Recently we've found out, Cook Columbus Magellan were all full of sh!t about their discoveries, they'd all used maps of at times great detail from the Chinese voyages, used a map of new lands to claim they were the first there to discover them, this is still being meted out on schools There are depictions of Chinese kicking about an air filled ball quite a time before the game was "invented" in England. Did some chappy copy it from them and brought it home and it grew in England from there.
i thought with the Columbus one there was some link to the Knights Templar who was in America 60 odd years before Columbus. also he used a map they had created and had their logo on it, didn't realise there was a Chinese link as well.
A few years back on Radio 5 this guy was chatting about his new book on the history of the game. He mentioned the chinese,and said they were basically playing five-a-side games and even had refs aswell. And this was going back a thousand years or more!! Iv'e always considered the claim that football is an english invention to be a load of b*ll*x. Sorry,can't remember authors name,but it would be interesting to find a copy or more info. etc.
The ball is round book mentions it a bit. Mayans used to play with the heads of people and **** like that after making a sacrifice. Strange stuff.
Chinese in 1422, a good 80 years before. A great book by a retired British submariner Gavin Menzies. 1422 The year China discovered the world, this guy has been a submariner for decades and has circumnavigated the world so he had the knowledge of currents and so on as far as sail ships are concerned so he could pretty much follow their journey and found proof in the USA India Africa Brazil Patagonia.. the list goes on. Fantastic read. There are depictions in ancient Chinese art showing chaps playing football, can't remember what it's called but there are several sources if one wishes to have a search I am sure they would find plenty. The Chinese in 1422, before they became isolationist a few years later and destroyed everything.. almost, created a global tribute and trade system rather than a greedy colonial empire. Zheng He was far far ahead of his time. Empires always reap from their colonies and claim it their own, the Roman aristocracy copied from other cultures pretty much everything they had but it was called roman culture none the less.
Buollshit the chinese invented it. The idea of kicking a ball around in a group goes back thousands of years but that is not football. Its like saying whoever invented the wheel invented the car and everything that uses a wheel. They didnt. Football was invented in england, the game we know now. sure they probably had influence from something but so does every inventor. Oh and BBF, nice sig but please find me anyone who can say with a straight face at this moment in time that Silva isn rubbish and Aguero is certainly rubbish compared to last season
Ur rite, we all bow before your greater footballing knowledge, in fact I think the only person who knows more about football than ur knowledgeable self is Howard Wilson
Football didn't develop from 5 aside ****e aswel! It came from mob football 30 on 30 strongest team wins sort of stuff!
It depends on what you view as football. IIRC the Han Dynasty had a game where you used your foot to kick a ball through small holes that was played around 200BC. Kind of like those fairground games where you have to chip the ball through holes to win a prize, but I think the ball was filled with feathers rather than air - doubt there would have been airtight seals on leather back then. The Japanese also had a game of foot volleyball with a leather ball around 1000BC, basically keepy ups with a net, and the Mesoamericas played games with rubber balls around 1500BC, but only allowed players to use their hips and sometimes knees (generally because the ball was so heavy it would smash feet to pieces). Even the original British game of football wasn't really football, it was kick the ball to the opposition's village with all the men in the village playing, and pretty much anything goes. The only reason that version came to dominate over all others was the decision of the English to formalise the rules to stop so many people getting killed / injured, and the ability of the British to kick the **** out of the rest of the world and make them do what we wanted for a good 300 years IIRC, the Chinese, Japanese and Mesoamerican ones have all spun off into their own modern games, albeit with different rules and much lower participation rates. So it's a bit hard to say the Chinese invented football as their game was in no way a precursor of the modern game, and the English version developed in around 800AD before any contact between England and China. It would be like saying the Greeks invented gunpowder as they were the first ones to burn nitrates and used them in their liquid flame weapons.
