by eagle216 on Fri Jun 20, 2014 12:43 pm
soccer and football offsides rules are weirdly similar if you think about what each rule is trying to accomplish - making sure a player is not behind the defense until the ball is played. Makes sense since both sports can be directly traced back to a single source in England in the 1800s. Much like linguists can look at two modern languages and determine they share the same anscestor, the same is true of soccer and football.
The origins of such make for an interesting story. In the 1800s in England, each town played a version of ancient soccer/football/rugby in the Town square after church on sunday. Such was also done by wealth kids at schools such as the Rugby School. As time went on, there was a need to centralize rules of play, as towns wanted to play each other, and schools wanted to play each other. The towns eventually agreed on a set of rules and called it Association Football (soccer), and the schools, led by the Rugby school, agreed on a set of rules that became known as Rugby football. This is why, even today, soccer is considered a working class sport, while rugby is more a sport for the upper crust elite.
I have no idea why the fuck I just wrote this post. Carry on.
or the soccer tournament?
