Spread of Football from the 1860s to the 1880s, looks at how the game spread from the United Kingdom to Germany, Argentina, and the United States, three countries that were not part of the British Empire in the late 19th century. Two questions: why did you focus on this 30-year period? And football is in every country today, so what made you decide to focus on how it spread to Germany, Argentina, and the United States?

TA: So let me start with the second part. I specifically picked Germany, the United States, and Argentina because they were not part of the British Empire, to focus on the global spread of soccer outside of the empire — to disconnect this and to correct the misperception that modern sports were a goal of the British Empire. It went far beyond that, and it went far beyond it because teachers and students were interested in it and took it upon themselves to bring this game to their schools and their countries. I specifically focused on the time period between the 1860s and the 1880s because that is the decade in which soccer — in which football — became a global sport. So in contrast to the majority of historians, who write the typical chronological histories where you start off with a history of English football or German football or American football, you start with a year where it begins and then you go to the present. I didn't want to do this. I wanted to see how exactly did that game move from one place in England to another place in Germany, to another place in the U.S., and another place in Argentina — because that is something no one had explained so far.

TP: Well, let's talk about the origins of the game in England. When you describe the early games in the book, it almost sounds like it's just two mobs running around a field chasing a ball — a limited number of rules, a huge crowd — and even one of the most basic aspects of soccer, that the players are not going to use their hands except the goalie, that wasn't settled for a long time. And the sport today that we call rugby — really, the difference between rugby and what we would call soccer — that was very fluid for a long time as well. When did the game evolve to a point that today we would look at it and say, "Oh yeah, that's soccer, I recognize it"?

TA: It is only after 1900 that we have a very clear delineation between football on one hand and soccer on the other, if you look on a global scheme, on a global playing field. But if we go to the origins — there were some very weird games before the modern history of football began. Folk football. I mean, these epic games where hundreds of people would face another group of hundreds of people, two villages fighting over something that resembled a ball, in which a lot of accidents happened — willfully and unwillfully. I have a hard time calling that football or soccer.

TP: What prompted people to create rules, to codify this game of football?

TA: Okay, so let's start with the history of the public school, because the setting is very important. And this is something I also wanted to bring out in this book. Traditional histories of sports — traditional histories of football — are driven by an interest in how the game evolves without an eye on the context in which it evolves. So what I try to do in the book is to bring together the history of education with the history of sports, and that is something other scholars haven't done.  So we need to understand what happened in public schools in England around that time. These public schools were created as private schools in the Middle Ages for the purpose of educating poor boys for positions in church administration and civil service for the state. So these were schools where poor boys would receive an education without having to pay — this is what made them "public." And from the beginning, these schools had a few seats reserved for the children of wealthy families who did have to pay tuition, but they were always a minority. In the 18th century, that turns around — the paying students from wealthy families suddenly outnumber the poor students, and these rich students come with certain expectations.  Poor students depended on the teachers because the teachers gave them their education and their careers, so they felt obligated to the teachers and would not rebel against them. Rich students came to these schools from a position of privilege — they expected to be served, not to serve a teacher. So this is why you have student rebellions in the 18th century, because these students looked down on the teachers and saw them as servants. And the teachers were completely baffled by it. This leads to a conflict between teachers and students, which also leads to other problems. Because these schools offered teaching in Latin and Greek — because they trained priests and ministers — at the beginning of the 19th century, with industrialization, such an education was no longer of great value, especially for students who came from richer families. So the curriculum had to be adjusted.  In that context, teachers and headmasters such as Thomas Arnold realized they had to fundamentally change these institutions. And the first thing Thomas Arnold at Rugby did was to outlaw all the traditional leisure activities — hunting, because the students constantly shot the animals belonging to farming families in the surrounding area, and the farmers complained to the school. So Thomas Arnold went ahead and outlawed basically all of the pastimes which had this sense of high entitlement. So now you have rich students who are bored because they can't do anything. And it is at that point where these older traditions of football were appropriated by these students. Thomas Arnold did not introduce that, but he basically created the space in which this sport could then evolve.  So students begin to play in the 1820s — unregulated, without supervision, without rules, without codes. And it takes about three decades — until the 1840s — for the first rules to be written down. And the rules are very short because everyone assumes that everyone knows how the game goes, so why should you write down a lengthy text? Everything is understood. And when competition begins, some public schools allow student players to use their hands to propel the ball and others don't. And this is the first time you have this division. In the beginning, even in the rugby game, both are allowed — you can kick the ball or you can throw the ball. It takes decades before there is a decision to go with either one or the other. So there is this mix of both activities for decades to come.

TP: And so the rules occur when people start competing?

TA: The rulemaking begins at Rugby in 1844. Eton School is the second one to develop codes, in 1847. So these students graduate — one of them goes to Oxford knowing you can kick the ball, another student goes to Oxford knowing you can throw the ball. So now you have another chaos. So Oxford and Cambridge have to define football rules. Students from different schools come together, try to find a compromise, only to find that everyone plays separately because no one likes the compromise. So again, it takes a long time. Then the students growing up, leaving the public schools, leaving the universities, entering basically the world at large. So suddenly it's no longer a teenage game. Now it's a game of adults. They meet in 1863 in London to come up with rules which apply to clubs no longer connected to schools. This is where what in the 19th century was called Association Football came to life, because this is where they decide: okay, now you can only use your feet — don't touch the ball anymore.

TP: And these association clubs — this was really just recreation?

TA: All of these games were for fun. There was no scorekeeping yet. And honestly, even after 1900, it's a participation sport. It's a sport where even the number of players on each team isn't determined yet — anywhere between 10 and 15, in some cases 10 to 20, is allowed. It's a game where different groups of students from the same school play against each other. At Harvard College for ten years, the only games that happened were among students within the college. And codification becomes much more important when the game ventures out — when you start to have games with other clubs from other institutions. When you have to sit down every single time at these meetings and agree on rules, because every place has its own rules.

TP: A lot of histories have said that football came to the United States and took root in colleges, specifically Yale and Harvard. You found a different story. So tell us where you found football originally arriving in the United States.

TA: So this is why this selection of Germany, Argentina, and the United States makes a lot of sense, because in all three cases, the starting point is always a high school. And the problem with the United States is that in contrast to Argentina and Germany, we don't have detailed accounts — the teachers involved haven't left a record, and the students involved didn't write about it. In the U.S., we don't have that. The only thing we have is the same pattern. It's Dixwell School in Boston, one of these private preparatory schools that prepared its students for Harvard College. It charged more tuition than Harvard College itself, which tells you who went to this school. This is the first school in the U.S. where we have the game of football played — and the game of football, again, very loosely defined — because this is the beginning of what is called the Boston Rules. And the Boston Rules are this mix: players were expected to kick the ball, but they could also pick up the ball if they were being chased by another player, but only for as long as they were being chased, and they could not throw the ball into the goal — they had to kick the ball to score. So this is the mix of rules. And Dixwell — Dixwell's Latin School in Boston — is the place where the first documented American football club was created, in 1861. So this is the beginning.

TP: In your book, you show how sometimes the spread of football relied largely on one individual — the principal or headmaster — bringing a game. Chance sometimes played a role. But now football, soccer, is everywhere in the world. Do you think that spread was inevitable?

TA: So we have to look at this from two angles — from the angle of the teachers and from the angle of the students. There is a reason why football became so popular and won a turf war over any kind of physical exercise that we would today, in today's terminology, identify with military exercises — marching exercises, boring stuff. I remember teenagers doing basically marching exercises. This is where football, in all its varieties, was so popular, because it allowed the students to take an active role and to engage in something in which the teachers had a very minimal role — if the teachers were involved at all, it was as referees. Because a beautiful thing about the game is that there are codes, there are rules agreed upon before the game, and then everyone has to obey those rules. So there is no mechanism by which teachers can punish students. It gives the students an enormous degree of independence. And that made it so attractive. This is why students, wherever they went in the 19th century, had a ball in their backpack, and they carried the football and the game — and the moment they started playing it, it basically brought new students into the fold.  From the perspective of teachers, this was the perfect game because the game is played all afternoon, especially for students in boarding schools. They come home exhausted — and an exhausted student is a perfect student. You don't have to discipline him anymore. He will behave. So this is a win-win situation for both sides.