If someone were to ask you what the most popular sport is, what would you say— basketball, football, or maybe baseball? Well, according to google, soccer is the most popular sport in the world, with an estimated 4 billion fans worldwide. But why is that? What makes soccer so deeply rooted in cultures all over the world?
One major reason soccer is such a universal sport is that it can be played by anyone, anywhere, at any time. All you need is two objects to mark a goal and something you can kick. Because of this simplicity, soccer has become a global sport.
People often ask where soccer actually originated from. While the modern rules of the game come from England, the idea of kicking a ball around for fun is much older than you’d think. Humans have been playing ball-kicking games since long before organized civilizations. Anthropologists note that hunter-gatherer children often kicked around animal bladders from animals their tribes hunted, treating them like makeshift balls. It’s funny to think that the instinct to kick around a ball for play has always been a part of human nature. Although these weren’t organized sports, they were very clear precursors to what would eventually evolve into soccer.
The earliest documented, organized version of a soccer-like sport was called Cuju, played in China during the Warring States period around the 3rd to 2nd century BC. In Cuju:here’s how it worked: they had balls made of leather with feathers or hair inside. Goals were nets or holes in cloth, it was played competitively, even at the imperial court. And its Recognized by FIFA as the earliest documented form of football
While these ancient games laid the groundwork for the sport, modern soccer as we know it was shaped in England. For centuries, the English played a wild and chaotic version called “mob football,” where entire villages chased a ball through streets with almost no rules. By the 1800s, schools and clubs each played by their own rules, which made organized competition impossible. In 1863, representatives met in London and formed the Football Association (FA), creating the first official, standardized rules. This moment is considered the birth of modern association football, or what we call in America Soccer.
Today, the sport reflects not just how easy it is to play, but how deeply it connects to human history. Soccer’s journey from kicking around animal bladders to playing in global stadiums is what makes it the world’s most popular and timeless sport.
