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Association football

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Football (official but largely unused name: Association Football), also called soccer in some countries and occasionally known colloquially in some parts of Britain as footy, or in Scotland as fitba', is the most popular team sport in the world in both number of spectators and number of active participants. The international governing body of football is the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA, based in Zurich, Switzerland). In many parts of the world, particularly in Europe, South America and ever increasingly in Africa, football is more than just a game: it is a way of life. Millions of people play for amateur clubs or regularly go to a stadium to follow their home team and avidly watch the game on television. Countries from these areas dominate the international game.

Name

The name Association football was first used when the sport was codified by the Football Association in 1863, to distinguish it from the numerous versions of football that were around at the time. The word soccer is a colloquial abbreviation of 'Association' and first appeared in the 1880s. The word is sometimes credited to a student at Oxford called Charles Wreford Brown. He is said to have often referred to breakfast as 'brekkers' and rugby football as 'rugger,' etc. He went on to play for the England national side and became vice-president of the Football Association. The term 'Association football' is rarely used today, though some clubs still use Association Football Club ("AFC") in their names.

In the late 19th century the word 'soccer' tended to be used by the upper-classes who played the game under that name at public schools, whilst the majority of working class people used the word 'football'. The sport was exported by expatriate Britons to much of the rest of the world and many of these nations adopted the common English term into their own language. The word was translated into the Germanic languages: thus it became Fußball in German, voetbal in Dutch, fotball in Swedish, fodbold in Danish, fótbolti in Icelandic etc. Finnish, too, translated the term: jalapallo. The English word football is used in most Romance languages, with different pronunciation. The spelling was however changed in Portuguese (futebol) and in Spanish(fútbol). In French the word remained unchanged as le football (but is often shortened to le foot), although in Quebec the word is le soccer. In Italy, a ceremonial Florentine court ritual known as il calcio storico ("kickball in costume") bore enough similarity to the imported game for the word calcio to be accepted instead.

Football is colloquially known in Britain as footie. The term 'footer' was once used, but is now obsolete.

The word "soccer" is predominantly used by English-speaking nations that have evolved their own native codes of football not directly descended from Association game, but from their common ancestors (See: Football).

However, this was not always the case. The first "football club" in the USA was the Oneida Football Club of Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1862. It is often said that this was the first club to play Association football outside Britain. However, the "Oneidas" were clearly formed before the English FA; it is not known what rules they used[1] and the club wound up within the space of a few years. The first US match known to have occurred under FA rules was a game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, although these two colleges would soon become famous as early bastions of American football.

Early soccer leagues in the US mostly used the name football leagues: for example, the American Football Association (founded in 1884), the American Amateur Football Association (1893), the American League of Professional Football (1894), the National Association Foot Ball League (1895), and the Southern New England Football League (1914). However, the word soccer was begining to catch on, and the St Louis Soccer League was a significant competition between 1907 and 1939.

What is now the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) was originally the US Football Association, formed in 1913 by the merger of the American Football Association and the American Amateur Football Association. The governing body of the sport in the US did not have the word 'soccer' in its name until 1945, when it became the US Soccer Football Association. It did not drop the word 'football' from its name until 1974, when it became the US Soccer Federation.

Similarly, in Australia the early governing bodies of Association football usually used other terms to distnguish themselves from Australian Rules Football and rugby football, rival sports which also became popular in the 1860s. The first game under FA rules did not occur until 1880. The New South Wales association was founded in 1882 as the South British Football Soccer Association; in Victoria, the Anglo-Australian Football Association in 1884; the Queensland British Football Association in 1889; the Western Australian Soccer Football Association in 1896; the South Australian British Football Association in 1902; and a Tasmanian association in about 1910-12. The first Australia-wide body was the Commonwealth Football Association, formed in 1912, althoug this reportedly folded two years later.[2]

In countries that didn't develop a rival sport with a claim to the name football, "soccer" and other names were rarely used. Today the growing use of the word may well owe much to the cultural dominance of the USA, which is shaping language and definitions well beyond its borders. However football remains by far the most common word used worldwide to describe the sport and is the name officially used by both FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.

Other "football" games include:

The Laws of Football

The rules of football are known as Laws of Football[3] and are based on efforts made in the mid-19th century to standardise the rules of the widely varying games of football played at the public schools and universities of England. The first set of rules resembling the modern game were produced at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1848, at a meeting attended by representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury, but it was far from universally adopted. A number of revised rules were subsequently proposed, most notably by the Sheffield football club (formed by former pupils from Harrow) in 1857 and the rules of JC Thring in 1862. These efforts culminated in the formation of the Football Association in 1863 which first met on the evening of October 26 1863. Between October and December the Freemason's Tavern in Great Queen Street, London, was the setting for a series of six meetings which eventually produced the first comprehensive set of rules. At the final meeting, the representative from Blackheath withdrew his club from the FA over a rule outlawing hacking (kicking an opponent in the shins). The Blackheath club later went on to form the Rugby Football Union.

Today the laws of football are determined by the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The board was formed in 1882 after a meeting in Manchester of the Football Association, the Scottish Football Association (SFA), the Football Association of Wales (FAW) and the Irish Football Association (IFA) (now the governing body in Northern Ireland and not to be confused with the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) the governing body in the Republic of Ireland). The International football body FIFA was formed in Paris in 1904 and declared that they would adhere to the rules laid down by the IFAB. The growing popularity of the international game led to the admittance of FIFA representatives to the IFAB in 1913. Today the board is made up of four representatives from FIFA and one representative from each of the British associations.

The official Laws of the Game are:

  • Law 1: The Field of Play
  • Law 2: The Ball
  • Law 3: The Number of Players
  • Law 4: The Players' Equipment
  • Law 5: The Referee
  • Law 6: The Assistant Referees
  • Law 7: The Duration of the Match
  • Law 8: The Start and Restart of Play
  • Law 9: The Ball In and Out of Play
  • Law 10: The Method of Scoring
  • Law 11: Offside
  • Law 12: Fouls and Misconduct
  • Law 13: Free Kicks
  • Law 14: The Penalty Kick
  • Law 15: The Throw-In
  • Law 16: The Goal Kick
  • Law 17: The Corner Kick

Object of the game

Two teams of eleven players on each side contend to get a spherical ball into the other team's goal. The side which does this the most frequently is the winner. The primary rule for this objective is that nearly all players cannot use their hands or arms in any way while on the field.

Officials

The game is presided over by a Referee, who has "full authority to enforce the Laws of the Game in connection with the match to which he has been appointed" (Law 6), and whose decisions regarding facts connected with play are final. The Referee is assisted by two Assistant Referees (formerly called linesmen). In many games there is also a fourth official, who assists the referee and may replace another official should the need arise.

Teams

Each team has a goal keeper that is allowed to handle the ball with his arms and shoulders when he is standing within the outer marked area around the home goal, which is called the Penalty area (football) (also known as the "box" or "18 yard box"). The penalty area extends 18 yards each side of the goal, and 18 yards in front of it.

The ten outfield players on either side are not allowed to touch the ball with their arms or shoulders whilst the ball is in play, but may however play it with any other part of their anatomies. The sole exception to this is when the ball is kicked out of play and a throw in results.

A number, (variable by league and nation), of players may be replaced by substitutes during the course of the game. The usual reasons for a player's replacement include injury, tiredness, ineffectiveness, a tactical switch, or to waste a little time at the end of a finely poised game.

Playing field


Standard football pitch measurements (Large) (Metric)

According to IFAB regulations the length of the football field (or "pitch") for international matches should be in the range 100-110 metres and the width should be in the range 64-75 metres. (For other matches the constraints are looser: 90-120 metres length by 45-90 metres width.) The area is under a hectare.

The pitch is divided at the centre: this is the halfway line. Exactly halfway across the halfway line is the centre spot (this is where the ball commences play from). A circle is drawn around the centre spot, the centre circle which has a radius of 10 yards (9.144 m) from the centre spot.

At either end of the pitch is a goal. This is a letterbox-shaped receptacle with a net behind it whose dimensions are: 8 feet (2.44 m) in height and 24 feet (7.32 m) in width. Two boxes are marked out on the pitch in front of the goal. The smaller box, which is laid out to surround the goal at an equal distance of 6 yards (5.5 m) denotes where the goalkeeper can take goal kicks from. The outer box is known as the penalty area or the 18 yard box, and is set 18 yards (16.5 m) to each side of the goal, and 18 yards in front of it. A small semicircle is also drawn at the edge of the penalty area, the D, 10 yards (9.5m) from the penalty spot. This is an exclusion zone for all players other than the one taking the kick in the event of a penalty being awarded.

The penalty spot (or penalty mark) is immediately in the middle of and 12 yards (11 m) in front of the goal.

In each corner of the pitch a small quarter circle with a 1 yard radius is drawn where corner kicks are taken from.

Duration

A full adult football match lasts for two periods of 45 minutes; a total of 90 minutes. There is usually a 15 minute break between halves. The referee is the official timekeeper for the match, and it is part of his duties to ensure that as close to 45 minutes in each half are played: he is allowed to stop his watch if, for example, a player is injured and requires treatment. This practice is commonly (and erroneously) known as 'adding time on': a more accurate description would be that the injury time (as time over exactly 45 minutes since the half started is known) is being played to make up for time that was lost earlier in the half. Some games, particularly knockout competition matches, provide for extra time in the event of a tied result at the end of normal time: two further periods of 15 minutes are played. Unlike North American ice hockey or American professional football, these periods are not played under 'sudden death' (first team to score wins) rules. If the score is still tied, then some competitions allow the use of a procedure properly known as kicks from the penalty mark and colloquially as the penalty shoot-out to determine a winner. In the late 1990s, the IFAB experimented with ways of making matches more likely to end without requiring kicks from the penalty mark, as they are generally seen as an undesirable and unfair way to end a match (often by the supporters of a side who have lost thanks to them). The first was the Golden Goal: this was equivalent to North American ice hockey or American professional football overtime procedures where the first goal or points scored in extra time wins the match. However, the Golden Goal was soon criticised because it tended to produce boring extra time periods where both sides sat back, too scared of a sudden counter-attack to try any serious attacking, and waited for penalties. In response, they created the Silver Goal procedure; basically, if one side was leading at half time in extra time, then the match was terminated there. If the scores were still level, the second half of extra time was played. This was also largely seen as a failure, and at the 2004 meeting of the IFAB, they decided to scrap both the Golden Goal and the Silver Goal, and in August 2004 they will be removed from the Laws.

Events

The major international competition in football is the World Cup organised by FIFA. The World Cup competition takes place over a two year period. Over 160 national teams compete in regional qualifying tournaments for a place in the finals. The final tournament which is held every four years, now involves 32 national teams (increased from 24 in 1998) competing over a 4 week period.

The major national competitions of the continents are:

The major club event in Europe is the Champions League, while the major club event in South America is the Copa Libertadores.

Violence

The level of passion with which football teams are supported has from time to time caused problems, groups of fanatics have participated in disturbances and sometimes tragedies (see hooligans, Heysel Stadium disaster and Football War). As of 2004 this aspect of football seems to have passed its peak though by no means disappeared completely. Specialist police units and information sharing between regional and international police forces has made it much harder for the hooligans to organize their displays of hatred.

National leagues

Here is a list of links to national league football teams:

Standard for football club information

National football teams

Here is a list of links to pages relating to national football teams:


See also:

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