Interesting Facts About Football You Didn’t Hear About

Football is a sport which is the most famous one among the games and I believe that you also love this game. Do you know that football is the game which once was banned and you could go to jail for playing it, we hope u don’t know this fact, we here have collected some facts like this so that you could know the history or we can say wild history of the sport liked by most.

1. THE ORIGIN

There only is evidence for an activity recognized as a form of football that football is from 300 BC to 201 BC. During the Hahn dynasty in China it was a simple ball game known as CUJU where the objective was to kick a leather ball through a small hole in a piece of cloth positioned a couple of meters above the ground. It was originally used and intended as a military exercise but the popularity of the game spread quickly among the upper class and spread to other nations. It also spread to Japanese people and found the resemblance with Japanese game KEMARI, where people stand in a circle trying to keep the ball in the air by kicking the ball in the air for as long as possible.

It is essentially the same like kick but with slightly different rules and clothes. Evidence for ancient game similar to the football has also been found in the places like ancient Greek and Italy also but it was until ninth century that the modern day football truly began to take its shape. Between ninth and thirteenth century an activity known as medieval or mob football spiked the popularity in England, Scotland and France. Mob football is exactly what it sounds like large mobs usually entire would compete against each other trying to acquire a small object like an inflated animal bladder to a specific location and with an exception of murder and man slaughter almost anything was accepted to complete this objective. The game got so violent and disruptive to non participant that in 1314 king Edward the second issued a proclamation banning football in London. Many attempts to ban the game would follow in all three countries but the bans were not effective as the people just kept on playing in secret. Beginning in the 16th century slightly different and familiar form of football were being played that public rules across England. It was lot less violent than the regular mob football and more strict regulations were soon established, things like only being allowed to use your feet, having a referee and coach passing, dribbling and having a goal with designated goalkeeper on each end of the playing field. Football began to transform into an organized sport rather than a chaotic riot. The problem was that each goal developed their own version of the game with slightly different rules. For example at rugby school they prefer a more violent game or you could tackle your opponents and still carry the ball in your arms and hands and thus rugby and grid iron’s football was born. Increasing attempts to unify and recognize the public, school games were made and in 1848 the first written rules were penned at the university of Cambridge, these rules became widely adopted and in 1863 the football association was founded in London to continue to promote football under a unified set of regulations as the sport became increasingly popular all over the globe, a need for international association became apparent and thus FIFA was founded in France in 1904. Today it’s estimated that 3.5 billion people or half the population of the entire globe are fans of football.

2. SAME THING DIFFERENT NAMES

Why is it that country like US and CANADA insist on calling these sports as soccer while the rest of the world calls it football? It also makes a lot less sense to call a sport football when it generally consists of using your hands but it does make a bit more sense if you know where it came from, calling this sport soccer actually began back in England and here is why, as the football association was founded in London in 1863, the sport became officially known as Association Football, that was and still is the full title of the sport, this was done to distinguish Association Football from other variations of the game such as rugby football and Gaelic football but using the full title in the conversation can be a bit tedious, so shorthand names were used in their place. And a popular conversational form of creating abbreviations at that time was by applying the suffix ER so rugby football became Rugger and association football became footer or soccer often spells with the ck at the time. So the word soccer comes from the abbreviation of the word association founded in the full title of the sport association football.

3. LIGHT DESTRUCTION

In 1998 a match in the capital of the democratic republic of Congo was suddenly disrupted by a lightning strike, now lightning strikes in football matches are not unheard of but this one was a unique case, not only did half the players on the field died as a result of being struck by lightning, they were all from the same team, the other team remarkably left the match completely unharmed. The low called population known to believe in shams and spells divided on whether the team was cursed and what further fueled this rumor was that the game was tied 1-1 at the time of the incident and the team that died was the visiting team.

4. OHH!! WHAT A SCORE

The record for the highest score line of all time in professional football occurred in 2002 in Madagascar, and ended with a score of 149-0, however the reason for this absurd amount of goals was that the players of the losing team kept on kicking the ball into their own goal, they did this as a protest against the referee decision, the previous record occurred in 1885 with a score line of 36-0. The record for the largest victory in an international football match happened in 2001 between Australia and American Samoa with a score line of 31-0 just like the game in 1885 the reason for the high score level were because of the team skill level being incredibly mismatched.

5. FOOTBALL AS A RELIGION

To a lot of people football is a big deal in places like Brazil, for example its more or less comparable to a religion and like a religion this extreme passion for the sport can lead to some extreme situations, a perfect example of this is the 1950 FIFA world cup hosted in Brazil. In finals it was brazil up against Uruguay for multiple days prior to the match both the press and the general public assumed that Brazil would come out as the world champions. The organizers of the events had even prepared the speech for when the Brazil ultimately won, but to everyone’s surprise Brazil lost the match with the final score 2-1 resulting in one of the biggest upsets in the football history, so much so that some fans actually committed suicide by throwing themselves off the stands through the stadium, and a noticeable wave of suicide were reported in the days that followed. Brazilian newspapers and radio hosts even tried to ignore or deny the fact that they have been defeated; the entire thing has become known as MARACANAZO after the name of the stadium.

6. FOOTBALL WAR

Even more dramatic 1970 FIFA world cup prompted a war between two nations in 1969, Honduras and El Salvador met the qualification for the upcoming world cup, Honduras won the first game with a score of 1-0 which sparked a lot of violence among the fans, El Salvador would go on to win the second game with a score of 3-0 which ignited another wave of riots and violence, finally a play of match took place which ended with El Salvador as the winner with the score of 3-2, now before all of this, these two nations were not exactly friends, issues over land reform and democratic problems were all rampant long before these games ever took place, so when El Salvador won the final game Honduras began assaulting and harassing Salvador immigrants all across the country, as a sort of retaliation for losing the game, El Salvador seeing this as a form of genocide dissolved all democratic relationship with Honduras the same day and launched an attack on the nation only two weeks after the final match, the war ended after 4 days when cease fire was signed, with over 2000 people had died because of which it is known as the football war.

Here were few of the interesting facts about the football which few of you might have known. Hope you liked all these facts and there are more facts to come so keep visiting our website.