Why is football the most popular sport?

On the fifteenth of July 2018, France beat Croatia 4-2 to win the World Cup. If you were alive on that date, there is a one in seven chance you watched the game itself. According to estimates, of the around 7.6 billion people making up the global population in 2018, 1.1 billion of them were watching. The popularity of football is hard to ignore. It is spoken about in offices, in pubs, on radio shows, in the newspaper. Walking around a major city, it would be almost impossible to miss the replica shirts worn by people on the streets and the magazine racks crammed with coverage of the game. So, football has become an inescapable aspect of modern life. What is less obvious, perhaps, is why?

When talking about the global appeal of football, it is tempting to focus on a very specific tradition of the game which emerged within medieval England and was eventually codified in the mid-19th century. But it is important to remember that the fascination with taking a round object and kicking it about has existed in many cultures and for much longer. There is evidence of ball games being played in Mesoamerica around 3000BC, and in Egypt and Greece a thousand years later. When it comes to games in which the ball is kicked with the feet, these took a little longer to develop.

The Chinese game of Cuju - which literally translates as “kick ball” - is the earliest known recorded form of football, with descriptions of the game appearing in a Chinese military work from the third century BC. There is also the suggestion that a form of ball game existed that may have predated Cuju, materializing from within early Aboriginal culture in Australia. Regardless of how you parse the origins of these different forms of football, one thing is certain. Whatever the time, whatever the place, when people have seen a round object, they have wanted to kick it with their feet. And it is perhaps the simplicity of that desire - seeing a ball and wanting to kick it - which goes some way towards explaining how the game of football would end up being the most popular sport in the world at the outset of the 21st Century.

The fact of the matter is that football doesn’t get much more complicated than that initial need to kick a round object. You can cobble together a ball out of almost anything - balls have been made out of leaves, old clothes, animal skins, pigs’ bladders, rubber, even rocks. And beyond that, all you need is space. It doesn’t even need to be a wide-open space. You can play almost anywhere. A beach. An abandoned car parks. You can play on the side of a hill. You can play in the space between buildings. You can throw down a couple of jumpers for goalposts almost anywhere in the world and start a game. And people do. There are numerous stories about professional players of the game being formed by the environment within which they began playing.

A youngster playing in the confines of a small urban space learning close control or developing the skills necessary to navigate an awkwardly placed lamppost or a curb that cuts across the penalty area. This material simplicity points to another aspect of football’s universality. Its accessibility. For many other sports, there can be barriers to entry. To play tennis, you need a racquet and a net. To play golf you need a set of clubs and a golf course. To play basketball, you need a hoop. Cricket and baseball require equipment and appropriate playing areas. You can also play competitively with no more than a couple of people.

You can explain the game in a sentence or two. You can get first-time players enjoying the game in a matter of minutes. It is a game that invites being played at the drop of a hat. And this material simplicity extends to the players. Anyone can play. And not just in the sense that anyone can enjoy the game if they play it. Football at the highest level is played by entirely different profiles of player. It’s not simply the case that physical superiority trumps all. You can find a place on the pitch if you are 6 foot 6 or 5 foot 5. There are different skill sets required by players that makes football one of the most accommodating sports in the world. So why is football so popular? Perhaps the answer to this question is simply “Because it allows itself to be so popular.” The simplicity and accessibility of the beautiful game means that there is something there for everyone.