The history of football is the story of rivalry and opposition. Indeed, the binary nature of football, involving rival teams and opposing identities, precedes the modern game of ‘association football’ (or ‘soccer’) and its codification in 1865. During the Middle Ages, the various European forms of ‘football’ were often violent affairs involving rival social groups (Magoun, 1938). Often, these games would be part of a folk carnival and so would dramatize opposing social identities, such as those between married and single men, masters versus apprentices, students against other youths, village against village, or young women against older women. Football games were brought into the English public schools during the.
