The story of the football match

 

The Greeks played a game called "harpaston". The game would consist of a couple of players on each side trying to get the ball over a goal line and pass it on to another player. The other team would try to stop it in any way possible. There were no rules to follow and something was acceptable as long as you were able to stop them.

In the 12th century, the game became extremely popular in England. In fact, it became so popular that some kings wanted to ban it, so people had to play other traditional sports. But it did not help too much and it continued to gain popularity. Seven schools soon adopted the game, but the rules had to be enforced. Six of the seven schools worked together and formed the same rules. The seventh school "Rugby" enforced its own rules and regulations. They had a crossbar that was 10 meters from the ground that the ball had to pass over and they also added a couple of goal posts.

A lot of the sports that were played in England were also adopted in the United States. Over time, the football match became popular in England, which automatically made people across the Atlantic more excited about it as well. After the Civil War, athletic clubs sponsored all kinds of sports teams, and football became a must in any respected athletic club. This led to the historic day on November 11, 1869, when the universities of Princeton and Rutgers met for the first time to play against each other. It was the beginning of a sports tradition where universities met and played against each other.

First, the teams had twenty players on each team. Rules were constantly changed to meet the needs of the players and their safety. But to ensure that everyone plays by the same rules, representatives from the four universities of Rutgers, Columbia, Princeton and Yale met and established the new organization for the IFA or "Intercollegiate Football Association." One of the groundbreaking rules they introduced was that there were only 15 players per game. Team. This worked well for a while, but in 1882 the coach at Yale, Walter Camp enforced new changes, one of which was that they reduced the players to eleven per. 7m.

Although the rules of the game were constantly changing most of the time, it was only to perfect the game itself and not the safety of the players. This resulted in a lot of deaths and injuries, leading to a number of schools banning the sport. To save the game, President Theodore Roosevelt invited representatives of Princeton, Harvard, and Yale to a meeting to discuss ways to save the game. This led to another meeting with about sixty other schools. There they formed an organization called the "National Collegiate Athletic Association" or NCAA, as it is more commonly known. They elected seven members to the board, who sat down and changed many rules and regulations so that it should be a game played safely.