Laws were even passed to prohibit citizen from playing such
a game. In England, Queen Elizabeth I was even know for having
soccer players jailed for weeks and then sent the church for
penance. The laws finally began to subside and soccer earned
official sanction in England in 1681. By the 1800s the game became
so popular, annual contests were being held in northern and middle
England in many towns and villages.
The earliest traces of rules for the game came from Eton College in
1815, which began to bring some order to the way the game was being
played. As more colleges began playing, they adopted a set of
rules known as the Cambridge rules in every major college in
England. England, who first banned the game, was actually the one to
export soccer to other areas of the world, such as the United
States.
The early colonies in the U.S. began to play the game of soccer as
early as 1609. Yet it wasn’t until the northeastern colleges began
to form teams was the game actually documented. Harvard has the
earliest known teams of soccer in the U.S. The game of soccer was
continually picked up by other colleges around the country. Soccer
steadily grew in popularity until the 1890s, the U.S. even
participated in the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, yet no professional
teams were formally organized. The American Soccer League was
finally formed in the 1920’s and the game of soccer took off in the
US.
Modern soccer is now played on every continent in the world. Soccer
is undisputedly the most watched and played sport in the world,
enjoyed by 8 billion people around the world. The World Cup recently
attracted 33 billion people around the world, making it the most
watched game in the world, passing even the Olympics.
FIFA is the world governing body.
