Usually, in Italy, you’d sense electricity in the air before the soccer World Cup begins: the country’s passion for calcio is well known, and when it comes to the national team, you can bet even the least likely among us turn into a fervid supporter. It’s a matter of pride, some say, because Italy has such a glorious past in the sport, pity this year we’ll have to find someone else to side with, as the Azzurri didn’t make it to the tournament’s finals in Russia.
The fact Italy is out of the World Cup is in itself a pretty big deal: four times a winner, second only to Brasil with five cups under its belt, we’re usually one of the favorites, even when we fail to impress. It’s a bit of a given, really: Italy is good at football, just the way it’s good at food and fine arts, but this year we’re all forced to take the backseat and let others do the talking. In the hope, of course, it’ll go better in 2022.
Taking a – forced – break from active football, however, may give us the opportunity to look into its history and, why not, to learn something more about our national sport. Which, by the way, may not be that national, after all, as it really seems it was created in the UK.
Or was it? Indeed, history tells us the first soccer team hails from Sheffield and was founded in 1857, to be followed by the publication of the Sheffield Rules (1858), the initial attempt to formalize the sport’s rules. And it is, once again, in the UK that, only a handful of years later, in 1863, the first official Football Association was created. When it comes to its modern form, there is little to discuss: the Brits beat the Italians to the “invention” and regulation of calcio of at least 30 years, because the first official record of an Italian football team, FC Genoa, dates from 1893. And the fact the sport was a British import is supported by the involvement of British businessmen operating in the Ligurian capital in the team’s creation, as well as by the signature of the British consul in Genoa, Charles Alfred Payton, on the main documents attesting it.
If you dig further into the history of this sport, however, you’ll discover the Italians may have a point when they claim to be the real inventors of soccer because the sport, or at least some versions of it, where present and practiced in the peninsula way before the 19th century. Now, to be fair to the rest of the world, the habit of running after a ball with the aim of scoring points by throwing it into some sort of net was popular well before the birth of Christ, in lands as far and foreign to us Italians as Japan and China. There, people would play kemari and tsu-chiu respectively, as early as the 11th century BC. To witness some sort of football fever in Europe, we have to wait for the 4th century BC, when the Greeks started playing episkyros: it was recognized as a sport, but it never made it into the official lot practiced during the Olympic Games.
Fast forward a couple of centuries and, finally, soccer – or its great-grandfather, we should say – lands in Italy, thanks to the athletic prowess of, you guessed it, the Romans. They used to play harapastrum, a game where two opposite teams would face each other in a rectangular field, divided in a half by a line. The aim was to place the ball, a small leather and feathers affair, on the opposite’ s team end-of-field line and hands could be used, too. Now, I am no expert but it sounds like harapastrum shares more than some passing resemblance with rugby and American football, too. During the later years of the Roman Empire, ball games similar to harapastrum became popular also on the British Isles, where they were played especially as a way to express rivalry between different towns and villages: this game, commonly known as “large football,” is described as pretty violent in coeval sources.
If there is one thing to learn from the early history of soccer, is that its forerunners seemed to be fairly popular a bit everywhere in the known world, although rules were varied and the use of hands admitted in many instances: we are still far from the soccer we know.
And then, the Renaissance came: Italy was on a ball then, creating modern culture and developing new aesthetic and philosophical canons, so it shouldn’t surprise it meddled also in the world of sports. Needless to say, it all happened in Florence: guys, if there was a hot spot during those centuries, that was it. It is in the second half of the 15th century that we find the first official attestations of florentinum harapastrum or, to say it in Italian, calcio fiorentino (Florentine soccer).
Truth is, the game was known especially for its political nuances, as the two teams facing one another usually belonged to opposed political factions. The rules of calcio fiorentino – they were 33 – were written down by Giovanni de Bardi and were used as a canvas to draft modern soccer rules on. Mind, teams were much bigger – they were formed by 27 players – and games were much shorter at 50 minutes, but similarities were many: there were goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards and, of course, the aim was to score by getting the ball into the opposers’ net.
And then? Well, to find more official records of soccer playing around the world we have to wait for 19th century Sheffield where, we’ve seen, the first modern soccer team was born. FIFA, the world football association, was founded in 1904, curiously by seven nations rarely mentioned in the history of football up to then: France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Spain. Britain joined in 1905.
The Italian National team played its first match in 1910 and went on winning four world cups in 1934, 1938, 1982 and, more recently, in 2006. Failing to qualify to this year’s tournament is something many an Italian never saw in their life: it has been 60 years since the last time the Azzurri didn’t make it to the final round of the Coppa del Mondo. Will we Italians enjoy it anyway? Very likely: we love armchair sports as anyone and, in a way, not having to deal with the tension of seeing the Azzurri on the pitch may help us appreciate a good game more. But, oh! How glorious it would have been, to rise that Cup up to the skies of Moscow!
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