When Football Divided
How we got so many variations
When Football Divided
We’ve noted in our last few posts that the early game of association football had a lot in common with early rugby. Most notably, the presence of touchdowns and fair catches in the 1863 rules, as well as the fact that goals consisted of kicking the ball above the crossbar, shows how closely related the game was to rugby.
The 1860s and 1870s are also the time when the various forms of football started to go down their separate paths of development. And, interestingly enough, every single form of football seems to have originally stemmed from the Rugby game.
For example, Australian rules football traces its original development to this letter written to an Australian sporting paper by Tom Wills:
The ties between the Australian game and rugby are obvious. What is not necessarily so obvious are the ties between the Rugby game and American football. As I’ve discussed in my American football blog, college football before Walter Camp’s changes in 1880 was rugby. See more at my other blog here:
The last game to consider is ice hockey, which also originally had rules reminiscant of rugby. Those rules were first published in 1887:
Note in particular that the offside rule here follows the rugby definition, where players had to be behind the puck, and not the association football rule of having a certain number of defenders between the attacker and the goal.
Lacrosse (and field hockey in England) might have also been an influence, as discussed on this forum. However, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of early influence of the offside rule in those articles.