While it may be difficult to envision a world without football, formalized football as we know it is a relatively new sport in overall terms. Although our perception of the beautiful game has gradually changed due to regulation changes throughout time, soccer as we know it today originated in English public schools and universities in the 19th century.
But football has existed as a sport for a lot longer than that. Humans have always had a strong desire to kick a ball around; soccer and other comparable games were once practiced by a number of ancient civilizations. 

We’ll walk you through some of those early iterations of the sport in this post and discuss how they relate to how we currently perceive it.

Those conversations will serve as background for the crucial query: who invented soccer? We’ll walk you through the history of the beautiful game, including its hows, whens, and wheres, before taking a quick look at the first international football competitions. But let’s begin with the fundamentals.

Who Invented Soccer?

The desire to kick a ball has been expressed by humans for a longer time than historians can trace. Whether it’s cavemen kicking a rock to each other, medieval villages battling for possession of a pig’s bladder, or citizens of Elizabethan England running around a muddy bog (football was mentioned in two William Shakespeare plays, King Lear and A Comedy of Errors), football has been around for centuries.

But it was in England’s public schools in the mid-late 1800s that traditional games—like the ones listed above—became modern soccer, and that’s when the Laws of the Game were first codified. The first English Football Association established a set of rules that football players at elite educational institutions nationwide could adhere to. Prior to the establishment of these laws, different cities, regions, and clubs across the nation played using a wide array of different rules and regulations. This set of rules was partly established as a way of confining the sport to these institutions and excluding outsiders.

It is impossible to pinpoint one person as the true creator of association football, but Ebenezer Morley, a Hull-born solicitor who lived in southwest London and is widely regarded as the “father” of the English Football Association, keeps coming up as the most likely candidate. The FA’s inaugural meeting, which resulted in the historic establishment of the Laws of the Game, was prompted by a letter written by the founder of Barnes Football Club to the publication Bell’s Life.

Where Was Soccer Invented?

Since the original Football Association Laws continue to serve as the foundation of football worldwide, association football is widely credited to the English. But the English game back then looked very different; it was essentially a dribbling game, when players from the same team took turns attempting to wiggle their way past opposing defenders and into scoring positions, disregarding their teammates in the process.
Because they were smaller than their English opponents at the time, the Scottish had to come up with new strategies to defeat their more physically aggressive opponents. As a result, they started to develop a new style of play that eventually led to football being what it is today: a passing game.

The sport was revolutionized by a surge of Scots who moved south of the border in search of professional playing possibilities with Northern English clubs, emphasizing team moves and passing play much more than before. Due to this phenomenon, many individuals have claimed over the years that Scotland is the country that truly founded football. Although the sport wasn’t formalized there, it is indisputable that the Scots are largely responsible for the development of modern soccer.

When Was Soccer Invented?

The legendary FA’s founding meeting was held in the Freemasons’ Tavern on Great Queen Street in London on October 26, 1863. Twelve separate clubs’ representatives contributed to the codification of football during the meeting, which marked the beginning of over 150 years of official association football in the United Kingdom.
While the men’s game is typically highlighted in history of the sport, women have been playing football in England and Scotland for practically as long as men have.

The first women’s football match was officially organized in Edinburgh in 1881. Women’s football gained enormous popularity throughout the United Kingdom during and after World War I, with well-known teams like Dick and Kerr Ladies drawing crowds of up to 50,000 spectators in the years that followed.
Even though it’s widely accepted that football was “invented” in 1863, similar games have been played for millennia around the globe.