By the middle of the nineteenth century, football was everywhere in England — and nowhere the same. Every public school had its own version. At Rugby, boys could pick up the ball and run with it. At Harrow, a heavy clay pitch favoured a dribbling game with a large ball. At Eton, the game had its own strange rules and vocabulary. When those schoolboys grew up and went to university or joined clubs, they discovered a problem: nobody could agree how to play.
A game without common rules
Attempts to unite the different codes had been made before. In 1848, students at Cambridge drew up a set of rules designed to let former pupils of different schools play together, and further Cambridge versions followed. In the north, Sheffield FC published its own rules in 1858. But in London, clubs formed by old boys and young professionals still argued on the touchline before every match. Could you handle the ball? Could you trip an opponent? Was "hacking" — kicking an opponent's shins — fair play or barbarism?
The meeting at Great Queen Street
On the evening of Monday 26 October 1863, representatives of a group of London and suburban clubs met at the Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, near Covent Garden. The driving force was Ebenezer Cobb Morley, a solicitor and captain of Barnes Football Club, who had written to a newspaper suggesting that football should have a fixed code of its own, just as cricket had its laws.
The clubs present agreed to form "The Football Association". Morley became its first secretary and set about drafting the rules. Over the following weeks the new association met several more times, and the arguments were fierce.
The great split
The biggest dispute was over hacking and running with the ball in the hands. Blackheath, whose representative Francis Maule Campbell defended hacking as an essential test of courage, wanted both kept. Most of the other clubs wanted them gone. When the majority voted to remove them, Blackheath withdrew from the Association. Clubs who preferred the handling game went their own way, and in 1871 they formed the Rugby Football Union. Association football and rugby football had become two separate sports.
The first Laws of the Game
The FA's first laws were published in December 1863. There were just thirteen of them, and to modern eyes they look strange. There was no crossbar, so a goal could be scored at any height between the two posts. There was no referee as we know him today. Throw-ins went to whichever player first touched the ball after it went out of play. Yet the essential idea was already there: a game played mainly with the feet, in which carrying the ball and kicking opponents were banned.
The first match played under the new laws is generally recorded as Barnes against Richmond in December 1863, a goalless draw. It was hardly a spectacle, but it was the beginning of something enormous.
Why it still matters
The FA was the first football governing body in the world, which is why it carries no national name. It was simply The Football Association, because there was no other. Even the word "soccer" comes from "association", through the student slang of the time.
Over the decades the laws were revised again and again. The crossbar, the referee, the penalty kick and many changes to offside all came later. Since 1886 the laws have been guarded by the International Football Association Board, on which the four British associations still sit alongside FIFA.
A handful of men in a London tavern could not have imagined that their thirteen rules would one day be followed by billions of people on every continent. But that is exactly what happened — and every match played today still carries a little of that evening in 1863.