The Origins Of Football
Today - Nationally And Locally

The Origins Of Football
Soccer, as played today, could be considered the final offshoot and purest, modern form of man's primitive kicking games. In turn, it became the basic source of Rugby, American Football, and Australian rules, all of which could be classed as its derivatives.

From 1820 onward, clubs were formed, and several kinds of football slowly developed. When the game was eventually introduced into the public schools, it received a new social standing. These schools naturally created their own style, which depended much upon the size and shape of the playing ground. In country schools with wide open spaces, 'handling' and 'hacking' became the rule: players in the city of London, restricted in territory, soon favored 'dribbling' and 'passing' the ball.

When pupils of the various schools entered university, they had their separate ideas of how football was played. In the end however, this proved a blessing as it led to the first attempt, at Cambridge in 1848, to unify the game by drawing up a general code of rules.

Nevertheless, this first effort to unify the game proved abortive. Many years later, in 1862, it was Cambridge once again which started the ball rolling in the battle for a generally accepted code. J.C Thring then published 'Ten Rules' for what he called 'The Simplest Game'. This led, within a year, to the 'Cambridge University Football Rules'.
By this time various clubs had been established and were experiencing a real boom. The oldest among them was the Sheffield Club. Its founding members were mostly graduates of Harrow, who brought with them their old school's football traditions. These strictly banned handling the ball. To ensure the adoption of their code by other players, they sometimes used an ingenious method. When playing a team of villagers, for example, they presented to each of them a pair of white gloves and a silver florin which, throughout the game, they were made to hold tightly. This, of course, prevented the men from using their hands.

And yet, other footballers relished catching, handling, and carrying the ball and no one could deny the urgent need somehow to combine the various forms of football. For this purpose a meeting was convened at the Old Freemasons Tavern in London, in October 1863, a date every footballer should cherish. Those taking part came from eleven London and suburban clubs, one public school, and the rest represented no one in particular. A motion to form 'The Football Association' was adopted and any club of at least a year's standing was invited to join at an annual subscription fee of one guinea. This was the birth of modern football and its unified code. Its further development and growth was the result of many years of debates, trial and error experiments, and the eventual resolution of conflicts and controversies by typical British compromise.

That is how the association came into existence in its final form. From the term Association, students slang created the modern term soccer, using the letters S, O and C as a base. Wherever Englishmen went, whether as soldiers, traders, teachers, or even as missionaries, they took football with them. It never took long for the new country to adopt enthusiastically the game which is now played all over the world.

Football of a kind dates back to a very early period in Australia's history. In its issue of 25 July 1829 the Sydney Monitor recorded: 'the privates in the barracks are in the habit of amusing themselves with the game and the ball can be daily descried repeatedly mounting higher or lower, according to the skill and energy of the bold military kickers thereof.'
At first football had few followers and even less admirers and the newspaper took very little notice of it. Yet in 1840 it was included in the Queen's Birthday celebrations when, according to the Sydney Herald, 'there was also a game of football attempted, which gave rise to sundry scuffles and broken shins'.

Soccer was brought to Australia by J.W Fletcher, an English schoolmaster who had made his home in Sydney. In 1880 he and J.A Todd convened a meeting at Aaron's Exchange Hotel, 'to consider and promote the introduction of the English Association Game in New South Wales'. They founded the Wanderer's Club. Its first match was played at Parramatta. For more than fifty years, soccer gained comparatively few friends in Australia. New South Wales and Queensland preferred rugby and in the rest of the country Australian Rules was the number one game.

The first intercolonial match was held between New South Wales and Victoria in Melbourne in 1883. But it was not until 1922 that Australia participated in international soccer, sending a team to New Zealand. The arrival of thousands of European migrants to Australia since World War 2, transplanted their fervent love of the sport to their new home. This led to its present day phenomenal growth and boom. It confirmed the view expressed by Soccer in the very first number of the weekly journal which appeared in 1958: 'Soccer, the most universal of ball games, provides a vast reservoir of untapped entertainment for the people of Australia'.

Today - Nationally And Locally
Soccer has long been considered the sleeping giant of Australian sport. On a grass roots level it has an exceptional participation base of juniors, amateurs, males and females - over 70,000.

At the elite level, Australia competes in the two largest international sporting competitions in the world - the World Cup and the Olympic Games.

Currently we have more than eighty of our elite players on multi-million dollar contracts playing in the world's best leagues throughout Europe, Japan, Malaysia and South America. Names like Mark Bosnich, Robbie Slater, Ned Zelic, Kevin Muscat, Mark Viduka and Stan Lazaridis, to name but a few, are household names throughout the world game.
Soccer in this country is administered by Soccer Australia with each State body responsible for the local scene.

Soccer was the first sport in Australia to establish a national league in 1977. Now known as the Ericsson Cup, it currently features 14 clubs located throughout the country.