Photo: Tom Pennington / Getty Images
Closely related to two ancient English sports, rugby and football (or association football), field football originated in the universities of the United States, at the end of the 19th century.
November 6, 1869, players from Princeton and Rutgers held the first intercollegiate soccer contest in New Brunswick, New Jersey, playing soccer-style with rules adapted from the London Football Association.
While other elite universities in the Northeast began practicing this sport in the decade of 1869, Harvard University kept its distance by joining a hybrid of rugby and football called the “Boston Game”.
In May 1874, after a game against Montreal’s McGill University, the players Harvard decided they preferred McGill’s rugby-style rules to their own.
In 1875, Harvard and Yale played their first intercollegiate game, and Yale players and spectators (including Princeton students) also adopted the rugby style.
The man most responsible for the transition from this rugby-like game to the sport of soccer we know today was Walter Camp, known as the “Father of Soccer”. American” , as a Yale undergraduate and medical student from 1876 to 1888, Camp played running back and served as team captain, equivalent to coach in chief at the time. More importantly, he was the guiding force on the rules council of the newly formed Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA).
Thanks to Camp, the IFA made two key innovations for the fledgling game: it eliminated the “scrummage” or opening “scrum” and introduced the requirement that a team surrender the ball after not moving down the field a specified distance in yards a certain number of “downs”.
Among the other innovations introduced by Camp are the team at 11 mens, the quarterback position, the line of scrimmage, offensive cues, and the scoring scale used in football today.
In addition to his rule board work, Camp coached the Yale team to a record of 67-2 of 1888 to 1892, all while working as an executive at a watch manufacturing company.
In 1920, was founded in Canton, Ohio, the American Professional Football Association, later known as the National Football League, which greatly professionalized the sport.
After growing in size and popularity during the first half of the 20th century, the NFL merged with the American Football League, its rival, in 1970, becoming the giant it is today.
Today with 32 member teams, the NFL is the largest football league in the United States and soccer is by far the most popular sport in the country: According to a Gallup poll of 2018, the 37 % of American adults list soccer as their favorite sport to watch, followed by basketball with a 11 % and baseball with 9%.
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