6.2 — Football

The most played and most watched sport on Earth, whose entire rulebook has seventeen laws and whose most argued-about one is a single line drawn across the pitch by a human eye.

The game

Why is it called both football and soccer?

Because English public schools in the nineteenth century played several codes of football and needed to tell them apart.

In 1863 the Football Association was formed to codify one version, which became Association Football. A rival group who wanted handling and hacking left and eventually formed the Rugby Football Union.

Oxford student slang at the time abbreviated words by taking a fragment and adding -er: rugby football became rugger, and association football became "assoccer", shortened to soccer. So the word is not American — it is English, it is upper-class Victorian, and it was in ordinary British use well into the twentieth century.

Britain dropped it as football became the default; America kept it, because in America the word football was already taken. Countries that use "soccer" are almost exactly the countries with a competing sport called football: the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland.

What are the actual rules, briefly?

Eleven players a side, ninety minutes in two halves, and only the goalkeeper may use hands, and only inside their own penalty area.

Restarts are what most of the seventeen Laws are about. The ball out over a side line gives a throw-in to the other team; out over the goal line off an attacker gives a goal kick; off a defender gives a corner. A foul gives a free kick, direct or indirect depending on the offence, and a foul by a defender inside their own penalty area gives a penalty from twelve yards with only the keeper to beat.

Yellow card is a caution, two yellows in one match make a red, and a red means the player leaves and is not replaced — so the team plays on with ten. Sending a player off in the first ten minutes is one of the few moments in sport where the balance of a contest changes irreversibly and immediately.

The referee alone keeps the official time, which is why matches end when the referee decides rather than when a clock reaches zero, and why added time is announced as a minimum.

What is offside, and why is it the most argued rule in sport?

The purpose is simple and worth stating before the mechanics: without it, an attacker could stand permanently next to the opposing goalkeeper and wait for a long pass. The rule forces the attack to come forward with the ball rather than camp behind the defence.

An attacker is in an offside position if, at the moment their teammate plays the ball, they are in the opponents' half and closer to the goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent — usually the last outfield defender, since the keeper is normally the last.

Three things people get wrong. Being in an offside position is not an offence. It becomes one only if the player then becomes involved — playing the ball, interfering with an opponent, or gaining an advantage. The moment that matters is when the pass is made, not when it is received, which is why a player running onto a ball can be well behind the defence legally. And you cannot be offside from a throw-in, a corner or a goal kick.

It is the most argued rule because it is a judgement about a single instant, made by an assistant referee watching two things in different places at once. Video review made it worse rather than better: decisions now turn on a few centimetres of a shoulder or a toe, which is technically correct and satisfies almost nobody, and has led to proposals for a tolerance margin.

History

Where did the game come from?

Ball games played with the feet appear all over the world — cuju in Han dynasty China, kemari in Japan, episkyros in Greece, mob football in medieval England involving whole villages and frequent injury.

What England produced was not the game but the rulebook. Public schools each had their own version, so boys arriving at university could not play together, and the 1863 codification existed to solve that. The 1863 Laws banned carrying the ball and, after argument, banned hacking — kicking an opponent in the shins deliberately — which is what split the rugby faction away.

Professionalism arrived in the 1880s over the objections of the amateur establishment, and it arrived because northern industrial clubs were paying players covertly and the alternative was a permanent split. The Football League began in 1888.

FIFA was founded in 1904 by seven continental European associations, without Britain, which regarded international organisation as unnecessary. The World Cup began in 1930 in Uruguay, with four European teams making the boat journey.

What was the Christmas truce, and did it really involve football?

On Christmas Day 1914, along parts of the Western Front, British and German soldiers left their trenches, exchanged food and cigarettes, and buried their dead.

Football matches did take place, and this is documented in several soldiers' letters, though the picture of an organised match with a proper ball and a score is romanticised. Most accounts describe kickabouts with improvised balls in the frozen mud between the lines.

It happened once at that scale. Commands on both sides issued orders to prevent any repetition, and by the following Christmas artillery was deliberately scheduled to make it impossible.

Why is the World Cup so much bigger than the Olympics for football?

Because football's own governing body runs it and controls which players may appear where.

The Olympic football tournament is restricted to under-23 squads with three older players allowed, deliberately, so that it does not compete with the World Cup. FIFA protected its own event by capping the Olympic one, and the result is that Olympic football gold has a fraction of the prestige.

The World Cup is watched by more people than any other single sporting event. The 2022 final drew a global audience estimated at around 1.5 billion.

The famous moments

What was the Hand of God?

In the 1986 World Cup quarter-final, Argentina against England, Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net with his fist and the referee, unsighted, gave the goal. Asked afterwards, Maradona said it was scored "a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God".

Four minutes later he scored again, running from inside his own half past five England players, in a goal voted the best in World Cup history. The two goals in one match are why the incident is remembered rather than merely resented: the same player produced the most cynical and the most brilliant goal in the tournament within four minutes.

The match took place four years after the Falklands war, which is a substantial part of why it carried the weight it did in both countries.

What is the Miracle of Istanbul?

The 2005 Champions League final. Liverpool were 3-0 down to AC Milan at half time, in a match they were being comprehensively outplayed in, and scored three goals in six minutes in the second half before winning on penalties.

It is the standard reference for a comeback because of the specific scale: no team had recovered a three-goal deficit in a European Cup final before or since, and Milan had one of the strongest sides of the era.

Which are the numbers to know?

Brazil has won the World Cup five times, more than anyone, and is the only country to have played in every tournament. Germany and Italy have four each, Argentina three, France and Uruguay two.

Miroslav Klose holds the record for World Cup goals with 16. Pelé is the only player to win three World Cups. Lionel Messi holds the record for Ballon d'Or awards and, with the 2022 win, the one trophy that had been used to argue against him.

The most goals in a professional career is disputed and depends on which matches count, which is a recurring problem with pre-1970 records where friendlies, wartime games and unofficial matches were counted differently.

The business and the trouble

Why do European clubs dominate?

Because of money, and the money follows broadcast markets rather than local populations.

The five major European leagues — England, Spain, Germany, Italy, France — sell broadcast rights globally and pay wages that no league elsewhere can match. So the best players from South America, Africa and Asia move to Europe in their early twenties, and the European clubs compete with each other rather than with the world.

The consequence is that club football's centre of gravity is European while international football's is not, and the World Cup is the only competition where that reverses.

What is FIFA's corruption problem?

In May 2015, US federal prosecutors indicted a large number of FIFA officials on racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering charges, with arrests made in a Zurich hotel days before a FIFA congress. Swiss authorities opened a parallel investigation into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

The pattern alleged and in many cases admitted was that votes on hosting rights and broadcast contracts were bought, over a period of decades, through intermediaries handling marketing rights.

Sepp Blatter, FIFA's president since 1998, was re-elected days after the arrests and resigned four days later. He and Michel Platini, head of European football, were subsequently banned from the sport by FIFA's own ethics committee.

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar raised a second and separate issue: the treatment of migrant construction workers under the kafala labour system, with disputed but substantial death tolls, and reforms to the system that were introduced under international pressure during the preparations.

Why does India not qualify?

A fair question with a specific answer, and it is not primarily about talent or population.

India played in the 1950 World Cup qualification and withdrew — the widely repeated story that this was because the players were barred from playing barefoot is not the main reason; the federation's own stated reasons included travel costs and a preference for the Olympics.

The structural reasons since are the ones that matter: football's investment has gone into a small number of professional clubs rather than into a broad base of youth infrastructure, cricket absorbs the great majority of sporting attention, sponsorship and school time, and the domestic league structure has been reorganised repeatedly, which makes long-term player development difficult.

India's men's ranking has hovered around 100th. The country has a genuine football culture in specific regions — Kerala, West Bengal, Goa and the north-east — with crowds and club rivalries that predate the national league by a century, and the gap between that enthusiasm and the national team's performance is the thing that frustrates its supporters.

What comes next

The next page is the event that stops the world every four years, its politics, and why the medals are ranked gold, silver and bronze rather than any other three metals.