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Just imagine the number of those who gathered around a TV in order to watch the matches; how useful free football online would have been! And the case of the World Cup is not singular; other football tournaments have their own faithful fans and viewers, many of whom would surely be grateful for the occasion of watching their favorite teams in action while the matches are broadcasted live. Fortunately, the latest improvements in live broadcasting allow football fans to watch live and free soccer online. Obviously, the reasons why free football online has been made possible are closely related to the popularity of this particular kind of sports event.

Football (or soccer) has not always been as popular as it is these days – and it is exceptionally popular since free soccer online is considered. Although the so called “games with a ball” (resembling football) have a long history, it was only during the second half of the 19th century that the birth of football was registered. England is the location where soccer, as we know it today (with a few minor changes), was officially born. Surely, there are stories relating that, approximately three thousand years ago, a game named “Kemari” played with a ball filled with sand was widely practiced in Japan. It did resemble football, but the number of the players on the field was only eight and even less at times. The same, it is estimated that in China, around the epoch of 2500 B.C., a game named “tsu chu”, played to pay homage to the emperor, developed up until the interval of 230 B.C.-220 A.D. The game involved a number of players trying to stop one another from kicking a stuffed ball (presumably, it was stuffed with feathers) through an opening between two bamboo stems.

However, the Football Association, the one which is “responsible” for the commencement of the game then called “Association football”, was established only as late as 1863, in London. The origins of English soccer can be identified back in the Middle Ages, when a type of mob football was practiced, as a competition between villages or towns. The purpose was to bring a ball at the central public square of the village/town of the opponents. While the game was very popular, it was also very violent, since very few play rules had been established.

As a consequence, the first royal ban (by King Edward II) on the practice of this game was registered at the middle of the 14th century. The bans were maintained for the next three centuries; nonetheless, the game was still practiced. We can be sure that by 1863 a number of more accurate play rules had been adopted (in fact, 17 years earlier the first play regulations had been written down). The label of “soccer” was coined in the 1880s, and it is an abbreviation from “association”. Nowadays, Americans use the term widely so as to distinguish soccer from American football.

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