The Game of Soccer

Posted by Steve on September 10th, 2008 under Premier Soccer Tags: ,  •  No Comments

Soccer Is A Great Game

Small children play soccer in parks around the world while professionals play soccer in large stadiums in front of millions of fans. Soccer is a team sport that is usually called football in most countries around the world. In the United States, this game is called soccer. The game is a favorite played by two teams with eleven players on each side. There are probably more people of all ages playing soccer than any other sport in the world. The game is played with minimum equipment which makes it portable to many different venues. The soccer fields for the professional players are usually in large stadiums that hold thousands of fans. The fans are usually very enthusiastic for the professional games.

A soccer field has a structure at each end that is called the goal, and the object of the game is to get the ball into the team’s goal. The goals at the professional matches are well built structures, but children playing an impromptu game can rig up some planks or polls to signify the goal. The players in all of the matches kick the ball or hit it with their heads or torso to move it toward the appropriate goal. Naturally, the professional players do this more skillfully than the small children, but all seem to enjoy the play.

Soccer Is A Game Of Skill

Ten of the players on each team use their heads or feet to propel the ball in the proper direction toward the goal where a goalkeeper stands to try to keep it away. The goalkeeper is the only player on each team who is allowed to use the hands. Soccer games do not usually end in the accumulation of large scores, but the team with the most points wins the game. A game can end in a tie unless it is a very important game, and then the teams must use the accepted rules to end the tie. The most skillful players can control the ball and keep it away from the players from the opposing team.

The most important game in soccer is the World Cup which is played in different venues around the world. The site changes from year to year. The best teams from around the world compete in this series. Millions of people watch enthusiastically and many root for their national team. The team that emerges as the championship soccer team is admired around the world. The soccer players who compete in the World Cup are often idolized in their native countries.

Who Invented Soccer

Posted by Steve on September 4th, 2008 under Premier Soccer Tags: ,  •  No Comments

Any discussion about who invented soccer will naturally veer around to England where the game was first organized and which has evolved over the centuries and the modern version of soccer is certainly the offshoot of the game invented in England. According to legend, the first ball used in soccer was that of a head of a Danish brigand. By the time the fourteenth century arrived, the popularity of soccer had reached great heights even though the monarch of that time King Edward III banned it from being played.

However, there are also other claimants as to who invented soccer, with it having also having been known to have been played in Japan around the year 1000 B.C. and, according to the Munich Ethnological Museum in Germany, there have also been found some Chinese text from the year 50 B.C. that also have mention of games similar to soccer having been played in that country. What is sure; however is that there was soccer played in the year 611 AD in the capital of Japan of that time in a place named Kyoto?

So, there is considerable confusion about who invented soccer since even the Romans had played a soccer style game that involved twenty-seven men per side and the game was so rough and ready that at the end of the fifty minute game most of the players had to be sent to a hospital.

The problem with identifying exactly who invented soccer is that there are no certain records about the game and its origins, and thus there is no clear explanation of how the game moved from Asia to Europe.

What is clear is that soccer was played in England even in spite of the ban by King Edward the Third, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, there were even annual contests being played in north as well as central England, and perhaps the earliest recorded instance of such matches refers to the year 1829 when a match was played in Derbyshire in which there were many “broken skins, broken heads, torn coats and lost hats.”

And, though this does not provide us with any clearer picture of who invented soccer, there were even records that the game had been played at Eton college where early forms of rules were implemented in the year 1815, which suggest that some form of order came to be known in place of the chaos up until that time.

So, even though one cannot say for certain who invented soccer, what is certain is that the English played the game in spite of the bans imposed, and they later came to even export the game to almost all parts of the world, which today is without a doubt the most viewed game on the planet, and is a bigger sport than any other sport is it baseball, basketball and American football all combined as one.