Like victories, successful soccer has many fathers. The British codified it in the 19th century, but similar ball games had been played in different parts of the world long before. For example, the Roman harpastum , Italian calcium or Chinese cuju , considered the most distant antecedent of the dominant sport of our time.
In China at the beginning of the Han dynasty (3rd and 2nd centuries BC), the military manuals included a collective training that was carried out with a leather ball (filled with feathers and hair) that had to be thrown with the foot to a small net supported by bamboo poles spaced 30 to 40 centimeters apart.
It is the most primitive “goal” that we have news of. In other Chinese instruction books of those times, there is talk of a variant of cuju in which players had to dodge opponents with the ball until they reached the opposite goal. The ball could be controlled with any part of the body except the hand, as in modern football.
The heyday of Chinese football was in the Song dynasty, AD 960-1279 It was then part of a broader urban culture of entertainment, sports, leisure and pleasure and there were different forms. In one version, the idea was to keep the ball in the air as long as possible, but there were also competitive team games where the idea was to put a ball into a kind of goal.
Such a game, played by professionals, is described in a famous book,The Splendours of the Eastern Capital, on life in the capital, Kaifeng, around 1120.
Cuju clubs had managers, coaches, and captains, and in recent research, German scholar Hans Ulrich Vogel even featured club manuals showing what life was like in Chinese soccer at the time.
Team members were often young men from wealthy families, although there were also itinerant professional players.
Cuju was also played as entertainment at court banquets or the reception of foreign ambassadors. Even the emperors played cuju. There is a painting from the Song Dynasty in which Emperor Taizu himself appears apparently playing, surrounded by burly courtiers.
And the rules?In the Song dynasty, they had printed books likeThe Illustrated Rules of Kickball por Wang Yuncheng.It isspeaks of two main forms of play,one with and one without goal / goal.
The target was about 10 meters high, with a network of colored rope, and in the middle, a hole about 30 centimeters in diameter.
The two teams used different strips, for example all red or all green.Captains wore hats decorated with small stiff wings, the equivalent of today’s captain’s armband. Other players wore hats with wavy brims.
The cuju (word that means “to kick a ball with the feet”) came out of the training fields and was popular in the Chinese Empire for many centuries, with various transformations that did not change the basics: you had to hit a ball with your feet to score as many. Its decline and disappearance would not come until the seventeenth century, during the Qing dynasty.
