Many ways
to kick a ball

Cuju is recorded before the Han dynasty, but the Han institutionalised it as military training. The Book of Han lists the twenty-five chapters of cuju under military texts — not an entertainment manual but a drill book: chasing, passing and contesting in a confined space, training coordination and stamina.

Two technical changes arrived in the Tang dynasty. First, the inflated ball — an animal bladder inside a sewn leather skin — replaced the solid hair-stuffed ball, making it lighter and bouncier, capable of being lofted and controlled in the air. Second, two formats appeared: goals at each end, or a single goal on a tall pole at the centre of the pitch, with both teams attacking it.

Under the Song, the game commercialised. Cities had professional clubs such as the Qi Yun Society, with membership rules, grading, and exhibition freestyle (the "bai da" repertoire). The Water Margin's villain Gao Qiu rises to power on the strength of his ball control.

Yet cuju never became the modern form: two teams, two goals, decided on goals scored. Two explanations are usually offered — it never fully left the frame of display and ceremony, and it never built a cross-regional rule book or competition structure. From the Ming and Qing it declined into folk game and acrobatics.

The Greek episkyros appears in fifth-century BCE sources. Playwrights and later grammarians describe two equal teams facing each other across a centre line; the object was to throw the ball over the opponents' back line. Hands were allowed and contact was heavy. The Spartan variant, sphairomachia, was rougher still.

Rome inherited and adapted it as harpastum — from the Greek for "snatched away". The ball was smaller and harder, often played indoors or on sand; Galen recommended it as exercise. Historians generally place harpastum closer to rugby than to football: the handling, the tackling and the sheer density of contact all point that way.

These two names are often used to claim a Greco-Roman ancestry for football. The more careful claim is that they show team ball games were normal, not exceptional, in the Mediterranean world — while no rule text or organisation survives into the nineteenth century.

Medieval England played "mob football" at Shrovetide: a whole town divided into two sides, chasing a ball towards a target that might be a tree, a church door, or the neighbouring village. There were almost no rules — the only shared understanding was that the ball could not be carried. Matches ran for hours, involved hundreds of people, and used a street, a field, or a river as the pitch.

It was dangerous enough to legislate against. Edward III banned it in 1349 on the grounds that it interfered with archery practice; similar prohibitions recur for the next two centuries without ever eradicating it. One ironic consequence: the more often it was banned, the more clearly it was popular.

The real turning point came in the nineteenth-century public schools. Eton, Harrow, Winchester and Rugby each evolved their own handling and kicking conventions, and their alumni could not agree on a game. That is precisely what the 1863 meeting was convened to settle. Between "no rules" and "too many rules", modern football found a copyable middle.