User:Deepak1448/sandbox

''No, England Did NOT Invent Football (Soccer) As We Know It.A soccer official claims that the game has been "stolen" from England. Here's why that argument is flawed".''

In a performance rendered all the more tragicomic by his accompanying rant about the availability of alcohol in Qatar and his unplanned plunge into a decorative pool, Premier League chairman Sir Dave Richards two weeks ago insisted that England had been robbed. “England gave the world football,” Richards complained at a sports security conference in Qatar. “For 50 years we owned the game … We were the governance of the game. We wrote the rules, designed the pitches and everything else. Then, 50 years later, some guy came along and said: ‘You’re liars,’ and they actually stole it. It was called FIFA.” (FIFA is the game’s global governing body.)

England invented a game of running around kicking a ball in the mid-19th century (although the Chinese claim to have played a version centuries earlier). They called it “football,” not because the ball is played with the feet, but because the game is played on foot rather on horseback. The term “soccer,” more commonly used in America now, was old English slang based on shortening “Assoc.,” a reference to the game’s formal name, Association Football (as distinct from Rugby Football). The point, however, is that the game first played in Sheffield in the mid-19th century — and throughout England for many decades hence — bears little resemblance to football as we know it today. And England, sad to say, has spent most of the past century trying, mostly in vain, to catch up. (Most of the top players and coaches in Sir Dave’s English Premier League are not, it should be noted, actually English.)