The Rise of Football From Then Until Now

American football is one of the most popular sports in the world, but the game’s roots are much older than people suspect. The modern rules developed out of rugby games that were played in American colleges, but rugby itself developed out of a much older tradition that dates back almost as far as recorded history in Europe.

Where It Started

The oldest signs of a football-like game come from Greece and Rome, which played Episkyros and Harpastum. Historians know relatively little about these games besides the general structure. They know that players tried to get a ball from one end of the pitch to the other, and that the games were so violent that spectators sometimes got injured if they got too close to the players. These games combined with Gaelic football to create the mob football that was popular in Europe throughout the Medieval period.

Mob football didn’t have many rules. Teams could be any size, and often formed when two towns decided to grab everyone that wanted to play and compete with each other. The playing field was usually an empty street, and players tried to get the ball to pass between a pair of markers, or occasionally to hit a specific building. The sport was popular in spite of several kings trying to ban it, and it traveled to America with the earliest colonists.

College Games

Those games spread to the first American colleges, and they started to get organized on campus in the early part of the 19th century. The professors and the local police usually disapproved of the games, since they were violent and chaotic, but the students loved them. They were occasionally banned, but they eventually developed into something that resembled modern football.

Historians generally accept that the first game of modern football took place between Princeton and Rutgers University November 6th, 1869. Players still scored by kicking the ball into a goal, but the general structure of the modern game was already present. Rutgers won the game, which naturally led to a rematch with Princeton’s rules a week later. That was the first game to have the fair catch kick rule, which has survived almost unchanged in the modern rules.

The game spread to other colleges, all of which experimented with new rules. Harvard initially refused to coordinate with the other universities and insisted on using its own rules, but that changed after a game against McGill University. That game introduced several English elements to the game, including the earliest form of the touchdown, and Harvard loved the new rule so much that it successfully spread them to other schools. This was the set of rules that Walter Camp went on to refine into the modern game during his time at Yale, which started in 1876.

The First Professionals

These rules made the game so popular that people were paid to play it. It’s possible that the first professionals went unrecorded by history, but the first known case of a paid player happened in 1892. William Heffelfinger, often called Pudge, received $500 to play in a game between Allegheny and Pittsburgh. People suspected the payment at the time, but it took almost 80 years for proof to appear to the public.

The Modern Game

The NCAA formed about a decade later in response to concerns about the violence in the game. Schools were starting to ban it to prevent injuries to their students, which offended the president of the USA, Teddy Roosevelt. He asked several schools to come together to save the game, which they did by creating the modern, relatively safe rules.

Mass media technology, including radios and eventually television, were enough to make the game steadily grow in popularity during the 20th century. The NFL formed in 1919 to arrange games between the teams and declare an overall champion as analyzed by betting sites also, which made it even easier for people to watch the games. It eventually started to regulate player payment and recruitment, which culminated in the modern system of NFL picks.

The history of football is a history of steady growth. Games that resembled modern football have been popular all over the world for thousands of years, but the professional game has only been around for a little more than a century. Since the mass broadcasting of games was all it took to make football popular, it’s probably safe to say that it would’ve taken even less time if the technology had developed faster.