It is widely accepted that modern soccer first emerged in England in the mid-19th century, but new evidence from an old Scottish farm suggests the sport was being played regularly in the area more than 200 years earlier.
Studio Something/BBCThe site of the world’s oldest known soccer pitch in Anwoth, Scotland.
The origin of football — or soccer, as we know it in the States — has long been a subject of debate across the pond. The English have claimed for centuries that they created the sport, but a recent discovery is shaking up the narrative of who invented soccer.
According to football historian Ged O’Brien, a field in the Scottish countryside near Anwoth may very well have been the world’s oldest soccer pitch. That farmland was hosting “foot-ball” matches as far back as the 1600s, a full two centuries before the rules of the sport were first laid out in England.
The 17th-Century Letter That Is Reshaping The History Of Soccer
Between 1627 and 1638, Reverend Samuel Rutherford served as the pastor at Anwoth Old Kirk. During that time, he wrote a letter complaining that some of his parishioners played “foot-ball” on the Sabbath at nearby Mossrobin Farm.
Studio Something/BBCLetters written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford, who served between 1627 and 1638, raise questions about who invented soccer.
“This is one of the most important sentences I have ever read in football history,” O’Brien told The Times. “Because it specifically identifies the exact place the football pitch was. I have always thought football has been played in Scotland for hundreds of years. Not mob-football, but proper football.”
Reverend Rutherford also mentioned placing large stones on the field to bring an end to the Sunday amusement. So, O’Brien and a team of archaeologists set out to the site of the former Mossrobin Farm to see if these stones were still there.
Indeed, they found a line of 14 large rocks across a grassy area that measured roughly 280 feet long and 148 feet wide — just slightly smaller than an American football field.
What’s more, soil analysis suggested that the stones were placed there about 400 years ago, around the time Rutherford wrote his letter. Now, this discovery is sparking heated debate between English and Scottish sports fans over who invented soccer.
Inside The Debate Of Who Invented Soccer
Previously, the general consensus was that “proper football” — that is, soccer with agreed-upon rules — didn’t really begin until the mid-19th century. Sheffield FC formed in 1857 and is widely accepted as the world’s oldest existing club, and the Football Association was founded in London in October 1863. But if O’Brien’s findings are correct, then football historians “are going to have to rewrite everything they think they know,” he says.
Studio Something/BBCFootball historian Ged O’Brien.
“In the history books, football is mob-football,” he said. “It was chaos, people drunk, it’s anarchy. The traditional view of modern football is that it started in 1863… Now this is entirely and utterly mistaken because for hundreds of years the Scots have been regularly playing football in Anwoth and places like it.”
O’Brien believes that if Scots were playing soccer regularly on Sundays, they would have also come up with rules, making them the official inventors of soccer. They couldn’t play mob-football — a violent sport without rules that was the grandfather of modern soccer — he argued, because they would have had to get up for work on Monday, so establishing rules for Sunday afternoon soccer games would have been imperative.
“This is one of my greatest days ever, because we’re stood on the proof that we need to show that Scotland invented modern world football,” O’Brien said. “In 1872, the minute international football started, Scottish clubs were absolutely destroying English teams. It’s absolutely no surprise because these people are 200 years in front of what England is doing.”
Public DomainAn illustration of a soccer match between the Thames and Townsend clubs in 1846.
Critics disagree, claiming that there’s no real way of knowing what sort of “foot-ball” Rutherford was talking about. It may have been a completely unrelated game. However, those involved with the discovery are positive that what they found is indeed an early soccer field and that the Scots are really the people who invented soccer.
Kieran Manchip, an archaeologist who assisted with the discovery, said of the Anwoth pitch: “You do get that sense of it being almost like a natural amphitheater. Putting together all the sources, being here in the landscape and seeing how it all pieces together, all of those things corroborate with one another.”
“You can be up the side of a mountain in the Himalayas, watching a football game, and the ghosts of Anwoth will be watching,” O’Brien added.
After learning about a discovery that may change everything we know about who invented soccer, read about some of the weirdest Olympic sports in history. Or, explore the history of sumo wrestling, the national sport of Japan.
