The love of the game

Football is without a doubt one of the most famous and popular games in the world. Chances are that you have played it or you have seen it or you have friends who play the game. Despite it being so popular and well known there are still a number of things which people don't know about it.

To start with there are actually a lot of games which are very similar to it which have similar origins. They all have the same basic premise of getting a ball into a goal area in order to score but not all versions of the game requite you to use your feet in order to score. In that sense it is quite similar to something like poker. If you visit an online casino, perhaps something like Partypoker.com, you will notice that they are quite a few different types of poker. They do all have a lot of similarities but like with the different games of football there are small differences.

But where did this game come from? The Ancient Greeks and Romans were known to have played a lot of ball games many of which did involve using their feet. There is also mention of a game like football in the Chinese military manual Zhan Guo Ce, which was compiled between the 3rd and 1st Century BC. The game described is known as cuju, which translates literally as kick ball. The game involved kicking a leather ball through a small hole in a piece of silk cloth which was fixed to bamboo canes, sounds familiar doesn't it?

Wherever the game did originate from, it really has proved to have lasting power, as it has stuck the test of time. It's even mentioned in Shakespeare's play King Lear- “Nor tripped neither, you base football player.” You don't hear many football players saying things like that any-more though, do you?

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