A Brief History of Soccer: Origins, Timeline and Superstars

LAST UPDATED: December 10th, 2018

The history of soccer is about 150 years old.

There are plenty of myths about its beginnings, from ancient Greece to Kamakura Japan to the beaches of the Caribbean.

But the game as we know it today was forged in Victorian Britain, around the same time that John D. Rockefeller incorporated Standard Oil and Major League Baseball began.

The exact dates are fuzzy (like the offside rule), but 150 is an easy number to remember.

If you picture steel wires hoisting a giant, neon ‘150’ sign onto the side of the newly-constructed Brooklyn Bridge, you’ll never forget how old soccer is.

Here is a timeline of some key dates in soccer’s history.

History of Soccer Timeline

1863: At the Freemason’s Tavern, 81-82 Long Acre, London, it is decreed that two separate winter sports are required to satisfy the appetites of Britain’s 19th Century schoolboys. Soccer and rugby officially fork (and rugby itself later forks between rugby union and rugby league), but the separate games are still being played today, so you can say that both camps had a good case.

1872: Soccer’s first international match takes place, between England and Scotland. It ends 0-0, but is historic because for the first time observers notice different styles. England were bigger, stronger and extremely direct, while Scotland were lighter in physique and passed the ball between themselves on the way up the pitch.

1872: The same year that the first FA Cup is held. 2,000 people watch the final at the Kennington Oval Cricket Ground in South London as Wanderers beat Royal Engineers 1-0.

1909: Goalkeepers are given a different colored shirt and asked to stay inside their own special box a couple of years later. Progress, as you can see, was slow.

1925: Soccer’s first major tactical shift. The existing offside law stated that three opposing players had to be between an attacking player and his opponent’s goal. This law change reduced that number to two, and goals per game skyrocketed.

1930: Uruguay wins the first ever World Cup. 93,000 spectators witness Uruguay beating Argentina 4–2 in a rematch of the 1928 Olympic gold medal game.

1940s: Domestic leagues mostly continue, but no World Cups take place in 1942, 1946 or 1948 because of World War II.

1950: USA beats 1–0 in a group match of the World Cup at Estádio Independência in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The result is notable as one of the biggest shocks in the tournament’s history.

1967: A group of entrepreneurs launch the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) after securing a contract from broadcast network CBS, albeit without FIFA’s permission. It was called the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) and it lasted just one season.

1975: Brazilian great Pelé arrives at the New York Cosmos, transforming soccer across the country and lending credibility not only to the Cosmos, but also to the NASL and soccer in general.

1978: Dutchman Johan Cruyff, who was instrumental in Ajax’s dominance of European soccer in the early 1970s, dragging the club from obscurity to the very pinnacle of the world stage, signs for Los Angeles Aztecs.

1989: Italian manager Arrigo Sacchi builds arguably the greatest ever club side with AC Milan, winning back-to-back European Cups.

1990: The World Cup in Italy is a tournament so dull (and the 1992 Euros that follow) that FIFA change the rules of the game. They prohibit goalkeepers from picking up a deliberate back pass, enforcing less time-wasting and more attacking, as well as outlawing the tackle from behind.

2005: The offside law is changed again, to exclude any players who are technically offside but not actually ‘interfering’ with play.

2008: At Barcelona between 2008 and 2012, Catalan Pep Guardiola builds his mesmeric ‘tiki-taka’ team and fans around the world are convinced soccer has reached its apex. Guardiola leaves for a sabbatical in New York.

2009: Cristiano Ronaldo becomes the world’s first $100m player when he transfers from Manchester United to Real Madrid.

2018: Der Spiegel newspaper in Germany publishes a story claiming Bayern Munich are leading a secret coalition to break away from the UEFA Champions League and form an elite competition with Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, AC Milan and Paris Saint-Germain.

History of Soccer in America

Researching the development of soccer’s administrative roots in the US is a tortuous undertaking. It’s characterised by regional disputes, competing bodies, the onset of the Great Depression and the extraordinarily long arm of FIFA. It took awhile for soccer to plant seed in America, but when it did, it was spectacular.

Long before soccer, there was Pasuckuakohowog, a Native American term which literally translates as “they gather the ball with the foot.” There’s evidence that it was played as early as the 17th Century, when it was played on beaches with goals nearly a kilometer wide and set twice as far apart. Some games had up to 1000 players and the spectacle was more like war than sport. But kicking something with your foot was where the similarities ended.

A soccer that you would identify with more arrived in the United States in the mid-19th Century. The beautiful game came to the Land of the Free in the same way it had traveled throughout the rest of the world: as a British export. It landed in the deep-water port of New Orleans. There are records of a first US match ‘inspired’ by the FA rules taking place between the universities of Princeton and Rutgers in November 1869, but this wasn’t quite soccer either, because each side had 25 players. Other colleges followed suit, but had converted to rugby within a few years and these teams would soon form the bedrock of American football.

In 1921, the country’s first proper soccer competition, the American Soccer League (ASL) was formed with founding teams hailing from industrial towns such as Fall River, Massachusetts and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Some clubs were even able to attract European talent with the bolt-on promise of a guaranteed well-paying factory job. The US finished third at the inaugural 1930 World Cup in Uruguay, which didn’t feature many of the top European teams, but even so, this was no meager beginning.

By 1931, infighting between the leagues, the clubs and the national federation caused the ASL to collapse like a soufflé. Obscurity beckoned. If the US hadn’t chalked their miracle victory over England, who knows when or even if soccer would have set foot in the American psyche ever again. It wasn’t until late 1960s that there was another crack at a professional league. A group of entrepreneurs launched the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) in 1967 after securing a contract from broadcast network CBS, albeit without FIFA’s permission. It lasted just one season. The head of CBS at the time, Bill McPhail, later told Sports Illustrated, “The stadiums were empty, which made it tough for us to generate much excitement. The players had foreign names, their faces were unfamiliar, their backgrounds undistinguished.” It wouldn’t stay that way.

Between 1976 and 1981, it rained soccer royalty on the United States. Pelé, George Best and Johan Cruyff, three of the greatest players the world has ever seen, let alone three of the greatest players of the time, contributed to a legacy that would ignite America’s soccer boom. For an amazing number of reasons, apart from those that are comically obvious given McPhail’s experience, the significance of this trilogy of fortune can hardly be overstated. Imagine, for a moment, that all of a sudden, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar all decide to forgo Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris St. Germain for LA Galaxy, D.C United and Houston Dynamo.

What changed? What took the NASL from amateur teams playing in front of sparse crowds on terrible pitches to the envy of the soccer glitterati? One man, Steve Ross. He was the president of Warner Communications, a media mogul with fingers in music, cable television, video games and the comic book industry.  He loved the Cosmos and was determined to make the club a success. He knew they needed something special, and there was nobody more famous than Pelé.

“I was retired from my team, Santos, I was retired from Brazil from the national team,” Pelé told journalist Michael Lewis, the editor of BigAppleSoccer.com. “What I am going to do in New York? I come from the two biggest teams, the biggest moments. Clive Toye [New York Cosmos president] told me, ‘Listen, we want to make soccer, football, as big as it is in Europe and South America.’ When I signed with the Cosmos, the Cosmos were almost a university team. Later on, we became the best team, almost in the world. After we got some excellent players, then the Cosmos became No 1.”

It all sounds so simple, but that’s how the greats think. Pelé’s three year, $2.8 million contract made him the best paid athlete in the world. His first game attracted television interest from over 200 countries and 300 journalists flew in to attend. He laid the path for the Cardiff-born Italian Giorgio Chinaglia to join the Cosmos from Lazio. This was a player in his prime, making the trip across the Atlantic to enhance his career, not finish it. Then came the German World Cup-winning captain Franz Beckenbauer and his Brazilian World Cup captain, Carlos Alberto.

Nightclubs and red-carpets begged for the Cosmos squad to attend glitzy events. They accepted. The club went on worldwide tours hand in hand with the Warner brand. The team won not because of tactics but pure technical superiority. And all this in a New York City that was a mess. President Ford had rejected the city’s plea for a financial bailout to help combat a notorious crime rate. In the summer of 1977, .44 Caliber Killer ‘Son of Sam’ terrorized the city with random killings. Times Square was a seedy, filthy, dangerous place to be. Looting was rife. This was Batman’s Gotham or the home of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, not a city fit for a king. And yet Pelé was happy to tirelessly sign autographs for fans until team officials had to remind him of his schedule and drag him away. In June, 62,394 American souls piled into the Giants Stadium for a 3-0 victory against the Rowdies. Pelé, who would turn 38 in the fall, scored a hat-trick.

His retirement game was a glitzy evening witnessed by 75,646 people shoulder to shoulder inside the New York Giants’ stadium. The celebrities in attendance included Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Diane Keaton, Mick Jagger, Muhammad Ali and Henry Kissinger. Jeff Carter, the son of then President Carter, presented Pelé with a plaque and read: “Presented to Pelé for the smiles he put on children’s faces, the thrills he gave to fans of this nation and the dimension he added to American sports. Pelé has elevated the game of soccer to heights never before attained in America and only Pelé, with his status, incomparable talent and beloved compassion could have accomplished such a mission. The United States of America is deeply grateful.”

Pelé took the microphone: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to be there with you in this greatest moment of my life,” he said. “I want to thank you all every single one of you. I want to take this opportunity to ask you to pay attention to the young of the world, the children, the kids. We need them too much.” Some tears appeared on Pelé’s cheeks. He gathered himself, then said, “And I want to ask you because I think that – I believe that – love is more important than what we can take in life. Everything passes. Please say with me, three times – Love! Love! Love!”

Roberta Flack sang The Star Spangled Banner, then Sérgio Mendes and his band played the Brazilian national anthem. Meanwhile, the stadium scoreboard was re-programmed to repeat the words – “Love! Love! Love!” and the crowd responded in unison. What did it mean? Maybe everything, maybe nothing. But in the long run, no explanation, no mix of words or memories can touch that sense of knowing that the crowd had that day. That they were there, in the stadium in that corner of time, whatever it meant for American soccer.

Soccer Ball History

Soccer’s origin story is both brutal and romantic, as opposed to just obscene, which is one way to describe populations of entire towns kicking a pig’s bladder from one landmark to another in 9th Century England. The bladders were – eventually – covered with leather for better shape retention, but not until Victorian Britain and the founding of the game in the late 19th Century. Whereas today Mitre, Nike, Adidas, Puma and the rest will produce new ball designs and fancy innovative technologies every season, these were simpler times.

In 1888, as the game’s popularity began to take off, Mitre first started mass producing balls. For Mitre’s customers, the most important quality a ball could have was an ability to reliably keep its shape. To achieve this they used thick, heavy leather, with cow rump the choice for the best balls and the shoulder for the cheaper versions. The pigs’ bladders were done away with and replaced with the more reliable vulcanized rubber.

With economic incentives generating competition to create better quality balls, interlocking panels began to appear. These replaced the previous leather sections that met at the north and south poles of the ball. The new balls had eighteen sections; six panels with three strips on each panel, tied together with stitching down one side.

White and orange balls were introduced in the 1950s with the arrival of floodlit games and the rising influence of spectator culture. Synthetic leather fully replaced regular leather in the 1980s. Since then, the history of the soccer ball has been a fascinating cycle to watch, for both its technical innovations and elliptical marketing hyperbole.

History of Soccer Book

On the pitch, you see good ideas all the time. I play for an international team in Berlin made up of players from 14 different countries. We have an American in the squad, the California kid, Andy Liu. As a player, Andy is so elusive that we have dubbed him ‘Luiesta’ because his style resembles that strange Spanish phantom, Andres Iniesta.

One day, I noticed that Andy and I had very different reference points as a fan. He loves playing the game, but I couldn’t exchange notes with him about watching Des Lynam’s mustache on 1990s Match of the Day. James Richardson mainlining macchiatos and blowing buongiornos into British living rooms on Sunday mornings? Not part of his childhood. Or yours, I wager. So an idea began to take hold.

I wondered about being a fan of the game growing up in America, and if there was place for a crash course in soccer history. My hunch was that most Americans did not want to read a 600-page tome. But they might like the extended highlights. I had read Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid (and will happily box anyone who doesn’t consider this the best book ever written about soccer), but knew that this wasn’t quite the right tool for the job.

So I decided to offer my own bridge between two spectator cultures. Here it is, a crash course in soccer, from the keyboard of a Brit to the Kindle of a Yank. It is designed to take only as long to read as it does to watch a game of soccer. In 105 minutes (90 mins + 15 for half-time), you can whizz through soccer’s kaleidoscopic highlights package and come to know more about the game than 98% of your friends.

If you’re looking for a great gift for the soccer fans amongst your friends and family, you’ve found it.

You can pick up your copy on Amazon.

Soccer Superstars

Who is the best soccer player in history?

There are only two players – Pelé and Diego Maradona – that will show up in every single conversation about the greatest player ever.

There are another three – Cruyff, Di Stefano and Puskás who show up in most.

Then there’s Zinedine Zidane, Messi, both Ronaldos and Franz Beckenbauer who are shoe-ins for the top ten.

It’s plausible that the latest superstars, Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, will make their way onto this list.

But fundamentally, the debate is between Pelé and Maradona.

Purely on paper, the accolade goes to Pelé, or to use his full name, Edson Arantes do Nascimento. He was involved in three World Cup wins (he played and scored in the 1958 and 1970 finals, but was injured in 1962), scored 1281 goals in 1363 games and is both the youngest winner of a World Cup – just 17 when he scored twice in the final – and one of only three players to have scored in four different World Cups.

If we’re taking a data-based approach, there’s no room for debate.

But we’re not, so please let me know who you think is the greatest soccer player ever in the comments below…