History of Association Football

Association football is popularly known as football soccer and it is claimed to be the most popular sport around the world. However, we can trace back the history of football soccer back in time and find the first sources citing ball games with similar characteristics that were played by ancient civilizations.

During the third century BC a soccer-like ball game was played in Egypt as a fertility rite, although the rules of the game were similar to those of modern handball, although China invented a leather ball game the century before and it was credited to Fu-Hi, who was not only an inventor but one of the five great Chinese rulers from the ancient times.

The leather ball was made of several spherical roots in the form of hard bristles that was coated with rawhide, but once again, the game was played passing the ball from hand to hand. The leather ball was later adopted in India and Persia where it became the most popular game. In the New World, the ancient pre-Hispanic civilizations were also known by their ball games that once again resembled what we known today as football soccer, although some tribes added their own rules and variants to those games.

Aztecs practiced a game called "tlachtli", that was probably the first real soccer game in the world because it incorporated actions similar to those of the tennis and basketball, but the use of the hands was prohibited, thus the ball was only touched with the feet. Of course, the end of the game was different to the end of a soccer match today. Aztecs sacrificed the captain of the defeated team, something that many people would like to do nowadays.

In Ancient Greece, Homer refers to a ball game called "esferomagia" or "esfaira" that was made of the ox bladder. Perhaps from the Spanish word "esf