Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly called football include association football (known as soccer in North America and Oceania); gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football); Australian rules football; rugby union and rugby league; and Gaelic football.^[1] These various forms of football share to varying extent common origins and are known as football codes.

There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games played in many different parts of the world.^[2][3][4] Contemporary codes of football can be traced back to the codification of these games at English public schools during the 19th century.^[5][6] The expansion and cultural influence of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread to areas of British influence outside the directly controlled Empire.^[7] By the end of the 19th century, distinct regional codes were already developing: Gaelic football, for example, deliberately incorporated the rules of local traditional football games in order to maintain their heritage.^[8] In 1888, The Football League was founded in England, becoming the first of many professional football associations. During the 20th century, several of the various kinds of football grew to become some of the most popular team sports in the world.^[9]

There have been several speculations about the game’s origins, including some that it was created in France or Flanders. The earliest of these speculative references is from 1300 and concerns the future King Edward II playing at “creag and other games” in both Westminster and Newenden. It has been suggested that “creag” was an Old English word for cricket, but expert opinion is that it was an early spelling of “craic“, meaning “fun and games in general”.

It is generally believed that cricket survived as a children’s game for many generations before it was increasingly taken up by adults around the beginning of the 17th century. Possibly cricket was derived from bowls, assuming bowls is the older sport, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball from reaching its target by hitting it away. Playing on sheep-grazed land or in clearings, the original implements may have been a matted lump of sheep’s wool (or even a stone or a small lump of wood) as the ball; a stick or a crook or another farm tool as the bat; and a stool or a tree stump or a gate (e.g., a wicket gate) as the wicket.