Modern Invention or Ancient Habit: How Old Are Team Sports, Really?

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Association football was one of the first team games to be given a single written code, which came out of a joint conference of the London and Cambridge committees in 1863. Lacrosse followed in Canada four years later, and so it can seem as though people living before the 19th century had little taste for organized games played between sides. But was that really the case?

The surviving evidence from three continents points firmly the other way. Courts built for a rubber ball game in Mexico are more than 3,500 years old, a Han dynasty book catalog listed a manual on kickball beside military handbooks, and a Greek writer recorded shouts on the field that any modern player would recognize. What arrived in the 1800s was something narrower, a set of written rules that many different groups agreed to follow.

The oldest known sports grounds in the Americas belong to the Mesoamerican ballgame. According to a 2020 study in Science Advances by Jeffrey Blomster and Víctor Salazar Chávez, the earliest formal court was built around 1650 BC at Paso de la Amada, in the coastal lowlands of Chiapas in southern Mexico. In an earlier paper Blomster described it as: "two parallel range mounds with benches flanking a central alley."

Blomster and Salazar Chávez excavated a second early court at Etlatongo, in the Mixtec highlands of Oaxaca, and dated it to around 1374 BC. However, Blomster has also warned that courts are only part of the picture: "The lack of early ballcourts does not imply a lack of a ballgame, as a current variant of the game can be played on a flat surface without erecting any standing architecture."

A ceramic figure cataloged by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a ballplayer, from Tlapacoya, Mexico, 12th to 9th century BC. (Metropolitan Museum of Art/CC0)

The ball itself depended on early chemistry, as Dorothy Hosler and two colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed in 1999. People in the region took latex from the Castilla elastica tree and processed it with liquid from a morning glory vine, which made the rubber more elastic. They wrote: "These ancient peoples' control over the properties of latex and processed rubber gave rise to the Mesoamerican ball game." Some balls weighed up to 7 kilograms (15 pounds), according to the MIT announcement of the study.

Teams and rivalries are clearer in the 16th century account of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. He wrote that Aztec lords kept their own rubber balls, cared for by a page, and brought along good players who played in their presence and on their behalf against other nobles. The wagers included gold, turquoise, slaves, fine cloaks, cornfields, houses and loads of cacao.

Sahagún also described the court, called tlachtli, as two plastered walls about 20 to 30 feet (6 to 9 meters) apart, with a line across the middle and a stone ring set in each wall. Whoever sent the ball through a ring won the game. Players could not use their hands and struck the ball with their buttocks, wearing gloves and a leather belt for protection.

China offers some of the earliest written references to a kicking game, known as cuju. In the Records of the Grand Historian, Sima Qian preserves a speech by the political adviser Su Qin praising Linzi, capital of the state of Qi. The city was so rich, Su Qin said, that its people all played pipes and zithers, fought cocks, raced dogs, played board games and kicked the ball.

Song Emperor Taizu and his ministers playing cuju, in a copy by the Yuan dynasty painter Qian Xuan, around 1300, of an earlier painting that does not survive. (Qian Xuan (after Su Hanchen)/Public domain)

The game was also classed with military training, and the bibliographic treatise in the History of the Han, compiled by the historian Ban Gu, lists a work called Cuju in 25 chapters among books on military skills, beside manuals on archery, swordsmanship and unarmed combat. The treatise explains that these skills trained the hands and feet and the handling of weapons, so as to win in attack and defense.

A short inscription for a ball field, a text attributed to the Eastern Han poet Li You, goes further. In a translation published by the FIFA Museum, the text describes a round ball, a square wall and goals facing each other, and then prescribes: "Each side has six in equal number." The same lines call for captains to be chosen and referees appointed, and warn players against favoring relatives or friends.

The Greek world had its own rough team game, as the Greek author Athenaeus explained in his Deipnosophists, or Learned Banqueters. He noted: "The ball-game now called harpastum was formerly called phaininda." The text adds, in the first person, that this was the kind its narrator liked best, and it did not hide the cost: "Great are the exertion and fatigue attendant upon contests of ball-playing, and violent twisting and turning of the neck."

However, the most vivid picture comes from a passage by the writer Antiphanes, which survives only because Athenaeus quoted it. A player "seized the ball and passed it with a laugh to one, while the other player he dodged," amid shouts of "out of bounds," "too far" and "pass it back in the scrimmage." The game clearly had boundaries, passing and opponents, whatever its exact rules may have been.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf reported in 1636 that the Huron played a game his Relation calls crosse, which healers sometimes prescribed as a cure for the sick. Whole communities would turn out, he wrote, with Village "contending against Village, as to who will play crosse the better, and betting against one another Beaver robes and Porcelain collars."

But it didn't end there. Two centuries later, the American painter George Catlin watched the Choctaw play a similar game and described its scale: "It is no uncommon occurrence for six or eight hundred or a thousand of these young men, to engage in a game of ball, with five or six times that number of spectators." Games of this size were played without any printed rulebook at all.

Written rules for lacrosse arrived only in the 1860s. In his 1869 book Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada, W. George Beers recalled the state of play before Montreal players stepped in: "Before the formation of laws by the Montreal Club in 1867, the game was destitute of regulations, saving the impromptu rules made upon the field, and broken at the first opportunity." In September of that year a convention at Kingston founded the National Lacrosse Association of Canada.

Folk football in Britain followed local custom for centuries. Montague Shearman's 1887 history quotes Stephen Glover's description of the Shrove Tuesday match at Derby: "The contest lies between the parishes of St. Peter's and All Saints." Glover also recorded a visiting Frenchman's remark that "if Englishmen called this playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting."

Florence was an early exception, since in 1580 the writer Giovanni de' Bardi printed a discourse on the calcio that set out 54 players in two equal sides, a carnival season running from January to March and six veteran players seated as judges. However, his rules were written for one city's carnival games.

The pressure for a shared code came from English schools and the clubs their former pupils founded. According to Shearman, each of the old schools had "its own game," and it was only when old boys formed adult clubs that a common set of rules became necessary. In 1863 London clubs and a Cambridge committee met to settle one code, the players who favored running and hacking withdrew, and the Football Association was born.

New organizations then carried the written rules outward, as when Sheffield formed its own football association in 1867 with rules of its own and joined the national body in 1870, while international matches and cup ties began in 1872. The 19th century gave old games written laws and governing bodies, while the instinct to pick sides and chase a ball is far older. Exactly how most of these early games were refereed and scored is unclear, and there is still much to learn.