Football
Football
is the national sport of England,
and as such has an important place within English national life. The sport is
almost always referred to simply as football; it is unusual for it to be called
soccer and it is only referred to as "association football" in very 20320b13u
limited circumstances. Any unqualified reference to football in an English
context should be read as a reference to association football rather than to
any other member of the football family of sports. The only other members of
this family played to any great extent in England belong to the rugby football
sub-family, and are usually referred to as rugby. Kicking ball games are
described in England since at least 1280. England can boast the earliest ever
documented use of the English word "football" in 1409. The modern
global game of football was first codified in 1863 in London by the English
Football Association, the oldest football association in the world. The modern
passing game is believed to have been innovated in London in the early 1870s.
England is home to the oldest association football clubs in the world (dating
from at least 1857), the world's oldest competition (the FA Cup founded in
1871) and the first ever football league (1888). For these reasons England is
considered the home of the game of football.
Gary
Lineker is a former English international football striker who scored ten
goals in two World Cups for
the England
national team and is currently a sports
broadcaster for the BBC. It was his sense of positioning and tap-ins that made him
one of England's most prolific strikers of all-time, although this style of
play sometimes provoked accusations that he was a "goal hanger"
capitalising on the effort of others. He first played for the England
national team against Scotland
in 1984. He played five games in the 1986 World Cup,
and was top scorer of the tournament with six goals, winning the Golden Boot,
making him the first and to this day only English player to have done so.
Beyond
organised football
Football in England is not just a
spectator sport or the preserve of official leagues and clubs, but a sport
attracting mass participation at many different levels and in a wide variety of
forms, including Sunday league football and five-a-side football.
