Football is evolving all the time and the reasons why are generally well understood.
International tournaments are growing, wages continue to rise and transfer
fees continue to be subject to rapid inflation. Even VAR continues to change,
being tweaked and adjusted in response to the chorus of criticism.
But some parts of the sport are not for changing:
the currency will always be goals, the pitch will always comprise halfway lines,
centre-circles and penalty spots, and each team will always line up with eleven players.
But why?
Why are the eleven players in a team?
Interestingly, this is a question without a definitive answer and is the subject of
competing and sometimes entwined theories. What is known is that eleven players per side
became mandated by a law change in 1897, but had become conventional much earlier, in the 1870s.
Modern football has many roots, some stretching back into antiquity. Early, tenuous version of
ball sports were played by the Aztecs and by the Chinese in around 200AD. More recently, In Italy,
the game’s direct ancestor is Calcio Florentino, a brutal sport originating in the Middle Ages.
Whether England is really football’s home is questionable. Nevertheless,
the form of the game that emerged in the country was essentially a compromise between the violent
chaos of rural and village games, which date as far back as the 12th Century, and the variations
of the game which sprung up and were adapted in English public schools, such as Eton and Rugby.
A codified version of the sport was always going to involve compromise and, for many years,
competing rules existed. The first published laws were the Sheffield Rules, which date back to 1858.
They outlawed hacking, tripping and pushing and introduced a form of the contemporary throw-in,
but made no reference to the number of players on each side.
Nor did the rival FA rules, published in 1863.
They decreed that teams should change ends every time a goal was scored and that,
so long as they didn’t run with the ball, any player could earn a free-kick with a ‘fair catch’,
but there was no mention of referees or pitch-markings or the number of players.
Nor would there be for over thirty years, long after the Sheffield Association had
adopted the FA rules in 1877, and the International Football Association
Board – IFAB as it’s commonly known today – had been founded in 1886,
as a way of standardising laws for international games between the home nations.
So, eleven players became IFAB law 1897,
but why it did it become informally standardised before then? There are two plausible explanations.
One claims cricket as its inspiration. The sport’s popularity in England predates modern football
and one theory is that eleven players in a cricket side became 11 in a football team – particularly
plausible given cricket’s success, but also because many early English clubs were built around
the cricket season, with players forming teams in the winter months as a means of keeping fit.
Most likely they played with eleven because that’s how many players they had.
Alternatively, it might have been a case of trial and error. Following the introduction
of a goalkeeper – ‘who could use his hands for the protection of his goal’ – in 1871,
eleven players might have gradually become a conventional norm as an ideal amount for the
various roles on the pitch or the amount of space that needed filling. That predates another rule
change which occurred in 1897, which reduced the maximum length of the pitch from 200 yards to 130,
but team size survived that reduction and has remained the same ever since.