Association football, more recently called simply football or Soccer, is a well-known team sport usually played between two sides of eleven players. It is also played by nearly 250 million players around 200 different countries and dependencies, making it by far the most popular sport in the world. Although soccer has many variations, the basic rules of the game have remained almost unchanged for decades. This article briefly covers the basics of the game and the importance of learning as many aspects of the game as possible.
The official name for this game is football but players often call it “futebol” which means “play football”. Because the sport is so open and wide-spread, there are several different kinds of footballs used including hard balls, soft balls and even water-filled ones. There are two foul areas in the playing field that players may cross while keeping within the penalty area or playing area. These include the front line or standing line, and the back line or center circle.
Aside from being played on a flat surface, soccer is played in a rectangular field or inside an artificial turf. Each side has only nine offensive players who stand in what is called the eleven-yard line, also known as the thirty-yard line. The object of the game is to score more points (“picks”) than the other team by taking advantage of different scores called “corners”. The game normally begins with the referee calling the start of play. The ball then is placed into the center circle, or “free-zone”, and players may then move toward the goal area through an opening in the corners of the field that is surrounded by the goal area. The objective of each player is to get as many touches on the ball as possible within the designated playing area.
There are three distinct types of soccer that most people play. Association football is played between two teams consisting of eleven players. Divisional football is played between two teams consisting of fourteen players. Professional football is played between a team of sixty players, commonly referred to as Major League Soccer, which plays every weekend. All three types of football may be played indoors or outdoors, with outdoor games being the more popular and longer-lasting.
When discussing the history of football, we have to touch on its development in England. When the Romans first played a game similar to what we call “football” it was only ever played for small groups of individuals. This was primarily because the Romans did not have the time or equipment to create a true football stadium, so they used something improvised: a sand pit with a round table where two or more persons could sit and watch the ball being played. Later this development was brought to the English people by the Football Association, an organization that was formed in 18ocker to help promote a better standard of play for English football. The first official football game played in England was a British exhibition game known as “Glasgow,” but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a real stadium was built, one that could hold a larger number of people than the usual sand pit.
In the early twentieth century a number of European and international soccer teams began to play a regular season league format, with each team playing two games a week for a total of 14 games. The first internationally recognized football game played in the United States was a match between the Americans of the United States and Germany, which took place at the RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. in a match that would later be known as “The World Game.” Today there are many professional and semi-professional soccer teams in the English Premier League, the EPL, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, and the Capital One Cup.
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