A History of the Football: Introduction
Series Introduction
Since publishing How Football Became Football in 2020, I have published over 1,000 articles on my website, Football Archaeology, and published a book, Hut! Hut! Hike!, in 2022. An unfortunate result of publishing in several formats and across many articles is the resulting lack of integration, making it difficult for readers to understand the game's core elements comprehensively. To correct that issue, this book is the first in the Football Archaeology Series, describing how specific football components of football originated and evolved.
Much like species in the animal kingdom, football did not evolve along a straight path. It meandered, branched, and detoured with many unproductive twists and turns. And just as mutations in the natural world do not always confer a competitive advantage, players, coaches, media members, and the public have consistently proposed and implemented ideas throughout the game's history that proved to have limited value.
We look back on the ideas that did not pan out as quaint or oddities. Yet, each new idea was an attempt to improve the game or create something new in response to a perceived need. The solution may not have been valuable, but by highlighting the problem they intended to solve, the oddities tell us as much about the state of the game at the time as the innovations that were accepted or became popular.
In telling the story of how elements of the game evolved, this series covers the rules, equipment, play designs, and other aspects of the game that worked out and, in some cases, those that did not cut the mustard.
Book Introduction
The gridiron football descends from the rugby ball, just as the sport of gridiron football descends from rugby. When gridiron football began, football was rugby, and footballs were rugby balls. There was no difference. Rugby had recently emerged from a mishmash of British folk games that spread from England to its diaspora in the current and former colonies, each forming local governing bodies for their sport. Some locations stayed true to Association Football or the Rugby Football Union. Others adapted their game based on regional preferences, resulting in football codes that became Gaelic Football, Australian Rules Football, Canadian Rugby (now Canadian Football), and American Football. As each game evolved, so did the balls used to play the games.
American footballers playing under the Eastern college's Intercollegiate Football Association rules used large English rugby balls for the first decade of play before opting for a smaller rugby ball. American football's continued transition into a separate game led to modifying the ball to suit the new game's play and rules. The rugby ball also changed over time, as did the balls used in the other football codes.
As American football transitioned to a separate game, people commonly referred to the sport and ball as rugby and rugby footballs, so it is occasionally unclear in period writing which sport or ball they are referencing. That confusion disappeared in the late 1920s when "football" became the nearly universal term for the game and the ball.
Countless books have recounted the history of football or particular periods, teams, and players. However, this book is the first to describe the history of the football itself. The ball has changed its shape, size, construction, inflation levels, and decorations over the years to meet the evolving demands of the game. Yet, despite the many changes to the game since the mid-1930s, the ball has remained essentially unchanged. Other than the emergence of stripes in the 1930s and a minor reduction in the college ball's size in 1982, the football's size and shape are unchanged for ninety years. Improvements in the materials used to construct footballs and a handful of cosmetic changes have occurred. However, if someone inserted a fresh ball from the 1930s into a game today, the ball's differences would go unnoticed by most fans and many players.
The bulk of the changes to the football occurred before the NFL exerted its influence over the game, so the story of the football is largely the ball's development within the college game.
This book tells the story of the football in five chapters and starts by examining how the ball's shape and size evolved. The critical changes in the football's history involved the ball's size reduction and reshaping, which occurred in a series of steps lasting nearly fifty years. The ball's size reduction began in the 1800s to make it easier to carry by Americans whose game increasingly shifted away from the Rugby Football Union rules they initially adopted. The influence of the forward pass led to further size reductions so the ball could be thrown more effectively and by more players.
Unlike baseballs or golf balls, footballs belong to the inflated class of sports balls. Chapter 2 tells the story of the football's inflation and how that process changed with new technologies. Since the Dark Ages, English folk games used inflated pig or sheep bladders as balls. Over the centuries, the bladders received leather covers to make them more durable. Later, rubber bladders replaced animal bladders before today's polyurethane bladders took over.
If the ball's size reduction was football's most critical historical change, another fundamental change was its inflation method. That change began in the mid-1920s when manufacturers first produced balls with valves resting flush with the ball's surface. The valves allowed footballs to be inflated without unlacing the leather cover to access the bladder. The laces soon disappeared from the inflated balls used in the world's other major sports, but the football retained its laces because they had become functional for players throwing the forward pass.
Chapter 3 covers cosmetic changes to the football, a more modern phenomenon. Traditionally, footballs were made of tanned leather without adornments because people had the good sense to play football honorably and in daylight. As those conditions shifted, footballs changed colors and acquired stripes to make them more visible when practicing at dusk and playing under the primitive lighting of early night games. Colors and stripes also helped distinguish the ball from particular team's uniform colors and deliberate attempts to hide the ball.
Chapter 4 examines the materials used to construct footballs over the years and then turns to the manufacturing process, which remains remarkably similar to the methods used at the game's birth. The chapter tells the tale of football production transitioning from a cottage industry dominated by artisans to a tightly controlled assembly line process in a few isolated factories.
Finally, Chapter 5 quickly examines the traditions and rules for the balls used in games and practices and reviews several special-purpose training footballs.
The football history told here is based on evidence from period publications, though some elements reflect my interpretation of circumstantial evidence. I surely made some mistakes in the storytelling, but if I knew which parts were incorrect, I would write a different story.
So, The History of the Football tells the little-known and underappreciated story of how the football we kick, carry, and pass across North American fields came about.
Posts in this series:
Chapter 1, Shape and Size: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | Pt. 4 I Pt. 5
Chapter 2, Bladders, Lacing, and Valves: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2
Chapter 3, Colors and Stripes: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2
Chapter 4, Materials and Manufacturing: Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
Chapter 5, Game and Practice Balls
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