GOLD football stamp

Football is the word given to a number of similar team sports, all of which involve (to varying degrees) kicking a ball with the foot in an attempt to score a goal. The most popular of these sports world-wide is association football, also known as "soccer" and most commonly just "football". The English language word "football" is also applied to gridiron football (which includes games like American football and Canadian football), Australian rules football, Gaelic football, rugby football (rugby league and rugby union), and related games. Each of these codes (specific sets of rules, or the games defined by them) is referred to as "football".

These games involve:

* two teams of usually between 11 and 18 players. Note that versions of the base games with fewer players have varying degrees of popularity:
o Six-man, eight-man, and nine-man football, derived from American football, are also played mainly at scholastic level in less-populated parts of the United States. Small schools in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan also play nine-man football, derived from the country's own code.
o Rugby sevens, a version of rugby union with seven players per side instead of 15, is especially well-developed, with its own World Cup, a prominent annual international competition, and an entrenched position in the Commonwealth Games.
o Although the sevens format also exists in rugby league, a different abbreviated format, rugby league nines, is more popular.
* a clearly defined area in which to play the game;
* scoring goals and/or points, by moving the ball to an opposing team's end of the field and either into a goal area, or over a line;
* the goal and/or line being defended by the opposing team;
* players being required to move the ball—depending on the code—by kicking, carrying and/or hand passing the ball; and
* goals and/or points resulting from players putting the ball between two goalposts.

In most codes, there are rules restricting the movement of players offside, and players scoring a goal must put the ball either under or over a crossbar between the goalposts. Other features common to several football codes include: points being mostly scored by players carrying the ball across the goal line and; players receiving a free kick after they take a mark/make a fair catch.

Peoples from around the world have played games which involved kicking and/or carrying a ball, since ancient times. However, most of the modern codes of football have their origins in England.
Ancient games

Documented evidence of what is possibly the oldest activity resembling football can be found in a Chinese military manual written during the Warring States Period in about the 476 BC–221 BC. It describes a practice known as cuju ( literally "kick ball"), which originally involved kicking a leather ball through a hole in a piece of silk cloth strung between two 30-foot (9.1 m) poles. During the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), cuju games were standardized and rules were established. Variations of this game later spread to Japan and Korea, known as kemari and chuk-guk respectively. By the Chinese Tang Dynasty (618–907), the feather-stuffed ball was replaced by an air-filled ball and cuju games had become professionalized, with many players making a living playing cuju. Also, two different types of goal posts emerged: One was made by setting up posts with a net between them and the other consisted of just one goal post in the middle of the field.

The Japanese version of cuju is kemari , and was adopted during the Asuka period from the Chinese. This is known to have been played within the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto from about 600 AD. In kemari several people stand in a circle and kick a ball to each other, trying not to let the ball drop to the ground (much like keepie uppie). The game appears to have died out sometime before the mid-19th century. It was revived in 1903 and is now played at a number of festivals.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans are known to have played many ball games some of which involved the use of the feet. The Roman writer Cicero describes the case of a man who was killed whilst having a shave when a ball was kicked into a barber's shop. The Roman game harpastum is believed to have been adapted from a team game known as "επισκυρος" (episkyros) or phaininda that is mentioned by Greek playwright, Antiphanes (388–311 BC) and later referred to by Clement of Alexandria. These games appears to have resembled rugby.
An illustration from the 1850s of Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherers. Children in the background are playing a football game, possibly Marn Grook.
An illustration from the 1850s of Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherers. Children in the background are playing a football game, possibly Marn Grook.

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, and/or prehistoric ball games, played by indigenous peoples in many different parts of the world. For example, in 1586, men from a ship commanded by an English explorer named John Davis, went ashore to play a form of football with Inuit (Eskimo) people in Greenland. There are later accounts of an Inuit game played on ice, called Aqsaqtuk. Each match began with two teams facing each other in parallel lines, before attempting to kick the ball through each other team's line and then at a goal. In 1610, William Strachey of the Jamestown settlement, Virginia recorded a game played by Native Americans, called Pahsaheman. In Victoria, Australia, indigenous people played a game called Marn Grook ("ball game"). An 1878 book by Robert Brough-Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, quotes a man called Richard Thomas as saying, in about 1841, that he had witnessed Aboriginal people playing the game: "Mr Thomas describes how the foremost player will drop kick a ball made from the skin of a possum and how other players leap into the air in order to catch it." It is widely believed that Marn Grook had an influence on the development of Australian rules football

Games played in Central America with rubber balls by indigenous peoples are also well-documented as existing since before this time, but these had more similarities to basketball or volleyball, and since their influence on modern football games is minimal, most do not class them as football.

These games and others may well go far back into antiquity and may have influenced later football games. However, the main sources of modern football codes appear to lie in western Europe, especially England.