"In the beginning, there were the English." That's the first sentence of a re-
cent book on Italian football, but it could accurately start any history of the
game, anywhere in the world. Humans have been kicking something round-an enemy'
s head, an inflated pig's bladder-since time immemorial, but it was in the Eng-
lish fee-paying "public" schools of the 19th centry, with their commitment to
muscular Christianity and mens sana in corpore sano, that rules were first est-
ablished to regulate the mayhem of ancient ball games.
When young Victorians left their schools to go to university or to take emplo-
yment, however, they found their attempts at football often chaotic, because e-
ach school had developed its own laws. At Harrow players could handle the ball,
for instance, whereas at Rugby they could carry it while running, too. So atte-
mpts were made to systematize the way in which varous codes of the game should
be played. The most famous such effort took place on Oct. 26, 1863, at the Fre-
emasons Tavern, a pub in London, where a group of former public-school men gra-
ndly announced that they would call themselves the Football Association (a tit-
le which, abbreviated, gave the world the world soccer), and went on to establ-
ish 13 laws of the game. Melvyn Bragg, a British novelist and cultural critic,
recently argued that the football laws constitute one of 12 books-along with s-
uch others as Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica-that changed the world.
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