Soccer in Sun and Shadow

The Origins

In soccer, as in almost everything else, the Chinese were first. Five thousand years ago, Chinese jugglers had balls dancing on their feet, and it wasn’t long before they organized the first matches. The net stood in the center of the field and the players had to keep the ball from touching the ground without using their hands. The sport continued from dynasty to dynasty, as can be seen on certain bas-relief monuments from long before Christ and in later Ming Dynasty engravings, which show people playing with a ball that could have been made by Adidas.

We know that in ancient times the Egyptians and the Japanese had fun kicking a ball around. On the marble surface of a Greek tomb from five centuries before Christ a man is kneeing a ball. The plays of Antiphanes contain telling expressions like “long ball,” “short pass,” and “forward pass.” They say that Julius Caesar was quick with his feet, and that Nero couldn’t score. In any case, there is no doubt that while Jesus was dying on the cross the Romans were playing something fairly similar to soccer.

Roman legionaries kicked the ball all the way to the British Isles. Centuries later, in 1314, King Edward II stamped his seal on a royal decree condemning the game as plebeian and riotous: “Forasmuch as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid.” Football, as it was already being called, left a slew of victims. Matches were fought in gangs, and there were no limits on the number of players, the length of the match, or anything else. An entire town would play against another town, advancing with kicks and punches toward the goal, which at that time was a far-off windmill. The matches extended over several leagues and several days at the cost of several lives. Kings repeatedly outlawed these bloody events: in 1349, Edward III included soccer among games that were “stupid and utterly useless,” and there were edicts against the sport signed by Henry IV in 1410 and Henry VI in 1447. The more it was banned, the more it was played, which only confirms that prohibition whets the appetite.

In 1592 in The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare turned to soccer to formulate a character’s complaint:

Am I so round with you as you with me,

That like a football you do spurn me thus?

You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:

If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.

And a few years later in King Lear, the Earl of Kent taunted: “Nor tripped neither, you base football player!”

In Florence soccer was called calcio, as it is even now throughout Italy. Leonardo da Vinci was a fervent fan and Machiavelli loved to play. It was played in sides of twenty-seven men split into three lines, and they were allowed to use their hands and feet to hit the ball and gouge the bellies of their adversaries. Throngs of people attended the matches, which were held in the largest piazzas and on the frozen waters of the Arno. Far from Florence, in the gardens of the Vatican, Popes Clement VII, Leo IX, and Urban VIII used to roll up their vestments to play calcio.

In Mexico and Central America a rubber ball filled in for the sun in a sacred ceremony performed as far back as 1500 B.C. But we do not know when soccer began in many places of the Americas. The Indians of the Bolivian Amazon say they have been chasing a hefty rubber ball to put it between two posts without using their hands since time immemorial. In the eighteenth century, a Spanish priest from the Jesuit missions of the Upper Paraná described an ancient custom of the Guarani: “They do not throw the ball with their hands like us, rather they propel it with the upper part of their bare foot.” Among the Indians of Mexico and Central America, the ball was generally hit with the hip or the forearm, although paintings at Teotihuacán and Chichén-Itzá show the ball being kicked with the foot and the knee. A mural created over a thousand years ago in Tepantitla has an ancestor of Hugo Sánchez maneuvering the ball with his left. The match would end when the ball approached its destination: the sun arrived at dawn after traveling through the region of death. Then, for the sun to rise, blood would flow. According to some in the know, the Aztecs were in the habit of sacrificing the winners. Before cutting off their heads, they painted red stripes on their bodies. The chosen of the gods would offer their blood, so the earth would be fertile and the heavens generous.