Jordanka Donkova (centre) of Bulgaria leading Cornelia Oschkenat (left) of East Germany to win the …
also called track-and-field sports or track and field a variety of competitions in running, walking, jumping, and throwing events. Although these contests are called track and field (or simply track) in the United States, they are generally designated as athletics elsewhere. This article covers the history, the organization, and the administration of the sports, the conduct of competitions, the rules and techniques of the individual events, and some of the sports' most prominent athletes.
Track-and-field athletics are the oldest forms of organized sport, having developed out of the most basic human activities—running, walking, jumping, and throwing. Athletics have become the most truly international of sports, with nearly every country in the world engaging in some form of competition. Most nations send teams of men and women to the quadrennial Olympic Games and to the official World Championships of track and field. There also are several continental and intercontinental championship meets held, including the European, Commonwealth, African, Pan-American, and Asian.
Within the broad title of athletics come as many as two dozen distinct events. These events, generally held outdoors, make up a meet. The outdoor running events are held on a 400-metre or 440-yard oval track, and field events (jumping and throwing) are held either inside the track's perimeter or in adjacent areas.
In many parts of the world, notably the United States, Canada, and Europe, the sport moves indoors during the winter; because of limited space, some events are modified and several are eliminated altogether.
Also within the general scope of track-and-field athletics come separate but related competitions that are not contested on the track. Cross-country running competition is carried out on various types of countryside and parkland. Marathons and races of other long distances are run on roads, and the long-distance race walks are contested on measured road courses. The rules followed by all organized competitions are established and enforced by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and its member body from each nation. The IAAF also ratifies all world records.

History
Origin and early development
There is little in the way of definitive records of athletics' early days as organized sport. Egyptian and Asian civilizations are known to have encouraged athletics many centuries before the Christian era. Perhaps as early as 1829 BC, Ireland was the scene of the Lugnasad festival's Tailteann Games, involving various forms of track-and-field activity. The Olympic Games of Greece, traditionally dated from 776 BC, continued through 11 centuries before ending about AD 393. These ancient Olympics were strictly male affairs, as to both participants and spectators. Greek women were reputed to have formed their own Heraea Games, which, like the Olympics, were held every four years.
Athletics as practiced today was born and grew to maturity in England. The first mention of the sport in England was recorded in 1154, when practice fields were first established in London. The sport was banned by King Edward III in the 1300s but revived a century later by Henry VIII, reputed to be an accomplished hammer thrower.

Modern development
The development of the modern sport, however, has come only since the early 19th century. Organized amateur footraces were held in England as early as 1825, but it was from 1860 that athletics enjoyed its biggest surge to that date. In 1861 the West London Rowing Club organized the first meet open to all amateurs, and in 1866 the Amateur Athletic Club (AAC) was founded and conducted the first English championships. The emphasis in all these meets was on competition for “gentlemen amateurs” who received no financial compensation. In 1880 the AAC yielded governing power to the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA).
The first meet in North America was held near Toronto in 1839, but it was the New York Athletic Club, formed in the 1860s, that placed the sport on a solid footing in the United States. The club held the world's first indoor meet and helped promote the formation in 1879 of the National Association of Amateur Athletes of America (NAAAA) to conduct national championships. Nine years later the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) took over as national governing body, amid reports that the NAAAA was lax in enforcing amateurism.
Athletics was well established in many countries by the late 1800s, but not until the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896 did the sport become truly international. Although begun modestly, the Olympics provided the inspiration and standardizing influence that was to spread interest in athletics worldwide. In 1912 the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) was founded, and by the time that organization celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1987 it had more than 170 national members. Its rules applied only to men's competition until 1936, when the IAAF also became the governing body of women's athletics.
Major international competitions before World War II included the Olympics, the British Empire Games, and the European Championships, but after the war athletics experienced its greatest period of growth, taking root especially in the developing countries. By the 1950s world-class athletes from African, Asian, and Latin American nations were enjoying great success at international meets.

Organization and tournaments
Top-level competition in athletics is still restricted to the amateur athlete, although the definition of “amateur” continues to evolve. The IAAF over time has reduced its definition of an amateur athlete to the simplest possible terms: “An amateur is one who abides by the eligibility rules of the IAAF” is the complete rule, allowing for change whenever the federation alters any of its other rules.
Until the 1980s the IAAF attempted to keep its athletes from benefiting financially from the sport. This was always a struggle, however, as star athletes and eager meet promoters managed to circumvent the rules. So did entire nations: eastern European countries provided government aid to athletes, other countries encouraged military personnel to concentrate on track-and-field training, and U.S. athletes received college scholarships in return for their skills.
Financial aid was made acceptable in the 1980s through the use of trust funds. Athletes were permitted to accept payment for appearing in competition, for performing well, for appearing in television commercials, or for other sport-related activities. The money was placed in trust; training expenses could be charged to the fund, with the remaining funds, if any, going to the athlete on retirement from competition. Some athletes were reported to have made several hundred thousand dollars a year under the new system.
The primary functions of the IAAF are to maintain a set of rules that are uniform throughout the world, to approve world records for outdoor and indoor competition, and to promote international athletics. While continuing to administer athletics competition in the Olympic Games, the IAAF began its own quadrennial World Championships in 1983, established World Cup competitions, and established walking, cross-country, marathon and other road races, indoor track and field, and junior competitions.
Each IAAF member nation has its own set of rules and maintains its own set of records in line with international guidelines. The amateur athletic federations of individual countries conduct their own national championships.
In the United States, for example, The Athletic Congress (TAC) alone has the power to select international teams (except for the Olympic team, which is under the jurisdiction of the United States Olympic Committee), to establish rules, and to accept or reject records. It also conducts the national championships and other competitions. Meets in which participation is restricted to college or university athletes usually are governed by the rules of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), or one of two junior (two-year) college groups. Most secondary schools in the United States come under the aegis of the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations.
The details of the conduct of athletics competitions vary with the location and the level and type of meet. To a great degree the basic sport has been standardized by the rules of the IAAF. Outdoor track events take place on the 400-metre (about 440-yard) oval running track. Track compositions differ greatly. Once almost all tracks were of natural materials (dirt, clay, cinders, and crushed brick being the most common), but all major competition tracks now are made of synthetic materials. The synthetic track provides more consistent and faster footing in all weather conditions. Field event performers also benefit from improved footing; jumpers and javelin throwers perform on the same materials used for synthetic tracks, while the throwers of the shot, discus, and hammer work in circles made of concrete.
Indoor track meets adapt themselves to widely varying and often limiting conditions. Tracks range in size generally from 150 to 200 metres or 160 to 220 yards and have synthetic surfaces over wood. Some tracks have banked curves, others are unbanked. Cross-country running utilizes any terrain that is available—parks, golf courses, farmland. The prescribed IAAF distance in international races for men is approximately 12,000 metres (7.5 miles) and for women 4,000 metres (2.5 miles). Road events include walking, marathon, and other road runs of widely varying distances.

Meets
Equipment
Every event has items of equipment that are essential to the conduct of the event. All athletes, for example, require shoes that give traction and protection with minimum weight. Other items of equipment include the starting blocks used by sprinters and hurdlers, hurdles, vaulting poles, and the implements employed in the various throwing events.

Timing and measurements
Exacting timing and measurement of performances are a vital part of athletics, not only to determine winners at the meet in question but also to provide marks that can be compared for record purposes. Fully automatic timing, using photography, is required for world records and all major competitions. Timing, once done in fifths of a second and then in tenths, now is done in hundredths of a second. By rule, an aiding wind of more than 2 metres per second (4.473 miles per hour) nullifies a record time in distances up to 200 metres. Metric measurements are required for both track and field events, even in the United States. The only English-measure distance that remains popular is the one-mile run. With the 1987 inauguration of the World Indoor Championships, the IAAF began accepting indoor records.

Presentation
Athletics meets differ greatly in presentation. The typical school, university, or club meet is of one-day duration. Conference meets generally last two days, while national championships require three to four days to accommodate large numbers of athletes. The Olympic Games and World Championships are scheduled for eight days of athletics competition.
All track events begin with the firing of a gun. In races of one lap or less the runners remain in their marked lanes for the entire distance. In longer events the runners may ignore the lane markers and run as close to the inside edge of the track as is prudent. The runner whose torso reaches the winning line first is the winner.
Field events have two types of qualifying competitions. In the smaller meets all participants are allowed three attempts, with the top six to nine athletes getting three more. In the larger meets there is a qualifying round from which about 12 athletes advance to the finals, at which stage the remaining competition proceeds in the same manner as in the smaller meets. The exceptions in field event competition are the vertical jumps—the high jump and pole vault. Jumpers are given three tries at each height; three consecutive misses cause elimination.
Although athletics is basically an individual sport, team scoring is sometimes important. Dual meets are always scored, but there are no official scores for multi-team international meets, such as the Olympic Games. Conference and national meets among universities also are scored officially. The points allotted to individual events and places vary from meet to meet. A national competition may award 10 points for first place, 8 for second, and so on. Similarly, an international dual meet awards 5 points for first place, 3 for second, 2 for third, and 1 for fourth. The team with the highest point total wins the meet. Cross-country meets always are scored, with the winner getting 1 point, second place 2 points, etc., the low score winning.
Runners have a chance to compete year-round. The indoor season lasts from January through March; the outdoor competition lasts until June for schools and colleges, with the higher-level individual competitors participating in track through September. In the United States autumn is given over to cross-country running. International cross-country is held in winter.

Conflicts and controversies
Athletics, occupying centre stage at all international games, generates its share of conflicts. Until the IAAF's trust-fund system there was continual concern about athletes earning money by violating rules. From about 1970 the question of drug usage has been a major issue. Athletes are forbidden to use a number of drugs that are said to improve performance. Testing for such use is required at the major meets, and, while the great majority of athletes tested are found to be free of banned drugs, each year a small number of athletes are found guilty of violating the drug rule and are suspended from competition, usually for 18 months. Most frequently the violators have used anabolic steroids in an attempt to increase muscle size and strength.

Events
As many as 25 events may make up a men's meet; women compete in a few less. The men's track events at championship meets generally include the 100-, 200-, 400-, 800-, 1,500-, 5,000-, and 10,000-metre runs; the 3,000-metre steeplechase; the 110- and 400-metre hurdles; and the 400- and 1,500-metre relays. The field events usually include the high jump, pole vault, long jump, triple jump, shot put, discus throw, hammer throw, and javelin throw. The decathlon, combining 10 track-and-field events, is also featured. Women run much the same schedule, with 100-metre instead of 110-metre hurdles, but do not compete in the steeplechase, pole vault, or hammer throw. They compete in the heptathlon (seven events) rather than the decathlon, and both men and women run the marathon. Women walk up to 10,000 metres and men up to 50,000 metres.

Running
The sprints


The relatively short sprint distances, ranging up to 400 metres, require a sustained top speed. Originally all sprinters started from a standing position, but in the 1880s the crouch start was invented, and it became a rule that sprinters must start with both feet and both hands on the track. The introduction of the adjustable starting block aided the quick start, critical in the sprints.
The current record holder at 100 metres generally is considered to be “the fastest human.” Holding that title have been such champions as Eddie Tolan, Jesse Owens, Bobby Morrow, Bob Hayes, and Carl Lewis (all of the United States), Valeriy Borzov (U.S.S.R.), Linford Christie (U.K.), and Donovan Bailey (Canada). Maurice Greene of the United States set a record time of 9.79 seconds at a 1999 meet in Athens, Greece. Outstanding women sprint champions have included Fanny Blankers-Koen (The Netherlands), who won four gold medals in the 1948 Olympics, Wilma Rudolph (U.S.), who won three in 1960, Marita Koch (East Germany), who was a winner at all three sprint distances, and Florence Griffith Joyner (U.S.), who set world records at 100 and 200 metres in 1988.
The 400 metres is run in lanes all the way; distance is equalized by a staggered start, the sprinters being spaced progressively farther up the track based on the distance their lane is from the inside edge. Outstanding in this event were Lee Evans (U.S.), whose 43.86-second mark remained the world record 20 years after he set it in 1968, Alberto Juantorena (Cuba), whose 44.26-second time in the 1976 Olympics was the fastest without the aid of high altitude, and Michael Johnson (U.S.), whose world record time of 43.18 seconds was set at the 1999 World Championships in Sevilla, Spain. Jarmila Kratochvilova (Czechoslovakia) won a rare double victory in the women's 400- and 800-metre events at the 1983 World Championships.

Middle-distance running
The longer the race, the more endurance is needed. The middle-distance events, in this discussion, range from 800 to 2,000 metres. Some authorities regard the 3,000-metre race as middle-distance.
Middle-distance runners usually are able to perform well at either the shorter or the longer distances. Racing tactics, including pacing, are more important at these than at any other distances. Even though it is no longer a championship event, the mile is still a glamour event. The first athlete to run a mile in less than four minutes—Roger Bannister of England in 1954—captured world attention. A “sub-four” is still a notable time, even though it is now routinely accomplished by the world's top runners. Other great middle-distance runners include Paavo Nurmi (Finland), who won both the 1,500 (the metric “mile”) and 5,000 metres on the same day in the 1924 Olympics, Sebastian Coe (U.K.), who won two Olympic gold medals at 1,500 metres and two silver at 800 metres, Noureddine Morceli (Algeria), who won two world championships and an Olympic gold medal in the 1,500 metres, and Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco), who set outdoor and indoor world records in the 1,500 metres and the mile. Two Soviet women created memorable middle-distance records. Tatyana Kazankina won five world records, while Lyudmila Bragina established eight. Mary Decker Slaney (U.S.) also won consistently at the middle distances.

Long-distance running
There is some difference of opinion over the dividing line between middle-distance and long-distance runs. The long-distance events considered here are those ranging from 3,000 metres upward; they include the marathon, steeplechase, cross-country, and road runs. The marathon is the longest event for which the IAAF keeps records. Speed becomes an even less important factor in the longer runs, pace and endurance correspondingly more so. The longer the run, the less likely the burst of speed known as the “finishing kick” at the end of the race.
Runners may also overlap the long- and middle-distance events. Nurmi, Gunder Hägg (Sweden), and Said Aouita (Morocco) all set world records at both 1,500 and 5,000 metres. Nurmi won at all distances longer than 1,000 metres except the marathon. Distance runners provide the most prolific record setters, including Nurmi, Ron Clarke (Australia), Kip Keino (Kenya), Haile Gebrselassie (Ethiopia), and Emil Zátopek (Czechoslovakia), the last of whom performed the remarkable feat of winning the marathon and the 5,000- and 10,000-metre races at the 1952 Olympic Games. The longer races for women have been slow to develop, but a number of runners have been able to compete at various distances, including Ingrid Kristiansen (Norway).
The steeplechase combines long-distance running with hurdling, each runner being required to clear seven water jumps and 28 hurdles in a 3,000-metre course. Although hurdling is an important aspect of the event, by far the greatest need is the ability to run the distance. Steeplechase competitors are often specialists, but there are examples of fine distance runners who have successfully overcome more experienced hurdlers. Henry Rono (Kenya), one of the most successful at the steeplechase, also held world records at 3,000, 5,000, and 10,000 metres.
The marathon was a key event at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, and it has become a major attraction of the Olympics and other international contests. The race originally commemorated the feat of a Greek soldier who in 490 BC supposedly ran from Marathon to Athens to bring news of the Greek victory over the Persians. At 26.22 miles (42,186 metres) the marathon is the longest race of the track meet. Hannes Kolehmainen (Finland) and Zátopek are two of the more memorable marathoners.

Hurdling
The hurdling events combine sprinting with negotiating a series of obstacles called hurdles. Men run the 110-metre high hurdles over 10 barriers 106.7 cm (42 inches) high and 9.14 metres (10 yards) apart. The 400-metre intermediate hurdles also covers 10 hurdles, but 91.4 cm (36 inches) in height and 35 metres (38.29 yards) apart. Women now run both the 100-metre high and 400-metre hurdles. A hurdler may knock down any number of hurdles but is disqualified if he runs out of his lane or uses his hands to knock over hurdles. The object is to make the hurdling action smooth and rhythmic so as not to disrupt forward progress.
High hurdlers need excellent speed, most champions also being good sprinters. An outstanding example is Harrison Dillard (U.S.), who won the 100-metre flat race in the 1948 Olympics and the high hurdles in the 1952 Games. Intermediate hurdlers also combine speed with hurdling ability. Glenn Davis (U.S.), who won both the 1956 and 1960 Olympics, was a world-record breaker on the flat as well as over the hurdles. Edwin Moses (U.S.) virtually revolutionized the event with his unusual 13-stride (between hurdles) technique. He also won two Olympics and achieved a winning streak lasting nearly 10 years.

Relays
The relays involve four runners per team, each member carrying a baton for 25 percent of the total distance before passing it to the next team runner. Two events, the 4 × 100- and 4 × 400-metre relays, are standard. They are included both in low-level dual meets and in the Olympic Games and the IAAF World Championships. Speed is essential in both events, and the ability to pass the baton well is especially crucial in the shorter event, where each runner covers 100 metres. Exchanging the baton while running about 25 miles per hour brings to the event a quality of suspense. Many races have been won or lost by the quality of baton passing. Other relay events—the 4 × 200-, 4 × 800-, and 4 × 1,500-metres—are run much less frequently.

Walking
This event, also called race walking, is relatively minor. Aside from the Olympic and other multinational competitions, it is seldom a part of track meets. Olympic competition is over 20,000 and 50,000 metres, while other distances are used in individual competitions.

Jumping
Men and women compete in four jumping events: the high jump, long jump, triple jump, and pole vault.

The high jump
There is one basic rule for high jumping: the jumper must leave the ground from one foot, not two. The object is to clear a thin bar perched atop two standards, and the jumper remains in the competition as long as he does not have three consecutive misses. Jumpers may enter the competition at any height above the minimum height and are allowed to pass any height as the bar is raised to new levels. Inflated or foam-rubber landing pits have replaced dirt and sawdust pits. The modern pits are of value because jumpers often land on the back of the shoulders and neck.
Jumping styles evolved in the 20th century with techniques called the scissors, eastern cut-off, western roll, and straddle (or belly roll) preceding the Fosbury flop. Named for its inventor, Dick Fosbury (U.S.), the 1968 Olympic champion, the flop involves an approach from almost straight ahead, then twisting on takeoff and going over headfirst with the back to the bar. Charles Dumas (U.S.), a notable example of the straddle jumpers, in 1956 became the first man to clear 7 feet (2.13 metres). Valeriy Brumel (U.S.S.R.) held the high-jump record for 10 years using the straddle jump. A woman jumper, Iolanda Balas (Romania), achieved remarkable feats in the event, establishing 13 world records and a winning streak of 140 meets.

The pole vault
Pole-vaulting is conducted along the lines of the high jump; i.e., vaulters attempt to vault over a crossbar placed on uprights, they have three tries at each height, and they land in an inflated or composition pit.
The vaulter runs down a runway for about 45 metres (150 feet) carrying a pole. After planting the end of the pole in a box that is sunk below ground level, the vaulter leaves the ground and pulls himself upward until he is almost doing a handstand on the pole. He twists as he nears the crossbar and arches over it feetfirst and facedown.
The first poles, of solid ash, cedar, or hickory, were heavy and cumbersome. Once the bamboo pole was introduced in 1904, it was quickly adopted. Records set with bamboo lasted until 1957, when records were set with an aluminum pole and a steel pole; these were followed by the fibreglass pole in the 1960s.
The dominant vaulter of the bamboo era was Cornelius Warmerdam (U.S.), who scored six world records; he was the first vaulter to go over 15 feet (4.6 metres), and he set a record of 15 feet 7.75 inches that lasted for 15 years. The constant improvement of fibreglass poles helped vaulters such as Sergey Bubka (Ukraine) push the record over 20 feet in the 1990s. In the 1990s the IAAF added women's pole vault to the competition roster, and Stacy Dragila (U.S.) became the event's first women's world and Olympic champion.

The long jump
Long jumping, formerly called broad jumping, is the least complicated of the field events. Speed is the most essential ingredient for a successful jump. Jumpers make their approach down the runway at nearly top speed, plant a foot on the takeoff board, and leap into the air. A legal jump requires that no part of the forward foot extend beyond the board. The most popular long-jumping style is called the “hitch-kick,” in which the runner seemingly walks in air.

Bob Beamon (U.S.) breaking the world record in the long jump at 8.90 metres (29.2 feet) during the …
Three distinct landmarks stand out in the history of long jumping. The first of these was the achievement of Jesse Owens (U.S.), who on May 25, 1935, jumped 8.13 metres (26 feet 8.25 inches), a record that endured for 25 years. The second was Bob Beamon's (U.S.) leap of 8.90 metres (29 feet 2.5 inches), a jump that exceeded the old world record by 55 cm (21.5 inches). The third feat came in 1991, when Mike Powell (U.S.) broke Beamon's 23-year record with a jump of 8.95 metres (29 feet 4.5 inches).
Notable among the women jumpers are Heike Drechsler (Germany) and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (U.S.), both of whom leaped over 7 metres (23 feet).

The triple jump
Once known as the hop, step, and jump, the triple jump includes three distinct segments of action. The jumper comes down the runway and bounds off a takeoff board, similar in style to but a little slower than long jumpers. The first segment involves the jumper executing a hop by landing on the same foot from which he took off. Then he takes a step, landing on the other foot, and concludes with a jump into the sand pit.
Among the outstanding competitors, Adhemar da Silva (Brazil) won two Olympics and set five world records; Jozef Schmidt (Poland), also a two-time Olympic champion, set a record in 1960 of 17.03 metres (55 feet 10.5 inches) and was the first to go over the 17-metre barrier; and Viktor Saneyev (U.S.S.R.) had three world records and three Olympic wins and one second place. Women began competing in the triple jump in the mid-1980s.

Throwing
The four standard throwing events—shot, discus, hammer, and javelin—all involve the use of implements of various weights and shapes that are hurled for distance.

The shot put
The putting action is best described as shoving the shot, because the rules require that the arm may not extend behind the shoulders during the putting action. The spherical shot is made of metal. The men's shot weighs 7.26 kg (16 pounds) and is 110–130 mm (4.3–5.1 inches) in diameter. Women put a 4-kg (8.82-pound) shot that is 95–110 mm (3.7–4.3 inches) in diameter.
The putter must launch the shot from within a ring 2.135 metres (7 feet) in diameter and so must gather momentum for the put by a rapid twisting movement. Shot-putters are among the largest athletes in track and field, the most massive ranging from 250 to 300 pounds (113 to 136 kg). Beginning in the 1950s, weight training became a major part of a shot-putter's training program. In that same period the O'Brien style of putting was popularized, with outstanding results. Developed by Parry O'Brien (U.S.), the style involved a 180-degree turn (rather than the usual 90-degree turn) across the ring, getting more speed and momentum into the action. O'Brien was the best exponent of the style, winning three Olympic medals (two gold) and raising the record from 17.95 metres (58 feet 10.75 inches) to 19.30 metres (63 feet 4 inches).
Some athletes have turned to a style in which the putter spins one and a half turns before releasing the shot, a technique developed by Brian Oldfield (U.S.).

The discus throw
Discus throwing is considered by many the classic event of athletics, the Greek poet Homer having made references to discus throwing in the 8th century BC. Modern male athletes throw a 2-kg (4.4-pound) platelike implement from a 2.5-metre (8.2-foot) circle. The discus is launched after the thrower, starting at the back of the circle, has completed one and a half turns. The women's discus weighs 1 kg (2.2 pounds).
Legendary among discus throwers are the feats of Al Oerter (U.S.), the first to throw over 200 feet (61 metres). He won an Olympic gold medal at the 1956 Games as a 20-year-old and at each of the following three Games as well. He also set four world records. A standout among women throwers was Faina Melnik (U.S.S.R.), who set 11 world records.

The hammer throw
The implement used in the hammer throw is not a conventional hammer but a metal ball at least 110 mm (4.3 inches) in diameter attached to a wire, the whole implement being a minimum of 1,175 mm (46.3 inches) in length and weighing a minimum of 7.2 kg (16 pounds). The handle at the end of the wire opposite from the ball is gripped by the thrower and released after three or four body turns have developed maximum centrifugal force. The throwing circle is slightly smaller than that of the discus. Women's hammer throw was introduced into international competition in the 1990s. The hammer used by women is slightly shorter and weighs a minimum of 4 kg (8.8 pounds).
American athletes of Irish birth or descent totally dominated the event from the 1890s to the 1930s and included John Flanagan, who unofficially set 17 world records and won three Olympic gold medals (1900, 1904, and 1908). After the passing of the Irish dynasty, the power shifted to the eastern Europeans. Among them was Yury Sedykh (U.S.S.R.), who won at the 1976 and 1980 Olympics and raised the record from 80.32 metres (24.5 feet) to 86.74 metres (26.4 feet).

The javelin throw
Javelin throwing involves a spearlike implement that is hurled with an over-the-shoulder motion at the end of an approach run. It is a direct descendant of spear-throwing contests, introduced in the Olympics of 708 BC. The men's javelin weighs about 800 grams (1.8 pounds) and must be at least 260 cm (8.5 feet) long. The women throw a javelin that must weigh at least 600 grams (1.3 pounds) and be at least 220 cm (7.2 feet) long. It is the only throwing event not using a circle. The javelin is not required to stick but must land point-first for a valid throw.
Throwers from Finland have historically been a force in the event. Matti Järvinen, a Finn, established 10 world records and improved the record by 6.22 metres, finally reaching 77.23 metres (253 feet 4.5 inches) in 1936. As records continued to be broken, there was less and less space within the stadium to throw the javelin safely. Terje Pedersen (Norway) broke the 300-foot (91.44-metre) barrier in 1964, and by 1984 Uwe Hohn (East Germany) had thrown a prodigious 104.80 metres (343.8 feet), a throw so great that it influenced a change in the design of the javelin to keep it within the safe confines of the field. Beginning in 1985, throwers used a javelin that, at the same weight, was designed to reduce the length of the throw by 9 to 12 metres (30 to 40 feet). The design of the women's javelin was changed after successive world records pushed close to 80 metres (262.5 feet) in the late 1980s.

Decathlon and heptathlon
Both men and women participate in multi-event competitions, the men in the 10-event decathlon and the women in the 7-event heptathlon, which superseded the earlier pentathlon. The competitions, which require a two-day schedule, are held basically at international meets and national championships. In the United States they also are scheduled in many college conference championships.
Each athlete is given points for performance in each event, with more points awarded for better marks. The athlete with the most total points wins.
Men compete in five events each day, doing consecutively the 100 metres, long jump, shot put, high jump, and 400 metres on the first day and the 110-metre hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, and 1,500-metre run in that order on the second day. Women do, in order, the 100-metre hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200 metres on the first day, followed by the long jump, javelin throw, and 800 metres on the second day.
Jim Thorpe, the great all-around American athlete, won the first decathlon, taking the 1912 Olympic Games contest, and for many years it was mostly an American event. Bob Mathias (U.S.) won his first decathlon at age 17 in 1948 and repeated it four years later. Another two-time winner was Daley Thompson of England, victorious in 1980 and 1984. Notable in the heptathlon was Jackie Joyner-Kersee, a record setter and winner at the 1987 World Championships and 1988 Olympics.

spo

form of motor racing involving cars built to combine aspects of racing and touring cars. Although there are many conflicting definitions of sports cars, it is usually conceded that in normal production form they do not resemble Grand Prix (Formula One) racing machines. Whereas the latter is a single-seat design carrying spartan cockpit furnishings and utterly functional equipment throughout, the sports car is usually a two-seater, sometimes a four-seater, characterized by its nimble abilities (if not speed and power) together with general suitability for high-speed touring on ordinary roads. Unlike a Grand Prix car, it is usually series-produced, seldom handmade. Some manufacturers of Grand Prix machines, such as Ferrari and Lotus, also make sports cars. Other makes include MG, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Austin-Healey, Triumph, Porsche, Lancia, Morgan, and Chevrolet Corvette. Although not usually designed exclusively for racing, sports cars are, nevertheless, able racing machines and are often entered in competitions with others of their class. Most of the world's sports-car racing is conducted for amateur drivers by local and regional organizations. Some of the world's most famous professional races are sports-car events, however, and may even be designated as Grand Prix. (When the term Grand Prix is used in this context, it does not refer to the type of car used but rather to the race's being a major automotive event of the nation in which it is held.) The development of sports cars for racing, especially in such commercially important events as the 24-hour endurance race at Le Mans, where the reputations of participating manufacturers are very much at stake, brought about some prototype sports cars that are, in reality, little different in their power and speed potentials from Formula One machines. A world sports-car championship was awarded from 1953 to 1961. It was replaced in 1962 by a manufacturer's championship, for which grand touring and prototype cars also compete, awarded annually to the make of car that achieves the best record in a specified series of races

sports

Introduction
recreational or competitive activities that involve a degree of physical strength or skill. At one time, sports were commonly considered to include only the outdoor recreational pastimes, such as fishing, shooting, and hunting, as opposed to games, which were regarded as organized athletic contests played by teams or individuals according to prescribed rules. The distinction between sports and games has grown less clear, however, and the two terms are now often used interchangeably.
Many animals engage in play, but homo sapiens is the only animal to have invented sports. Since sports are an invention, a part of culture rather than an aspect of nature, all definitions of sports are somewhat arbitrary. Whether sports are a human universal found in every known culture or a phenomenon unique to modern society depends upon one's definition of sports. Men and women have always run, jumped, climbed, lifted, thrown, and wrestled, but they have not always performed these physical activities competitively. Although all literate societies seem to have contests of one sort or another in which men, and sometimes women, compete in displays and tests of physical skill and prowess, sports may be strictly defined as physical contests performed for their own sake and not for some ulterior end. According to this strict definition, neither Neolithic hunters nor contestants in religious ceremonies such as the ancient Olympic Games were engaged in sports. Insistence on the stipulation that sports must be performed for their own sake means the paradoxical elimination of many activities which are usually thought of as sports, such as exercises done for the sake of cardiovascular fitness, races run to satisfy a physical education requirement, ball games played to earn a paycheck. Strict definition also means abandonment of the traditional usage in which “sport,” derived from Middle English disporter, refers to any lighthearted recreational activity. In the minds of some 18th-century aristocrats, a game of backgammon and the seduction of a milkmaid were both considered good sport, but this usage of the term has become archaic.
Strict conceptualization allows the construction of an evolutionary history of sports in which extrinsic political, economic, military, and religious motivations decrease in importance as intrinsic motivations—participation for its own sake—increase. The disadvantage, however, is that the determination that a given activity is truly a sport depends on the answer to a psychological question: What is the motivation of the participants? The question of motivation cannot be answered unambiguously. It is probable that the contestants of the ancient Olympic Games were motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of the contest as well as by the religious imperatives of Greek cult. It is also probable that modern professional athletes are motivated by more than simply economic motives. Thus most scholars assume quietly that popular usage cannot be completely wrong to refer, for instance, to U.S. professional National Football League games as sports.

History
No one can say when sports began. Since it is difficult to imagine a time when children did not spontaneously run races or wrestle, it is clear that children have always included sports in their play, but one can only speculate about the emergence of sports as autotelic (played for their own sake) physical contests for adults. Hunters are depicted in prehistoric art, but it cannot be known whether the hunters pursued their prey in a mood of grim necessity or with the joyful abandon of sportsmen. It is certain, however, from the rich literary and iconographic evidence of all ancient civilizations that the hunt soon became an end in itself—at least for royalty and nobility. Archaeological evidence also indicates that ball games were common among the ancient Chinese. If such games were contests rather than ritual performances like the Japanese football game kemari, then they were instances of sports in the most rigorously defined sense. That it cannot simply be assumed they were contests is clear from the evidence presented by Greek and Roman antiquity, indicating that ball games seem to have been for the most part playful pastimes like those recommended for health by the 2nd-century AD Greek physician Galen.

Sports in the ancient world
Egypt
Sports were certainly common in ancient Egypt, where pharaohs demonstrated their fitness to rule by prowess in the hunt and by exhibitions of strength and skill in archery. In such exhibitions, pharaohs such as Amenhotep II (ruled 1450–25 BC) never competed against another person, and there is reason to suspect that their extraordinary achievements were scribal fictions. However, Egyptians with less claim to divinity jumped, wrestled, and engaged in ball games and stick fights of the sort that can still be observed in Egypt.

Crete and Greece
Since Minoan script still baffles scholars, it is uncertain whether Cretan boys and girls who tested their acrobatic skills against bulls were engaged in sports, in religious ritual, or in both.
That the feats of the Cretans may have been both sport and ritual is suggested by evidence from Greece, where sports had a significance unequaled anywhere before the rise of modern sports. Secular and religious motives mingle in history's first extensive “sports report,” found in book 23 of Homer's Iliad in the form of funeral games for the dead Patroclus. These games were a part of cult and were not, therefore, autotelic, but the contests in the Odyssey are essentially secular. Odysseus was challenged by the Phaeacians to demonstrate his prowess as an athlete. In general, Greek culture included both cultic sports, such as the Olympic Games honouring Zeus, and secular contests.
The most famous association of sports and religion was certainly the Olympic Games, which Greek tradition dated from 776 BC but which probably began much earlier. In the course of time, the earth goddess Gaea, originally worshiped at Olympia, was supplanted in importance by the sky god Zeus, in whose honour priestly officials conducted quadrennial athletic contests. Sacred also were the games held at Delphi, in honour of Apollo, and at Corinth and Nemea. These four events were known as the periodos, and great athletes, such as Theagenes of Thasos, prided themselves on victories at all four sites. The extraordinary prestige accorded athletic triumphs brought with it not only literary accolades (as in the odes of Pindar) and visual commemoration (in the form of statues of the victors) but also material benefits, contrary to the amateur myth propagated by 19th-century philhellenists. Since the Greeks were devoted to secular sports as well as to sacred games, no polis, or city-state, was considered a proper community if it lacked a gymnasium where, as the word gymnos indicates, naked male athletes trained and competed. Except at militaristic Sparta, Greek girls rarely participated in sports of any kind. Women were excluded from the Olympic Games even as spectators (except for the priestess of Demeter). Pausanias, the 2nd-century-AD traveler, wrote of races for girls at Olympia, but these events in honour of Hera were of minor importance.

Rome
Although chariot races were among the most popular sports spectacles of the Roman and Byzantine eras, as they were in Greek times, the Romans of the republic and the early empire were quite selectively enthusiastic about Greek athletic contests. Their emphasis was on physical exercises for military preparedness, an important motive in all ancient civilizations; they preferred boxing, wrestling, and hurling the javelin to running footraces and throwing the discus. The historian Livy tells of Greek athletes appearing in Rome as early as 186 BC, but the contestants' nudity shocked Roman moralists. The emperor Augustus instituted the Actian Games in 27 BC to celebrate his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, and several emperors began similar games, but it was not until the later empire, especially during the reign of Hadrian (AD 117–138), that large numbers of the Roman elite developed an enthusiasm for Greek athletics.
Chariot races in Rome's Circus Maximus were watched by as many as 250,000 spectators, five times the number that crowded into the Colosseum to enjoy gladiatorial combats. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that the latter contests were more popular even than the former. Indeed, the munera, which pitted man against man, and the venationes, which set men against animals, became popular even in the Eastern Empire, which historians once thought immune from the lust for blood. The greater frequency of chariot races can be explained in part by the fact that they were relatively inexpensive compared to the enormous costs of gladiatorial combats. (The editor who staged the games usually rented the gladiators from a lanista and was required to reimburse him for losers executed in response to a “thumbs down” sign.) Brutal as these combats were, many of the gladiators were free men who volunteered to fight, an obvious sign of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, imperial edicts were needed to discourage the aristocracy's participation. In AD 63, during the reign of Nero, female gladiators were introduced into the arena.
The circus and the hippodrome, a stadium of Greek origin for chariot racing, continued to provide popular sports spectacles long after Christian protests (and heavy economic costs) ended the gladiatorial games, probably early in the 5th century. In many ways, the chariot races were quite modern. The charioteers were divided into bureaucratically organized factions (e.g., the “Blues” and the “Greens”), which excited the loyalties of fans from Britain to Mesopotamia. Charioteers boasted of the number of their victories as modern athletes brag about their “stats,” indicating, perhaps, some incipient awareness of what in modern times are called sports records. The gladiatorial games, however, like the Greek games before them, had a powerful religious dimension. The first Roman combats, in 264 BC, were derived from Etruscan funeral games in which mortal combat provided companions for the deceased. It was the idolatry of the games, even more than their brutality, that horrified Christian protestors. The lesser pagan religious association of the chariot races helped them survive late into the post-Constantine period.

Sports in the Middle Ages
The sports of medieval times were less well-organized. Fairs and seasonal festivals were occasions for men to lift stones or sacks of grain and for women to run smock races (for a smock, not in one). The favourite sport of the peasantry was folk football, a wild sort of no-holds-barred unbounded game that pitted married men against bachelors or one village against another. The violence of the game, which survived in Britain and in France until the late 19th century, was such that Renaissance humanists, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, condemned it as more likely to maim than to benefit the participants.
The nascent bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance amused itself with archery matches, some of which were arranged months in advance and staged with considerable fanfare. When town met town in a challenge of skill, the companies of crossbowmen and longbowmen marched behind the symbols of St. George, St. Sebastian, and other patrons of the sport. It was not unusual for contests in running, jumping, cudgeling, and wrestling to be offered for the lower classes who attended the match as spectators. Grand feasts were part of the program, and drunkenness commonly added to the revelry. In Germanic areas, a Pritschenkoenig was supposed to simultaneously keep order and entertain the crowd with clever verses.
The burghers of medieval towns were welcome to watch the aristocracy at play, but they were not allowed to participate in tournaments or even, in most parts of Europe, to compete in imitative tournaments of their own. Tournaments were the jealously guarded prerogative of the medieval knight and, along with hunting and hawking, his favourite pastime. At the tilt, in which mounted knights with lances tried to unhorse one another, the knight was practicing the art of war, his raison d'être. He displayed his prowess before lords, ladies, and commoners and profited not only from valuable prizes but also from ransoms exacted from the losers. Between the 12th and the 16th centuries, the dangerously wild free-for-all of the early tournament evolved into dramatic presentations of courtly life in which elaborate pageantry and allegorical display quite overshadowed the frequently inept jousts. Some danger remained even amid the display. At one of the last great tournaments, in 1559, Henry II of France was mortally wounded by a lance blow.
Peasant women participated freely in the ball games and footraces of medieval times, and aristocratic ladies hunted and kept falcons, but middle-class women contented themselves with spectatorship. Even so, they were more active than their contemporaries in Heian Japan during the 8th to the 12th century. Encumbered by many-layered robes and sequestered in their homes, the Japanese ladies were unable to do more than peep from behind their screens at the courtiers' mounted archery contests.

Sports in the Renaissance and modern period
The changing nature of sports
By the time of the Renaissance, sports had become entirely secular, but in the minds of the Czech educator John Amos Comenius and other humanists, a concern for physical education on what were thought to be classic models overshadowed the competitive aspects of sports. Indeed, 15th- and 16th-century elites perferred dances to sports and delighted in geometric patterns of movement. The ballet developed in France during this period. Horses were trained to graceful movement rather than bred for speed. French and Italian fencers like the famed Girard Thibault, whose L'Accademie de l'espee appeared in 1628, thought of their activity more as an art form than as a combat. Northern Europeans emulated them. Humanistically inclined Englishmen and Germans admired the cultivated Florentine game of calcio (“kick”), a form of football that stressed the good looks and elegant attire of the players.
The development of sports into the forms of the present day began in late 17th-century England when the emphasis gradually shifted from measure, in the sense of balance or proportion, to measurement. During the Restoration and throughout the 18th century, traditional pastimes like stick fighting and bullbaiting, which the Puritans had condemned and driven underground, gave way to organized games, like cricket, which developed under the leadership of the Marylebone Cricket Club (founded 1787). Behind these changes lay a new conception of rationalized competition. Contests that seem odd to the modern mind, like those in which cripples were matched against children, were replaced by horse races in which fleeter steeds were handicapped, a notion of equality that led eventually to age and weight classes (but not height classes) in many modern sports. The traditional sport of boxing flourished throughout the 18th century, guided and regulated by boxer-entrepreneurs like James Figg and his pupil Jack Broughton, and, eventually, by the Marquess of Queensberry, whose 1867 rules replaced Broughton's 1743 attempt to civilize the sport.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, sports became increasingly specialized, and national organizations developed to standardize rules and regulations, to organize sporadic challenge matches into systematic league competition, to certify eligibility, and to register results. England's Football Association was formed in 1863 to propagate that sport (called soccer in the United States), which had developed out of medieval folk football (as, eventually, did rugby and American football). The Amateur Athletic Association followed in 1880. From England and then from the United States, modern sports spread throughout the globe. Sports that originally began elsewhere, such as tennis (which derives from Renaissance France), were modernized and exported as if they too were raw materials imported for British industry to transform and then ship out as finished goods. By the early 20th century, organizations like the International Olympic Committee (founded 1894), the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (1904), and the International Amateur Athletic Federation (1912) had begun to seem inevitable.
During the age of imperialism, when Europeans and Americans dominated much of Asia and most of Africa, the colonial powers suppressed traditional sports and introduced their own modern ones. Japan, one of the few non-Western nations where a traditional sport (sumo) rivals a modern one (baseball) in popularity, is also one of the few non-Western nations to contribute a sport (judo) to the modern Olympic Games.
Behind the dramatic transition to modern sports lay the scientific developments that sustained the Industrial Revolution. Technicians sought to perfect equipment. Athletes trained systematically to achieve their physical maximum. New games, like basketball, volleyball, and team handball, were consciously invented to specification as if they were new products for the market. As early as the late 17th century, quantification became an important aspect of sports, and the cultural basis was created for the concept of sports record. The word “record,” in the sense of an unsurpassed quantified achievement, appeared, first in English and then in other languages, only in the late 19th century.

Development of modern sports
The sociological terms used to describe the development of modern sports, such as secularization, rationalization, specialization, bureaucratization, and quantification, all suggest that the formal and structural characteristics specific to 20th-century sports are the characteristics of modern society generally. Although Marxist scholars contend that this development is the result of industrial capitalism, non-Marxists, adapting the sociological theories of the German Max Weber, the Frenchman Émile Durkheim, and the American Talcott Parsons and others, have observed that modern sports antedate industrial capitalism and have flourished in societies such as the former Soviet Union that had never known a “bourgeois” phase.
Economic analysis demonstrates that the boom in sports participation and in sports spectatorship has depended on the increase of leisure time for the masses. Capitalistic entrepreneurship certainly played a role in the rationalization of sports into a marketable commodity. But the transformation of traditional pastimes into modern sports took place in the schools and universities as well as in business and industry. Modern baseball was formulated by a group of New York City players, but modern soccer was invented in the elite boys' schools of Victorian England, while rowing and track-and-field athletics took their modern forms in English and American colleges and universities. The 19th century's combination of Christian ethics and rationalized forms is best symbolized by the birth of basketball in 1891 at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., a stronghold of “muscular Christianity.”
While England may be considered the homeland of modern sports, modern physical education can be traced back to German and Scandinavian developments of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Men like Johann Christoph Friedrich Guts Muths in Germany and Per Henrik Ling in Sweden elaborated systems of exercise that were eventually adopted by British, American, and other schools. These noncompetitive alternatives to modern sports, which also flourished in the form of central European gymnastic displays, did not develop great popularity with schoolchildren or college students. Almost universal in the late 19th century, such gymnastic systems have by and large been replaced by competitive sports—with or without the notion that sports can be a vehicle of ethical instruction. Gymnastic displays can still be witnessed in the disciplined mass formations that accompany major sports competitions, particularly in the countries of eastern Europe. Modern-day individual gymnastics is itself an outgrowth of the earlier European gymnastics form.
While commercial motives encouraged promoters to stage sports events open to all who had the price of admission, class solidarity and exclusiveness led to the invention of the amateur rule, originally formulated in the 1870s to prevent the participation of all those who worked with their hands. The spread of egalitarian ideals and the avarice of individual athletes has had little to do with the demise of amateurism. Rather, barriers to overt professionalization eroded with the realization that the highest levels of physical achievement (and the richest harvest of national and international championships) require expenditures of time and money incompatible with a primary commitment to work or study. Once a university's prestige or a nation's image became dependent upon stellar athletic performances, it was no longer possible to limit the pool of talent to the leisure class. Now that the modern Olympic Games are open to men and women who may earn millions of dollars by their athletic prowess, it is quite improbable that what remains of the Victorian concept of amateur sports as an avocation can endure. The line between amateurism and professionalism has changed through time and will continue to be a point of controversy in sports as long as amateurism, however defined, is a requirement in world competitions.

Sociological, psychological, and physiological aspects
Sociological factors
Although the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called attention to play as an aspect of culture in Homo Ludens (1938), his predilection for pageantry and for play tinged with religious ritual forced sociologists to devise alternative paradigms for the relationship of play to other activities. That relationship can be expressed in the form of a diagram:

Play can be conceptualized as either spontaneous or regulated. Regulated play—i.e., games—can be contests, like poker, or noncompetitive activities, like leapfrog. Contests can be purely intellectual, like chess, or a combination of physical and intellectual aspects, like rugby.

Preliterate societies
Competition is such an integral part of Western civilization that some anthropologists and sociologists assume that all games must be contests and are led, therefore, to assert that many preliterate cultures lack games. This assertion is questionable, but many cultures, including some of the most complex, have sought to diminish competition and have favoured noncompetitive games. Such cultures, like those of the Indian subcontinent, have tended to lag behind in the adoption of modern Western forms of sport. There are reasons, however, to suspect that competitiveness may be a universal trait. In Bali, for instance, where Hinduism is the dominant religion, direct social conflict is avoided wherever possible, but the mediated contest of the traditional cockfight indirectly arrays family against family and village against village as the Balinese excitedly bet large sums on the cocks with which they passionately identify.
Most preliterate peoples have sports of one sort or another. As indicated above, these sports are frequently if not invariably associated with cult. The natives of the American Southwest played a stickball game in which the role of the shaman was as important as that of the stick wielders. African youths wrestled one another as part of their rites of passage into manhood. Greek myths like that of swift-footed Atalanta, who said she would marry anyone who could outrun her, testify that footraces as a form of courtship survived into archaic times. The tendency to separate sports from the rest of culture gains strength as the division of labour in society becomes more complex, but the association of sports with the rest of culture has never been lost. An athletic image is almost as useful to the modern politician as it was to Amenhotep II.

Political influence
Politics are in fact an integral aspect of modern sports despite the efforts of some idealists to separate the two. Political decisions determine which sports will be encouraged (traditional or modern), how much public support will be available to promote recreational and elite sports, if differences in gender, race, religion, or ideology will be the basis of discrimination in sports, whether or not athletes will be free to compete in this or that international competition. All of these decisions have prompted bitter controversies, some of which have raged for decades. In nations once colonized by the British, such as Barbados, enthusiasm for cricket is associated with the continued influence of a foreign culture. In the former Soviet Union, the Politburo had to decide how much money to allocate for national teams of athletes who enhanced the system's prestige and how much to devote to facilities that were used by the masses. Women and blacks struggled for decades to achieve integration into the white male preserve of American sports; Jews and Communists were suddenly expelled from German sports clubs in 1933 (on the initiative of the clubs, which anticipated the politics of the Nazi regime). The ostracism of racially segregated South Africa and the use of Olympic boycotts as a means of protest are prime examples of political decisions affecting participation in international sports events.

Mass-media influence
That hundreds of millions of people now play sports on a regular basis and equally large numbers watch the Olympic Games and soccer's World Cup on television has enormous economic consequences. Most of the world's governments now have ministries of sport that budget large sums to construct sports facilities and otherwise promote recreational sports for the masses. Such ministries cooperate closely with national sports federations to finance research into “sport science” and to field elite representative teams for international events. Where private enterprise is encouraged, entrepreneurs market equipment, operate commercial sports facilities, and sponsor tournaments. They and other companies purchase sports-related television advertisements that in the late 20th century cost into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute.
The development of modern sports has been entwined with the growth of modern mass media. Each depends upon the other. Sports pages and specialized sports journals began to appear in the early 19th century when men such as Pierce Egan in England began to write in the colourfully metaphoric, argot-rich prose now recognized everywhere as typical of sportswriters. Thousands of specialized magazines are published, and sports dailies such as L'Equipe (France) or the Gazzetta dello sport (Italy) are common in many countries but less so in the United States. In the early 20th century U.S. radio and German television pioneered in the development of live sports coverage. In the latter half of the century it became customary for private and public television networks to broadcast 500 or more hours of sports annually. Multiyear contracts for television rights have cost commercial networks as much as $1,000,000,000 or more. Rights to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul and Calgary, Alta., were sold for more than $600,000,000. The popularity of televised sports events guarantees that the networks will continue to budget enormous sums for the rights to cover them and that commercial sponsors or governmental agencies will continue to underwrite these costs.

Psychological and physiological factors
Motivational factors
The psychological aspects of sports are more difficult to assess because factors such as motivation are more difficult to measure than the size of an audience or the amount of a contract. The psychological tests that have been administered have produced such a welter of contradictory results that many specialists are ready to abandon the attempt to pinpoint motives. Some generalizations, however, seem tenable. On the whole, physical fitness and the desire for simple relaxation seem to motivate those who shun competitive sports in favour of noncompetitive physical activities such as jogging, hiking, recreational swimming, and aerobics (although the development of aerobics contests testifies to the protean nature of the competitive urge). Important to those who choose sports is the challenge of the contest, the opportunity to test one's physical and mental skills against another person, against nature, or against the abstraction of the sports record. The choice of one sport over another depends on the cultural availability of the sport (few Laotians play baseball), on social group (few truck drivers own polo ponies), on gender (women are not supposed to box), and on individual temperament (some people cannot enjoy golf). There is reason to believe that the distinction between team sports, which emphasize cooperation within the contest, and individual sports, which call for a greater sense of autonomy, is a fundamental one, although an individual may enjoy both.

Mental preparation
The will to win is a powerful motive, and individual athletes as well as coaches and administrators have studied such matters as the most efficient type of leadership and the optimal level of pregame stress. Psychologists differ among themselves, but some contend that democratic leadership produces greater individual satisfaction while authoritarian leadership provides “results” (i.e., a higher level of achievement and, consequently, more victories). Many psychological studies have shown that female athletes tend to attribute failure to their lack of effort or skill while male athletes point to external factors such as luck or the strength of the opposition. It has also been established that the ideal level of pregame stress falls between utter relaxation and hypertension and depends in part on the sport; successful archery, for instance, calls for less pre-match aggressiveness than rugby does. Athletes in many sports such as golf, tennis, diving, high jumping, and pole vaulting, where form and timing are crucial, often resort to a different method of pregame “psyching” called imaging or visualizing. This does not so much build aggressiveness as write a visual mental script to be followed in the contest to come.
Induced aggressiveness is, of course, a common technique, but “psyched-up” players can be a menace to themselves and others. Injuries are but one consequence. As the desire to win increases in intensity, especially when the players symbolically represent schools, cities, nations, races, religions, or ideologies, considerations of fair play are liable to be lost in the scuffle. In such situations aggressiveness on the field is often accompanied by violence in the stands, where crowd psychology operates (often in conjunction with alcohol) to reduce normal inhibitions on rowdy behaviour.

Crowd behaviour
Sports-related spectator violence is, however, often more strongly associated with social group than with the specific nature of the sport itself. Roman gladiatorial combats were, for example, history's most violent sport, but the closely supervised spectators, carefully segregated by social class and gender, rarely rioted. In modern times, association football is certainly less violent than rugby, but “soccer hooliganism” is a worldwide phenomenon, while spectator violence associated with the more upper-class but rougher sport of rugby has been minimal. Similarly, crowds at baseball games have been more unruly than the generally more affluent and better-educated fans of American football, although football is unquestionably the rougher sport. Efforts of the police to curb sports-related violence are often counterproductive because the young working-class males responsible for most of the trouble are frequently hostile to the authorities. Media coverage of disturbances can also act to exaggerate their importance and to stimulate the crowd behaviour simultaneously condemned and sensationalized, as is violence on the field. The frequent fights between National Hockey League players seem to be a consistent feature of sports highlights on television.

Drug usage
Drug abuse must be considered among the other unfortunate aspects of modern sports. The misuse of amphetamines, anabolic steroids, and other drugs has become a central problem of modern sports. One of the touted values of sports is that they better one's health. Pursued in moderation, they certainly do improve muscle tone, increase cardiovascular efficiency, and retard skeletal decalcification. When sports become an obsession, however, they tend ironically to have the opposite effect. The human body is thought of not as a part of the self but as the self's instrument, something to be used and abused. In pursuit of the absolute maximum achievement, 19th-century cyclists began to drug themselves with caffeine and strychnine; some died from the effects of the drugs. Modern chemistry has greatly enlarged the possibilities of artificial stimulation. In the late 20th century came widespread use of amphetamines and anabolic steroids. The former permit athletes to draw upon their physical reserves and continue despite the extremes of exhaustion until they collapse and, occasionally, die. Steroids are thought to increase muscle mass and muscular strength, but the side effects include damage to various organs and, in the case of women, masculinization (e.g., facial hair, deeper voices). Efforts of the International Olympic Committee to limit drug abuse have often been frustrated by national Olympic committees determined upon sports victories at any cost. Efforts to control drug abuse in professional sports and in intercollegiate athletics have frequently been countered by the athletes' concerns regarding personal privacy. Nevertheless, in the United States, codes of varying strictness have been imposed in different sports, part of which includes the requirement of periodic testing for drug use. Olympic athletes now undergo testing prior to participation.

Scientific training
Quite apart from drug abuse, publicly deplored even by some of the abusers, there is the trend to scientific training, which is practiced by most modern countries, and which Germany has developed to a high degree of expertise. While no one questions the instrumental efficiency of such training, there is reason to ask, as have neo-Marxist scholars, whether sports—once conceived as an alternative to work—have not become work's mirror image. The pervasive popularity of modern sports, for children as well as for adults, suggests that the answer must still be negative. Sports continue to be perceived as a domain of freedom unlike what most people experience at work. Almost everyone has experienced the joy of sports. Nevertheless, reflective observers will continue to ponder the pros and cons of the modern drive to instrumentalize the body and to rationalize sports in a quest for the ultimate possible athletic performance.

Allen Guttmann
Additional Reading
General works
Robert J. Higgs, Sports: A Reference Guide (1982), offers analyses of scholarly and popular literature on sports. An overview of sports literature is presented in Sport Bibliography, 11 vol. (1981–83), prepared by the Sport Information Resource Centre and continued by annual supplements. John Arlott (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World Sports and Games (1975); and Frank G. Menke, The Encyclopedia of Sports, 6th rev. ed., revised by Pete Palmer (1977), provide brief historical descriptions of many sports and games. For information on equipment, dress, facilities, and differences in rules, see the Official Rules of Sports & Games (biennial).
History
See Richard D. Mandell, Sport, a Cultural History (1984); Wolfgang Decker, Sport und Spiel im Alten Ägypten (1987); Ingomar Weiler, Der Sport bei den Völkern der Alten Welt (1981); and Jacques Ulmann, De la gymnastique aux sports modernes: histoire des doctrines de l'éducation physique, 3rd rev. ed. (1977). Competitive sports are surveyed historically in William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (1982). Sports history in individual countries is discussed in: (Italy): William Heywood, Palio and Ponte: An Account of the Sports of Central Italy from the Age of Dante to the XXth Century (1904, reprinted 1969); (France): Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (1981); (Britain): Dennis Brailsford, Sport and Society: Elizabeth to Anne (1969); J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (1981, reissued 1986); and John Hargreaves, Sport, Power, and Culture: Social and Historical Analysis of Popular Sports in Britain (1986); (Socialist countries): James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR (1977); and James Riordan (ed.), Sport Under Communism: The U.S.S.R., Czechoslovakia, the G.D.R., China, Cuba, 2nd rev. ed. (1981); (Canada): Alan Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807–1914 (1987); (United States): Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (1983); and Allen Guttmann, A Whole New Ball Game: An Interpretation of American Sports (1988).

soccer

Introduction
also called association football or soccer game in which two teams of 11 players, using any part of their bodies except their hands and arms, try to maneuver the ball into the opposing team's goal. Only the goalkeeper is permitted to handle the ball and may do so only within the penalty area surrounding the goal. The team that scores more goals wins.
Football is the world's most popular ball game in numbers of participants and spectators. Simple in its principal rules and essential equipment, the sport can be played almost anywhere, from official football playing fields (pitches) to gymnasiums, streets, school playgrounds, parks, or beaches. Football's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), estimated that at the turn of the 21st century there were approximately 250 million football players and over 1.3 billion people “interested” in football; in 2002 a combined television audience of more than 28 billion watched football's premier tournament, the quadrennial month-long World Cup finals.

History
The early years
Modern football originated in Britain in the 19th century. Since before medieval times, “folk football” games had been played in towns and villages according to local customs and with a minimum of rules. Industrialization and urbanization, which reduced the amount of leisure time and space available to the working class, combined with a history of legal prohibitions against particularly violent and destructive forms of folk football to undermine the game's status from the early 19th century onward. However, football was taken up as a winter game between residence houses at public (independent) schools such as Winchester, Charterhouse, and Eton. Each school had its own rules; some allowed limited handling of the ball and others did not. The variance in rules made it difficult for public schoolboys entering university to continue playing except with former schoolmates. As early as 1843 an attempt to standardize and codify the rules of play was made at the University of Cambridge, whose students joined most public schools in 1848 in adopting these “Cambridge rules,” which were further spread by Cambridge graduates who formed football clubs. In 1863 a series of meetings involving clubs from metropolitan London and surrounding counties produced the printed rules of football, which prohibited the carrying of the ball. Thus the “handling” game of rugby remained outside the newly formed Football Association (FA). Indeed, by 1870, all handling of the ball except by the goalkeeper was prohibited by the FA.
The new rules were not universally accepted in Britain, however; many clubs retained their own rules, especially in and around Sheffield. Although this northern English city was the home of the first provincial club to join the FA, in 1867 it also gave birth to the Sheffield Football Association, the forerunner of later county associations. Sheffield and London clubs played two matches against each other in 1866, and a year later a match pitting a club from Middlesex against one from Kent and Surrey was played under the revised rules. In 1871 15 FA clubs accepted an invitation to enter a cup competition and to contribute to the purchase of a trophy. By 1877, the associations of Great Britain had agreed upon a uniform code, 43 clubs were in competition, and the London clubs' initial dominance had diminished.

Professionalism
The development of modern football was closely tied to processes of industrialization and urbanization in Victorian Britain. Most of the new, working-class inhabitants of Britain's industrial towns and cities gradually lost their old bucolic pastimes, such as badger-baiting, and sought fresh forms of collective leisure. From the 1850s onwards, industrial workers were increasingly likely to have Saturday afternoons off work, and so many turned to the new game of football to watch or to play. Key urban institutions such as churches, trade unions, and schools organized working-class boys and men into recreational football teams. Rising adult literacy spurred press coverage of organized sports, while transport systems such as the railways or urban trams enabled players and spectators to travel to football games. Average attendance in England rose from 4,600 in 1888 to 7,900 in 1895, rising to 13,200 in 1905 and reaching 23,100 at the outbreak of World War I. Football's popularity eroded public interest in other sports, notably cricket.
Leading clubs, notably those in Lancashire, started charging admission to spectators as early as the 1870s and so, despite the FA's amateurism rule, were in a position to pay illicit wages to attract highly skilled working-class players, many of them hailing from Scotland. Working-class players and northern English clubs sought a professional system that would provide, in part, some financial reward to cover their “broken time” (time lost from their other work) and the risk of injury. The FA remained staunchly elitist in sustaining a policy of amateurism that protected upper and upper-middle class influence over the game.
The issue of professionalism reached a crisis in England in 1884, when the FA had expelled two clubs for using professional players. However, the payment of players had become so commonplace by then that the FA had little option but to sanction the practice a year later, despite initial attempts to restrict professionalism to reimbursements for broken time. The consequence was that northern clubs, with their large supporter bases and capacity to attract better players, came to prominence, and as the influence of working-class players rose in football so the upper classes took refuge in other sports, notably cricket and rugby union. Professionalism also sparked further modernization of the game through the establishment of the Football League, which allowed the leading dozen teams from the North and Midlands to compete systematically against each other from 1888 onwards. A lower, second division was introduced in 1893, and the total number of teams increased to 28. The Irish and Scots formed leagues in 1890. The Southern League began in 1894 but was absorbed by the Football League in 1920. Yet football did not become a major profit-making business during this period. Professional clubs became limited liability companies primarily to secure land for gradual development of stadium facilities. Most clubs in England were owned and controlled by businessmen but shareholders received very low, if any, dividends; their main reward was an enhanced public status through running the local club.
Later national leagues overseas followed the British model, which included league championships, at least one annual cup competition, and a hierarchy of leagues that sent clubs finishing highest in the tables (standings) up to the next higher division (promotion) and clubs at the bottom down to the next lower division (relegation). A league was formed in The Netherlands in 1889, but professionalism arrived only in 1954. Germany completed its first national championship season in 1903, but the Bundesliga, a comprehensive and fully professional national league, did not evolve until 60 years later. In France, where the game was introduced in the 1870s, a professional league did not begin until 1932, shortly after professionalism had been adopted in the South American countries of Argentina and Brazil.

International organization
By the early 20th century, football had spread across Europe, but it was in need of international organization. A solution was found in 1904, when representatives from the football associations of Belgium, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).
Although Englishman Daniel Woolfall was elected FIFA president in 1906 and all of the home nations (England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales) were admitted as members by 1911, British football associations were disdainful of the new body. FIFA members accepted British control over the rules of football via the International Board, which had been established by the home nations in 1882. Nevertheless, in 1920 the British associations resigned their FIFA memberships after failing to persuade other members that Germany, Austria, and Hungary should be expelled following World War I. The British associations rejoined FIFA in 1924 but soon after insisted upon a very rigid definition of amateurism, notably for Olympic football. Other nations again failed to follow their lead, and the British resigned once more in 1928, remaining outside FIFA until 1946. When FIFA established the World Cup championship, British insouciance toward the international game continued. Without membership in FIFA, the British national teams were not invited to the first three competitions (1930, 1934, and 1938). For the next competition, held in 1950, FIFA ruled that the two best finishers in the British home nations tournament would qualify for World Cup play; England won, but Scotland (which finished second) chose not to compete for the World Cup.
Despite sometimes fractious international relations, football continued to rise in popularity. It made its official Olympic debut at the London Games in 1908, and it has since been played in each of the Summer Games (except for the 1932 Games in Los Angeles). FIFA also grew steadily—especially in the latter half of the 20th century, when it strengthened its standing as the game's global authority and regulator of competition. Guinea became FIFA's 100th member in 1961; at the turn of the 21st century, more than 200 nations were registered FIFA members, which is more than the number of countries that belong to the United Nations.
The World Cup finals remain football's premier tournament, but other important tournaments have emerged under FIFA guidance. Two different tournaments for young players began in 1977 and 1985, and these became, respectively, the World Youth Championship (for those 20 years old and younger) and the Under-17 World Championship. Futsal, the world indoor, five-a-side championship, started in 1989, and two years later the first women's World Cup was played in China. In 1992 FIFA opened the Olympic football tournament to players aged under 23 years, and four years later the first women's Olympic football tournament was held. The World Club Championship debuted in Brazil in 2000. The Under-19 Women's World Championship was inaugurated in 2002.
FIFA membership is open to all national associations. They must accept FIFA's authority, observe the laws of football, and possess a suitable football infrastructure (i.e., facilities and internal organization). FIFA statutes require members to form continental confederations. The first of these, the Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (commonly known as CONMEBOL), was founded in South America in 1916. In 1954 the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) were established. Africa's governing body, the Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF), was founded in 1957. The Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF) followed four years later. The Oceania Football Confederation (OFC) appeared in 1966. These confederations may organize their own club, international, and youth tournaments, elect representatives to FIFA's Executive Committee, and promote football in their specific continents as they see fit. In turn, all football players, agents, leagues, national associations, and confederations must recognize the authority of FIFA's Arbitration Tribunal for Football, which effectively functions as football's supreme court in serious disputes.
Until the early 1970s, control of FIFA (and thus of world football) was firmly in the hands of northern Europeans. Under the presidencies of the Englishmen Arthur Drewry (1955–61) and Stanley Rous (1961–74), FIFA adopted a rather conservative, patrician relationship to the national and continental bodies. It survived on modest income from the World Cup finals, and relatively little was done to promote football in developing countries or to explore the game's business potential within the West's postwar economic boom. FIFA's leadership was more concerned with matters of regulation, such as confirming amateur status for Olympic competition or banning those associated with illegal transfers of players with existing contracts. For example, Colombia (1951–54) and Australia (1960–63) were suspended temporarily from FIFA after permitting clubs to recruit players who had broken contracts elsewhere in the world.)
Growing African and Asian membership within FIFA undermined European control. In 1974, Brazilian João Havelange was elected president, gaining large support from developing nations. Under Havelange, FIFA was transformed from an international gentlemen's club into a global corporation: billion-dollar television deals and partnerships with major transnational corporations were established during the 1980s and '90s. While some earnings were reinvested through FIFA development projects—primarily in Asia, Africa, and Central America—the biggest political reward for developing countries has been the expansion of the World Cup finals to include more countries from outside Europe and South America.
Greater professionalization of sports also forced FIFA to intercede in new areas as a governing body and competition regulator. The use of performance-enhancing drugs by teams and individual players had been suspected since at least the 1930s; FIFA introduced drug tests in 1966, and occasionally drug users were uncovered, such as Willie Johnston of Scotland at the 1978 World Cup finals. But FIFA regulations were tightened in the 1980s after the sharp rise in offenses among Olympic athletes, the appearance of new drugs such as the steroid nandrolone, and the use of drugs by stars such as Argentina's Diego Maradona in 1994. While FIFA has authorized lengthy worldwide bans of players who fail drug tests, discrepancies remain between nations and confederations over the intensity of testing and the legal status of specific drugs.
As the sport moved into the 21st century, FIFA came under pressure to respond to some of the major consequences of globalization for international football. Since the election of Switzerland's Sepp Blatter as president in 1998, the political bargaining and wrangling among world football's officials have gained greater media and public attention. Direct conflicts of interest among football's various groups have also arisen: players, agents, television networks, competition sponsors, clubs, national bodies, continental associations, and FIFA all have divergent views regarding the staging of football tournaments and the distribution of football's income. Regulation of player representatives and transfers is also problematic. In UEFA countries, players move freely when not under contract. On other continents, notably Africa and Central and South America, players tend to be tied into long-term contracts with clubs that can control their entire careers. FIFA now requires all agents to be licensed and to pass written examinations held by national associations, but there is little global consistency regarding the control of agent powers. In Europe, agents have played a key role in promoting wage inflation and higher player mobility. In Latin America, players are often partially “owned” by agents who may decide on whether transfers proceed. In parts of Africa, some European agents have been compared to slave traders in the way that they exercise authoritarian control over players and profit hugely from transfer fees to Western leagues with little thought for their clients' well-being. In this way, the ever-widening inequalities between developed and developing nations are reflected in the uneven growth and variable regulations of world football.

Football around the world
Regional traditions
Europe
England and Scotland had the first leagues, but clubs sprang up in most European nations in the 1890s and 1900s, enabling these nations to found their own leagues. Many Scottish professional players migrated south to join English clubs, introducing English players and audiences to more-advanced ball-playing skills and to the benefits of teamwork and passing. Up to World War II, the British continued to influence football's development through regular club tours overseas and the Continental coaching careers of former players. Itinerant Scots were particularly prominent in central Europe. The interwar Danubian school of football emerged from the coaching legacies and expertise of John Madden in Prague and Jimmy Hogan in Austria.
Before World War II, Italian, Austrian, Swiss, and Hungarian teams emerged as particularly strong challengers to the British. During the 1930s, Italian clubs and the Italian national team recruited high-calibre players from South America (mainly Argentina and Uruguay), often claiming that these rimpatriati were essentially Italian in nationality; the great Argentinians Raimondo Orsi and Enrique Guaita were particularly useful acquisitions. But only after World War II was the preeminence of the home nations (notably England) unquestionably usurped by overseas teams. In 1950 England lost to the United States at the World Cup finals in Brazil. Most devastating were later, crushing losses to Hungary: 6–3 in 1953 at London's Wembley Stadium, then 7–1 in Budapest a year later. The “Magnificent Magyars” opened English eyes to the dynamic attacking and tactically advanced football played on the Continent and to the technical superiority of players such as Ferenc Puskás, József Bozsik, and Nándor Hidegkuti. During the 1950s and '60s, Italian and Spanish clubs were the most active in the recruitment of top foreign players. For example, the Welshman John Charles, known as “the Gentle Giant,” remains a hero for supporters of the Juventus club of Turin, Italy, while the later success of Real Madrid was built largely on the play of Argentinian Alfredo Di Stefano and the Hungarian Puskás.
European football has also reflected the wider political, economic, and cultural changes of modern times. Heightened nationalism and xenophobia have pervaded matches, often as a harbinger of future hostilities. During the 1930s, international matches in Europe were often seen as national tests of physical and military capability. In contrast, football's early post-World War II boom witnessed massive, well-behaved crowds that coincided with Europe's shift from warfare to rebuilding projects and greater internationalism. More recently, racism became a more prominent feature of football, particularly during the 1970s and early 1980s: many coaches projected negative stereotypes onto black players; supporters routinely abused non-whites on and off the fields of play; and football authorities failed to counteract racist incidents at games. In general terms, racism at football reflected wider social problems across western Europe. In postcommunist eastern Europe, economic decline and rising nationalist sentiments have marked football culture too. The tensions that exploded in Yugoslavia's civil war were foreshadowed during a match in May 1990 between the Serbian side Red Star Belgrade and the Croatian team Dynamo Zagreb when violence involving rival supporters and Serbian riot police spread to the pitch to include players and coaches.
Club football reflects the distinctive political and cultural complexities of European regions. In Britain, partisan football has been traditionally associated with the industrial working class, notably in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, and Newcastle. In Spain, clubs such as Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao are symbols of strong nationalist identity for Catalans and Basques, respectively. In France, many clubs have facilities that are open to the local community and reflect the nation's corporatist politics in being jointly owned and administered by private investors and local governments. In Italy, clubs such as Fiorentina, Internazionale, Napoli, and AS Roma embody deep senses of civic and regional pride that predate Italian unification in the 19th century.
The dominant forces in European national football have been Germany, Italy, and, latterly, France; their national teams have won a total of seven World Cups and six European Championships. Success in club football has been built largely on recruitment of the world's leading players, notably by Italian and Spanish sides. The European Cup competition for national league champions, first played in 1955, was initially dominated by Real Madrid; other regular winners have been AC Milan, Bayern Munich (Germany), Ajax of Amsterdam, and Liverpool (England). The UEFA Cup, first contested as the Fairs Cup in 1955–58, has had a wider pool of entrants and winners.
Since the late 1980s, topflight European football has generated increasing financial revenues from higher ticket prices, merchandise sales, sponsorship, advertising, and, in particular, television contracts. The top professionals and largest clubs have been the principal beneficiaries. UEFA has reinvented the European Cup as the Champions League, allowing the wealthiest clubs freer entry and more matches. In the early 1990s, Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman sued the Belgian Football Association, challenging European football's traditional rule that all transfers of players (including those without contracts) necessitate an agreement between the clubs in question, usually involving a transfer fee. Bosman had been prevented from joining a new club (US Dunkerque) by his old club (RC Liège). In 1995 the European courts upheld Bosman's complaint, and at a stroke freed uncontracted European players to move between clubs without transfer fees. The bargaining power of players was strengthened greatly, enabling top stars to multiply their earnings with large salaries and signing bonuses. Warnings of the end of European football's financial boom came when FIFA's marketing agent, ISL, went bust in 2001; such major media investors in football as the Kirch Gruppe in Germany and ITV Digital in the United Kingdom collapsed a year later. Inevitably, the financial boom had exacerbated inequalities within the game, widening the gap between the top players, the largest clubs, and the wealthiest spectators and their counterparts in lower leagues and the developing world.

North and Central America and the Caribbean
Football was brought to North America in the 1860s, and by the mid-1880s informal matches had been contested by Canadian and American teams. It soon faced competition from other sports, including variant forms of football. In Canada, Scottish émigrés were particularly prominent in the game's early development; however, Canadians subsequently turned to ice hockey as their national sport.
In the United States, gridiron football emerged early in the 20th century as the most popular sport. But, beyond elite universities and schools, soccer (as the sport is popularly called in the United States) was played widely in some cities with large immigrant populations such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland (Ohio), and St. Louis (Missouri), as well as New York City and Los Angeles after Hispanic migrations. The U.S. Soccer Federation formed in 1913, affiliated with FIFA, and sponsored competitions. Between the world wars, the United States attracted scores of European emigrants who played football for local teams sometimes sponsored by companies.
Football in Central America struggled to gain a significant foothold in competition against baseball. In Costa Rica, the football federation founded the national league championship in 1921, but subsequent development in the region was slower, with belated FIFA membership for countries such as El Salvador (1938), Nicaragua (1950), and Honduras (1951). In the Caribbean, football traditionally paled in popularity to cricket in former British colonies. In Jamaica, football was highly popular in urban townships, but it did not capture the imagination of the country until 1998, when the national team—featuring several players who had gained success in Britain and were dubbed the “Reggae Boyz”—qualified for the World Cup finals.
North American leagues and tournaments saw an infusion of professional players in 1967, beginning with the wholesale importation of foreign teams to represent American cities. The North American Soccer League (NASL) formed a year later and struggled until the New York Cosmos signed the Brazilian superstar Pelé in 1975. Other aging international stars soon followed, and crowds grew to European proportions, but a regular fan base remained elusive, and NASL folded in 1985. An indoor football tournament, founded in 1978, evolved into a league and flourished for a while but collapsed in 1992.
In North America, football did establish itself as the relatively less-violent alternative to gridiron football and as a more socially inclusive sport for women. It is particularly popular among college and high school students across the United States. After hosting an entertaining World Cup finals in 1994, the United States possessed some 16 million football players nationwide, up to 40 percent of whom were female. In 1996 a new attempt at establishing a professional outdoor league was made. Major League Soccer (MLS) was more modest in ambition than NASL, being played in only 10 U.S. cities, with greater emphasis on local players and a relatively tight salary cap. The United States hosted and won the Women's World Cup finals in 1999, attracting enthusiastic local support. The success of the MLS and the Women's World Cup led to the creation of a women's professional league in 2001. The Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) began with eight teams and featured the world's star player, Mia Hamm, but it disbanded in 2003.
North American national associations are members of the continental body, CONCACAF, and Mexico is the traditional regional powerhouse. Mexico has won the CONCACAF Gold Cup four times since it was first contested in 1991, and Mexican clubs have dominated the CONCACAF Champions Cup for clubs since it began in 1962. British influence in mining and railroads encouraged the founding of football clubs in Mexico in the late 19th century. A national league was established in 1903. Mexico is exceptional in that its mass preference for football runs counter to the sporting tastes of its North American neighbours. The national league system is the most commercially successful in the region and attracts players from all over the Western Hemisphere. Despite high summer humidity and stadiums at high elevations, Mexico has hosted two of the most memorable World Cup finals, in 1970 and 1986, from which Brazil and Argentina (led by the game's then greatest players, Pelé and Maradona, respectively) emerged as the respective winners. While the national team has been ranked highly by FIFA, often figuring in the top ten, Mexico has not produced the world-class calibre of players expected of such a large football-crazed nation. Hugo Sanchez (at Real Madrid) has been the only Mexican player to reach the highest world level in modern times.

South America
Football first came to South America in the 19th century through the port of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where European sailors played the game. Members of the British community there formed the first club, the Buenos Aires Football Club (FC), in 1867; at about the same time, British railway workers started another club, in the town of Rosario, Argentina. The first Argentinian league championship was played in 1893, but most of the players belonged to the British community, a pattern that continued until the early 20th century.
Brazil is believed to be the second South American country where the game was established. Charles Miller, a leading player in England, came to Brazil in 1894 and introduced football in São Paulo; that city's athletic club was the first to take up the sport. In Colombia, British engineers and workers building a railroad near Barranquilla first played football in 1903, and the Barranquilla FBC was founded in 1909. In Uruguay, British railway workers were the first to play, and in 1891 they founded the Central Uruguay Railway Cricket Club (now the famous Peñarol), which played both cricket and football. In Chile, British sailors initiated play in Valparaíso, establishing the Valparaíso FC in 1889. In Paraguay, Dutchman William Paats introduced the game at a school where he taught physical education, but the country's first (and still leading) club, Olimpia, was formed by a local man who became enthusiastic after seeing the game in Buenos Aires in 1902. In Bolivia the first footballers were a Chilean and students who had studied in Europe, and in Peru they were expatriate Britons. In Venezuela, British miners are known to have played football in the 1880s.
Soon local people across South America began taking up and following the sport in ever greater numbers. Boys, mostly from poorer backgrounds, played from an early age, with passion, on vacant land and streets. Clubs and players gained popularity, and professionalism entered the sport in most countries around the 1930s—although many players had been paid secretly before then by their clubs. The exodus of South American players to European clubs that paid higher salaries began after the 1930 World Cup and has steadily increased.
By the late 1930s, football had become a crucial aspect of popular culture in many South American nations; ethnic and national identities were constructed and played out on an increasingly international stage. In South American nations, nonwhite players fought a successful struggle to play at the top level: in Rio de Janeiro, Vasco da Gama was the first club to recruit black players and promptly stormed to the league championship in 1923, encouraging other clubs to follow suit. In Uruguay, a nation of largely mixed European descent, local players learned both the physical style played by the English and the more refined passing game of the Scots, producing a versatility that helped their national team win two Olympic championships and the World Cup between 1924 and 1930.
In 1916, South American countries were the first to hold a regular continental championship—later known as the Copa America. In 1960 the South American club championship (Libertadores Cup) was started; it has been played annually by the continent's leading clubs (with the winner playing the European club champion), and, as a result of its popularity, various other international competitions have also been held between clubs. Domestic league championships are split into two or more tournaments each season with frequent variations in format.
Africa
European sailors, soldiers, traders, engineers, and missionaries brought football with them to Africa in the second half of the 19th century. The first documented match took place in Cape Town in 1862, after which the game spread rapidly throughout the continent, particularly in the British colonies and in societies with vibrant indigenous athletic traditions.
During the interwar period, African men in cities and towns, railroad workers, and students organized clubs, associations, and regional competitions. Teams from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia competed in the North African championship, established in 1919, and vied for the North African Cup, introduced in 1930. South of the Sahara, Kenya and Uganda first played for the Gossage Trophy in 1924, and the Darugar Cup was established on the island of Zanzibar. In the mining centre of Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi, Congo) a football league for Africans was begun in 1925. In South Africa the game was very popular by the early 1930s, though it was organized in racially segregated national associations for whites, Africans, Coloureds (persons of mixed race), and Indians. In the colonies of British West Africa, the Gold Coast (now Ghana) launched its first football association in 1922, with Nigeria's southern capital of Lagos following suit in 1931. Enterprising clubs and leagues developed across French West Africa in the 1930s, especially in Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire. Moroccan forward Larbi Ben Barek became the first African professional in Europe, playing for Olympique de Marseilles and the French national team in 1938.
After World War II, football in Africa experienced dramatic expansion. Modernizing colonial regimes provided new facilities and created attractive competitions, such as the French West Africa Cup in 1947. The migration of talented Africans to European clubs intensified. Together with his older compatriot Mario Coluña, Mozambican sensation Eusebio, European player of the year in 1965, starred for European champions Benfica of Lisbon and led Portugal to third place in the 1966 World Cup, where he was the tournament's leading scorer. Algerian stars Rachid Mekhloufi of Saint-Étienne and Mustafa Zitouni of AS Monaco represented France before joining the team of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1958. The FLN eleven, who lost only 4 of 58 matches during the period 1958–62, embodied the close relations between nationalist movements and football in Africa on the eve of decolonization.
With colonialism's hold on Africa slipping away, the Confédération Africaine de Football (CAF) was established in February 1957 in Khartoum, Sudan, with the first African Cup of Nations tournament also played at that time. Independent African states encouraged football as a means of forging a national identity and generating international recognition.
In the 1960s and early '70s, African football earned a reputation for a spectacular, attacking style of play. African and European coaches emphasized craft, creativity, and fitness within solid but flexible tactical schemes. Salif Keita (Mali), Laurent Pokou (Côte d'Ivoire), and François M'Pelé (Congo [Brazzaville]) personified the dynamic qualities of football in postcolonial Africa.
In the late 1970s, the migration of talented players overseas began hampering domestic leagues. The effects of this player exodus were somewhat tempered by the rise of “scientific football” and defensive, risk-averting tactics, an international trend that saw African players fall out of favour with European clubs. Even so, the integration of Africa and Africans into world football accelerated in the 1980s and '90s. Cameroon's national team, known as the Indomitable Lions, was a driving force in this process. After being eliminated without losing a match at the 1982 World Cup in Spain (tied with Italy in its group, Cameroon lost the tiebreaker on the basis of total goals scored), Cameroon reached the quarterfinals at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, thereby catapulting African football into the global spotlight. Nigeria then captured the Olympic gold medal in men's football at the Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., in 1996; in 2000 Cameroon won its first Olympic gold medal in men's football at the Games in Sydney, Australia. Success also came at youth level as Nigeria (1985) and Ghana (1991 and 1995) claimed under-17 world titles. Moreover, Liberian striker George Weah of Paris St. Germain received the prestigious FIFA World Player of the Year award in 1995.
In recognition of African football's success and influence, FIFA awarded Africa five places in the 32-team 1998 World Cup finals. This achievement bears witness to African football's phenomenal passion, growth, and development. This rich and complex history is made more remarkable by the continent's struggles to cope with a fragile environment, scarce material resources, political conflicts, and the unpleasant legacy of imperialism.

Asia and Oceania
Football quickly entered Asia and Oceania in the latter half of the 19th century, but, unlike in Europe, it failed to become a unifying national sport. In Australia, it could not dislodge the winter games of Australian rules football (codified before soccer) and rugby. British immigrants to Australia did relatively little to develop football locally. Because southern European immigrants were more committed to founding clubs and tournaments, football became defined as an “ethnic game.” As a result, teams from Melbourne and Sydney with distinctive Mediterranean connections were the most prominent members of the National Soccer League (NSL) when it started in 1977. The league has widened its scope, however, to include a highly successful Perth side, plus a Brisbane club and even one from Auckland, New Zealand. The NSL collapsed in 2004, but a new league, known as the A-League, emerged the next year.
In New Zealand, Scottish players established clubs and tournaments from the 1880s, but rugby became the national passion. In Asia, during the same germinal period, British traders, engineers, and teachers set up football clubs in such colonial outposts as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Burma. Yet football's major problem across Asia, until the 1980s, was its failure to establish substantial roots among indigenous peoples beyond college students returning from Europe. Football in India was particularly prominent in Calcutta (Kolkata) among British soldiers, but locals soon adopted cricket. In Japan, Yokohama and Kobe housed large numbers of football-playing foreigners, but local people retained preferences for the traditional sport of sumo wrestling and the imported game of baseball.
At the turn of the 21st century, football became increasingly important in Asian societies. In Iran, national team football matches became opportunities for many to express their reformist political views as well as for broad public celebration. The Iraqi men's team's fourth-place finish at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens struck a chord of hope for their war-torn homeland.
The Asian game is organized by the Asian Football Confederation, comprising 45 members in 2003 and stretching geographically from Lebanon in the Middle East to Guam in the western Pacific Ocean. The Asian Cup for national teams has been held quadrennially since 1956; Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Japan have dominated, with South Korea a regular runner-up. These countries have also produced the most frequent winners of the annual Asian Club Championship, first contested in 1967.
Asian economic growth during the 1980s and early 1990s and greater cultural ties to the West helped cultivate club football. Japan's J-League was launched in 1993, attracting strong public interest and a sprinkling of famous foreign players and coaches (notably from South America). Attendance and revenue declined from 1995, but the league survived and was reorganized into two divisions of 16 and 10 clubs, respectively, by 1999. The league grew to 30 teams by 2005.
Some memorable international moments have indicated the potential of football in Asia and Oceania. Asia's first notable success was North Korea's stunning defeat of Italy at the 1966 World Cup finals. In 1994 Saudi Arabia became the first Asian team to qualify for the World Cup's second round. The entertaining 2002 World Cup hosted by Japan and South Korea and the on-field success of the host nations' national teams (South Korea reached the semifinals; Japan reached the second round) stood as the region's brightest accomplishment in international football.
Football's future in Asia and Oceania depends largely upon regular competition with top international teams and players. Increased representation in the World Cup finals (since 1998, Asia has sent four teams, and, beginning in 2006, Oceania will have a single automatic berth) will help development of the sport in the region. Meanwhile, domestic club competitions across Asia and Oceania have been weakened by the need for top national players to join better clubs in Europe or South America to test and improve their talents at a markedly higher level.

Spectator problems
The spread of football throughout the globe has brought together people from diverse cultures in celebration of a shared passion for the game, but it has also spawned a worldwide epidemic of spectator hooliganism. High emotions that sometimes escalate into violence, both on and off the field, have always been a part of the game, but concern with fan violence and hooliganism has intensified since the 1960s. The early focus of this concern was British fans, but the development of the anti-hooligan architecture of football grounds around the world points to the international scope of the problem. Stadiums in Latin America are constructed with moats and high fences; many grounds in Europe now ban alcohol and no longer offer sections where fans can stand (these “terraces,” which charged lower admission than ticketed seating, were traditional flash points of fan violence).
Some of the first modern hooligan groups were found in Scotland, where religious sectarianism arose among the supporters of two Glasgow teams: Rangers, whose fans were predominantly Protestant Unionists, and Celtic, whose fans were drawn largely from the city's sizeable Irish-Catholic community. Between the world wars “razor gangs” fought street battles when these two clubs met. Since the late 1960s, however, English fan hooliganism has been even more notorious, especially when English supporters have followed their teams overseas. The nadir of fan violence came during the mid-1980s. At the European Cup final in 1985 between Liverpool and the Italian club Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, 39 fans (38 Italian, 1 Belgian) died and more than 400 were injured when, as Liverpool supporters charged opposing fans, a stadium wall collapsed under the pressure of those fleeing. In response, English clubs were banned from European competition until 1990, but by then hooliganism had become established in many other European countries. By the turn of the 21st century, self-identifying hooligans could be found among German, Dutch, Belgian, and Scottish supporters. Elsewhere, militant fans included the ultras in Italy and southern France, and the various hinchadas of Spain and Latin America, whose levels of violence varied from club to club. Argentina has experienced perhaps the worst consequences, with an estimated 148 deaths between 1939 and 2003 from violent incidents that often involved security forces.
The causes of football hooliganism are numerous and vary according to the political and cultural context. High levels of alcohol consumption can exaggerate supporter feelings and influence aggression, but this is neither the single nor the most important cause of hooliganism, given that many heavily intoxicated fans instead behave gregariously. In northern Europe, fan violence has acquired an increasingly subcultural dimension. At major tournaments, self-identifying hooligans sometimes can spend weeks pursuing their distinctive peers among opposing supporters to engage in violence; the most successful combatants earn status within the subcultural network of hooligan groups. Research in Britain suggests these groups do not hail from society's poorest members but usually from more-affluent working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds, depending upon regional characteristics. In southern Europe, notably in Italy, spectator violence can also reflect deep-seated cultural rivalries and tensions, especially between neighbouring cities or across the divide between north and south. In Latin America, fan violence has been understood in relation to the modern politics of dictatorship and repressive state methods of social control. Moreover, the upsurge in violence in Argentina beginning in the late 1990s has been explained according to the severe decline of the national economy and the political system.
In some circumstances, football hooliganism has forced politicians and the judiciary to intercede directly. In England, the Conservative government of the 1980s targeted football hooligans with legislation, and the subsequent Labour administration unveiled further measures to control spectator behaviour inside stadiums. In Argentina, football matches were briefly suspended by the courts in 1999 in a bid to halt the violence. Football authorities have also recognized fan violence as a major impediment to the game's economic and social health. In England, attempts at reducing hooliganism have included all-seated stadiums and the creation of family-only stands. These measures have helped attract new, wealthier spectators, but critics have argued that the new policies have also diminished the colour and atmosphere at football grounds. More liberal anti-hooligan strategies encourage dialogue with supporters: the “fan projects” run by clubs and local authorities in Germany, The Netherlands, and Sweden are the strongest illustrations of this approach.
Still, the major threats to spectator safety tend to involve not fighting among supporters but rather a mixture of factors such as disorderly crowd responses to play in the match, unsafe facilities, and poor crowd-control techniques. In the developing world, crowd stampedes have caused many disasters, such as the 126 deaths in Ghana in 2001. Police attempts to quell disorderly crowds can backfire and exacerbate the dangers, as was the case in Peru in 1964 when 318 died and in Zimbabwe in 2000 when 13 died. Disastrous crowd management strategies and facilities that some have characterized as inhumane were at the root of the tragedy in Hillsborough, England, in 1989, in which 96 were fatally injured when they were crushed inside the football ground.
It would be quite wrong, however, to portray the vast majority of football fans as inherently violent or xenophobic. Since the 1980s, organized supporter groups, along with football authorities and players, have waged both local and international campaigns against racism and (to a lesser extent) sexism within the game. Football supporters with the most positive, gregarious reputations—such as those following the Danish, Irish, and Brazilian national sides—tend to engage in self-policing within their own ranks, with few calls for outside assistance. As part of their Fair Play campaigns, international football bodies have introduced awards for the best-behaved supporters at major tournaments. In more challenging circumstances, English fan organizations such as the Football Supporters' Federation have sought to improve the behaviour of their compatriots at matches overseas by planning meetings with local police officials and introducing “fan embassies” for visiting supporters. Across Europe, international fan networks have grown up to combat the racism that has also been reflected in some hooliganism. More generally, since the mid-1980s, the production of fanzines (fan magazines) across Britain and some other parts of Europe have served to promote the view that football fans are passionate, critical, humorous, and (for the great majority) not at all violent.

Play of the game
The rules of football regarding equipment, field of play, conduct of participants, and settling of results are built around 17 laws. The International Football Association Board, consisting of delegates from FIFA and the four football associations from the United Kingdom, is empowered to amend the laws.

Equipment and field of play
The object of football is to maneuver the ball into the opposing team's goal, using any part of the body except the hands and arms. The side scoring more goals wins. The ball is round, covered with leather or some other suitable material, and inflated; it must be 27–27.5 inches (68–70 cm) in circumference and 14.5–16 ounces (410–450 grams) in weight. A game lasts 90 minutes and is divided into halves; the halftime interval lasts 15 minutes, during which the teams change ends. Additional time may be added by the referee to compensate for stoppages in play (for example, player injuries). If neither side wins, and if a victor must be established, “extra-time” is played, and then, if required, a series of penalty kicks (see below Fouls) may be taken.
The penalty area, a rectangular area in front of the goal, is 44 yards (40.2 metres) wide and extends 18 yards (16.5 metres) into the field. The goal is a frame, backed by a net, measuring 8 yards (7.3 metres) wide and 8 feet (2.4 metres) high. The playing field (pitch) should be 100–130 yards (90–120 metres) long and 50–100 yards (45–90 metres) wide; for international matches, it must be 110–120 yards long and 70–80 yards wide. Women, children, and mature players may play a shorter game on a smaller field. The game is controlled by a referee, who is also the timekeeper, and two assistants who patrol the touchlines, or sidelines, signaling when the ball goes out of play and when players are offside.
Players wear jerseys with numbers, shorts, and socks that designate the team for whom they are playing. Shoes and shin guards must be worn. The two teams must wear identifiably different uniforms, and goalkeepers must be distinguishable from all players and match officials.

Fouls
Free kicks are awarded for fouls or violations of rules; when a free kick is taken, all players of the offending side must be 10 yards (9 metres) from the ball. Free kicks may be either direct (from which a goal may be scored), for more serious fouls, or indirect (from which a goal cannot be scored), for lesser violations. Penalty kicks, introduced in 1891, are awarded for more serious fouls committed inside the area. The penalty kick is a direct free kick awarded to the attacking side and is taken from a spot 12 yards (11 metres) from goal, with all players other than the defending goalkeeper and the kicker outside the penalty area. Since 1970, players guilty of a serious foul are given a yellow caution card; a second caution earns a red card and ejection from the game. Players may also be sent off directly for particularly serious fouls, such as violent conduct.

Rules
There were few major alterations to football's laws through the 20th century. Indeed, until the changes of the 1990s, the most significant amendment to the rules came in 1925, when the offside rule was rewritten. Previously, an attacking player (i.e., one in the opponent's half of the playing field) was offside if, when the ball was “played” to him, fewer than three opposing players were between him and the goal. The rule change, which reduced the required number of intervening players to two, was effective in promoting more goals. In response, new defensive tactics and team formations emerged. Player substitutions were introduced in 1965; teams have been allowed to field three substitutes since 1995.
More recent rule changes have helped increase the tempo, attacking incidents, and amount of effective play in games. The pass-back rule now prohibits goalkeepers from handling the ball after it is kicked to them by a teammate. “Professional fouls,” which are deliberately committed to prevent opponents from scoring, are punished by red cards, as is tackling (taking the ball away from a player by kicking or stopping it with one's feet) from behind. Players are cautioned for “diving” (feigning being fouled) to win free kicks or penalties. Time wasting has been addressed by forcing goalkeepers to clear the ball from hand within six seconds and by having injured players removed by stretcher from the pitch. Finally, the offside rule was adjusted to allow attackers who are level with the penultimate defender to be onside.
Interpretation of football's rules is influenced heavily by cultural and tournament contexts. Lifting one's feet over waist level to play the ball is less likely to be penalized as dangerous play in Britain than in southern Europe. The British game can be similarly lenient in punishing the tackle from behind, in contrast to the trend in recent World Cup matches. FIFA insists that “the referee's decision is final,” and it is reluctant to break the flow of games to allow for video assessment on marginal decisions. However, the most significant future amendments or reinterpretations of football's rules may deploy more efficient technology to assist match officials. Post-match video evidence is used now by football's disciplinary committees, particularly to adjudicate violent play or to evaluate performances by match officials.

Strategy and tactics
Use of the feet and (to a lesser extent) the legs to control and pass the ball is football's most basic skill. Heading the ball is particularly prominent when receiving long, aerial passes. Since the game's origins, players have displayed their individual skills by going on “solo runs” or dribbling the ball past outwitted opponents. But football is essentially a team game based on passing between team members. The basic playing styles and skills of individual players reflect their respective playing positions. Goalkeepers require agility and height to reach and block the ball when opponents shoot at goal. Central defenders have to challenge the direct attacking play of opponents; called upon to win tackles and to head the ball away from danger such as when defending corner kicks, they are usually big and strong. Fullbacks are typically smaller but quicker, qualities required to match speedy wing-forwards. Midfield players (also called halfs or halfbacks) operate across the middle of the field and may have a range of qualities: powerful “ball-winners” need to be “good in the tackle” in terms of winning or protecting the ball and energetic runners; creative “playmakers” develop scoring chances through their talent at holding the ball and through accurate passing. Wingers tend to have good speed, some dribbling skills, and the ability to make crossing passes that travel across the front of goal and provide scoring opportunities for forwards. Forwards can be powerful in the air or small and penetrative with quick footwork; essentially, they should be adept at scoring goals from any angle.
Tactics reflect the importance of planning for matches. Tactics create a playing system that links a team's formation to a particular style of play (such as attacking or counterattacking, slow or quick tempo, short or long passing, teamwork or individualistic play). Team formations do not count the goalkeeper and enumerate the deployment of players by position, listing defenders first, then midfielders, and finally attackers (for example, 4-4-2 or 2-3-5). The earliest teams played in attack-oriented formations (such as 1-1-8 or 1-2-7) with strong emphasis on individual dribbling skills. In the late 19th century, the Scots introduced the passing game, and Preston North End created the more cautious 2-3-5 system. Although the English were associated with a cruder kick-and-rush style, teamwork and deliberate passing were evidently the more farsighted aspects of an effective playing system as playing skills and tactical acumen increased.
Positions of the players for the withdrawn centre forward attack.
Between the wars, Herbert Chapman, the astute manager of London's Arsenal club, created the WM formation, featuring five defenders and five attackers: three backs and two halves in defensive roles, and two inside forwards assisting the three attacking forwards. Chapman's system withdrew the midfield centre-half into defense in response to the 1925 offside rule change and often involved effective counterattacking, which exploited the creative genius of withdrawn forward Alex James as well as Cliff Bastin's goal-scoring prowess. Some teams outside Britain also withdrew their centre-half, but others (such as Italy at the 1934 World Cup, and many South American sides) retained the original 2-3-5 formation. By the outbreak of World War II, many clubs, countries, and regions had developed distinctive playing styles—such as the powerful combative play of the English, the technical short-passing skills of the Danubian School, and the criollo artistry and dribbling of Argentinians.

After the war, numerous tactical variations arose. Hungary introduced the deep-lying centre-forward to confuse opposing defenders, who could not decide whether to mark the player in midfield or let him roam freely behind the forwards. The complex Swiss verrou system, perfected by Karl Rappan, saw players switch positions and duties depending on the game's pattern. It was the first system to play four players in defense and to use one of them as a “security bolt” behind the other three. Counterattacking football was adopted by top Italian clubs, notably Internazionale of Milan. Subsequently, the catenaccio system developed by Helenio Herrera at Internazionale copied the verrou system, playing a libero (free man) in defense. The system was highly effective but made for highly tactical football centred on defense that was often tedious to watch.
Several factors contributed to the generation of more defensive, negative playing styles and team formations. With improved fitness training, players showed more speed and stamina, reducing the time and space for opponents to operate. The rules of football competitions (such as European club tournaments) often have encouraged visiting teams to play for draws, while teams playing at home are very wary of conceding goals. Local and national pressures not to lose matches have been intense, and many coaches discourage players from taking risks.
As football's playing systems became more rationalized, players were no longer expected to stay in set positions but to be more adaptable. The major victim was the wing-forward, the creator of attacking openings, whose defensive limitations were often exposed. Internationally, Brazil became the greatest symbol of individualistic, flowing football. Brazil borrowed the 4-2-4 formation founded in Uruguay to win the 1958 World Cup; the tournament was widely televised, thus helping Brazil's highly skilled players capture the world's imagination. For the 1962 tournament in Chile, Brazil triumphed again, withdrawing one winger into midfield to create 4-3-3. England's “Wingless Wonders” won the 1966 tournament with a more cautious variant of 4-3-3 that was really 4-4-2, employing no real wingers and a set of players more suited to work than creative passing or dribbling skills.
In the early 1970s, the Dutch “total football” system employed players with all-around skills to perform both defensive and attacking duties, but with more aesthetically pleasing consequences. Players such as Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens provided the perfect outlets for this highly fluent and intelligent playing system. Holland's leading club—Ajax of Amsterdam—helped direct total football into a 3-4-3 system; Ajax's long-term success was also built upon one of the world's leading scouting and coaching systems, creating a veritable conveyor belt of educated, versatile players. However, hustling playing styles built around the now classic 4-4-2 formation have been especially prominent in Europe, notably as a result of the successes of English clubs in European competition from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. The great Milan team of the late 1980s recruited the talented Dutch triumvirate of Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, and Marco Van Basten, but their national and European success was founded too upon a “pressing” system in which opponents were challenged relentlessly for every loose ball.
The move towards efficient playing systems such as 4-4-2 saw changes in defensive tactics. Zonal defending, based on controlling specific spaces, became more prominent. Conversely, the classic catenaccio system had enabled greater man-to-man marking of forwards by defenders, with the libero providing backup when required. Subsequently, some European clubs introduced 3-5-2 formations using wingbacks (a hybrid of fullback and attacking winger) on either side of the midfield. Players such as Roberto Carlos of Real Madrid and Brazil are outstanding exponents of this new role, but for most wingbacks their attacking potential is often lost in midfield congestion and compromised by their lack of dribbling skills.
After 1990, as media coverage of football increased in Europe and South America and as the game enjoyed a rise in popularity, playing systems underwent closer analysis. They are now often presented in strings of four: 1-3-4-2 features a libero, three defenders, four midfielders and two forwards; 4-4-1-1 calls for four defenders, four midfielders, and a split strike force with one forward playing behind the other. The different roles and playing spaces of midfield players have become more obvious: for example, the four-player midfield diamond shape has one player in an attacking role, two playing across the centre, and one playing a holding role in front of the defenders.
Differences in playing systems between Latin American and European teams have declined markedly. During the 1960s and '70s, Brazilian and Argentinian teams went through “modernizing” phases in which the European values of efficiency, physical strength, and professionalism were promoted in place of more traditional local styles that emphasized greater individualism and display of technical skills. South American national teams are now very likely to be composed entirely of players who perform for European clubs and to play familiar 3-5-2 or 4-4-2 systems.
For all these tactical developments, football's finest players and greatest icons remain the brilliant individualists: the gifted midfield playmakers, the dazzling wingers, or the second forwards linking the midfield to the principal attacker. Some leading postwar exponents have included Pelé and Rivaldo (Brazil), Diego Maradona (Argentina), Roberto Baggio and Francesco Totti (Italy), Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane (France), George Best (Northern Ireland), Stanley Matthews and Paul Gascoigne (England), Ryan Giggs (Wales), Luis Figo and Eusebio (Portugal), and Jim Baxter and Derek Johnstone (Scotland).