There's
just something a little ludicrous about the World Series. The
winner of baseball's annual love-in is hoisted atop America's
shoulders and celebrated as the greatest baseball team in the
world. Sure it is. The people that know how to play baseball,
let alone those who give a crap about the game, come from about
seven countries. If you want a real world champion in sports,
you have to turn to soccer or as it's called all over
the universe outside the US: football.
Over 200 countries
or territories compete in its quadrennial world championship,
the World Cup, and billions
of people know it and love it as their first and only sport. And
if you take a look at the next generation of Americans, or their
more conspicuous soccer moms, you'll realize that soccer's
arrival on the American cultural consciousness is growing faster
and more inexorably than the waistbands on our fat-ass population.
So it's time you learned a little more about the game. We're
here, as always, to help out.
There
are a few things you'll need to familiarize yourself with
in order to have a functional understanding of the game. First,
we'll give you a brief history of the game, so you'll
know from whence it came. Then we'll give you a rundown of
the objectives of the game and its basic rules. Next, we'll
discuss the equipment of the game and the positions of the players.
Finally, we'll go over the fouls and violations, and the
officials who oversee them.
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Basically,
people like kicking things around. Okay, so not many Americans seem
to we prefer throwing things (e.g., baseball, basketball) and
full-body assault (e.g., football, hockey) but you have to
admit that there's an appeal to just knocking the crap out of
something with your foot. Kickers are some of the most impressive
athletes in the America why do you think kickball is so popular
with the kiddies?
Well,
even if you don't like kicking things around, everyone else
seems to. The earliest accounts of a game that resembled modern-day
soccer can be found, where else, in ancient China though
this version wasn't pirated from somewhere else. Historians
have found evidence dating from 2500 BC that a game known as "tsu
chu" was played during the celebration of the emperor's
birthday, and it involved kicking animal-skin balls through a hole
in a net erected on tall poles. Of course, most of us think of soccer
as an Old World game common amongst the Brits, and true to form,
they were hooligans as far back as 1100 AD. There are accounts of
the game being played in England for hundreds of years, but by the
twelfth century, it had devolved into a mob riot played without
any rules. Since the kings weren't too keen on losing their
soldiers and tax-paying citizens to these early versions of a Sex
Pistols' concert, the game was banned repeatedly by royal decree.
But
an early version of the game was popular even over here: Native
Americans played a game called "pasuckuakohowog," meaning
"they gather to play ball with the foot," long before
the Italian forward, Columbus, was substituted into the continent
in 1492. These games involved as many as 1000 players and were often
played on beaches half a mile wide with goals a mile apart.
The
first attempt at formal rules for the game were published by an
Italian, Giovanni Bardi, who referred to the game as "calcio."
In fact, that's what soccer is still called in Italy, so when
we said that everyone else calls it football, we lied a little.
But hey, maybe after America wins the World Cup three times, then
we can justify calling the game something else. Almost three centuries
later, in 1877, the football associations of Great Britain assembled
to draw up a uniform code. Back then, the British Empire was more
than just a pathetic memory, so the game and its rules were exported
widely across the world, which is why it is so universal today.
Since the creation of those nineteenth century rules, the game has
remained largely unchanged, though the international governing body,
FIFA (Federation Internationale de
Football Association), does modify the rules from time to time.
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