Nobody Wrote The Rules. Someone Just Stopped Arguing First.

Before the railways, sport didn't really need rules. Not written ones, anyway. A village played football in whatever way the village had always played football, and if the neighbouring village played it differently, that was fine – because the two villages never actually played each other. The game was locally understood, locally inherited, and nobody needed to put it on paper because everyone already knew. It was the longest game of Chinese whispers in the world. Except it was working perfectly, because nobody was trying to pass the message anywhere new.

Before the rulebook: mob football

What those villages played was often closer to a brawl than a match. Medieval mob football, still played on Shrove Tuesday in a few towns in England, could involve hundreds of players on each side, goals at opposite ends of the parish and very little restriction on the movement of the ball between them. The public schools took up this tradition and tidied it up in different ways.

How did railways change competitive sport?

Then the railways arrived.

Suddenly, a team from Sheffield could travel to London in an afternoon. A school in Rugby and a school in Eton could arrange a fixture. And the moment they tried, someone realised the problem: in Sheffield you couldn't handle the ball, and in Rugby you absolutely could, and in some corners of England you couldn't even agree on how many players made a side. Centuries of cheerfully isolated oral tradition crashed, all at once, into the need for a single printed sheet of paper that both teams would have to agree to before kick-off.

Who wrote the first codified rules?

The scramble to write that sheet is where almost every sport you've ever watched was actually born. The Football Association first codified its rules in 1863. The Rugby Football Union followed in 1871, lawn tennis got its first proper rulebook in 1875. Cricket had managed a written code slightly earlier, in 1744, but spent the next century arguing about it anyway. In each case, the process was the same: representatives of different clubs or schools sat down together, each carrying their own village's version of the game in their heads, and had it out until one version won.

Football’s version of that scramble started at Cambridge. In 1848 students from several public schools met to agree a common set of rules so they could play each other. Copies of the first code no longer exist but later versions of the rules (Cambridge Rules) fed directly into the Football Association’s talks in 1863, where the issue was hacking, the deliberate kicking of an opponent’s shins, as well as whether players could run with the ball in hand. The majority voted to ban both practices and Blackheath and its allies walked out of the meeting, and the clubs that wished to continue handling the ball subsequently formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871.

Even then the rules did not stay put. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland each ran their own association with its own variations, and in 1886 they set up the International Football Association Board to agree one set of laws between them. That board still decides the Laws of the Game today.

Negotiated, Not Discovered

That last bit matters. They didn't discover the correct rules – they negotiated them. Some of what got written down reflected genuine sporting logic. Some of it reflected who happened to be the loudest voice in the room, or which school had the most old boys on the committee. (The reason rugby split into union and league in 1895 was essentially a disagreement about whether working-class players in the north should be compensated for taking time off work to play. That's not a sporting question at all. It's a class war that produced two different sports and two different rulebooks, and we're still playing both.)

How Quickly They Became Sacred

The odd thing is how quickly those negotiated compromises became sacred. Within a generation or two, the rules felt ancient, inevitable, almost natural – as if football had always been eleven-a-side and always would be. People argue about them now with genuine passion, as though the offside rule were handed down from somewhere. It wasn't. It was the thing that survived one particular afternoon in a Victorian gentleman's club, when someone finally got tired of arguing and wrote it down, and everyone else agreed to live with it.

The game you watch on Saturday is the version that won. There were dozens of others.