Читать книгу Now You Know Soccer онлайн

11 страница из 49

Quickies

Did you know …

• on February 17, 1530, while the troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, were besieging Florence, a game of calcio was organized in the city as a show of defiance?

What is the oldest national soccer team in the world?

That would be a tie. Both Scotland and England were the first countries to put forward national teams in 1872. In fact, they did so for a match against each other, which also allows them to share the credit of holding the first international match. The game was held at Hamilton Crescent in Partick, Scotland, on November 30 that year, and, appropriately enough, it ended in a goal-less tie.

Quickies

Did you know …

• in the 1930s the fascist party of Italy, under Mussolini, so despised British soccer that they invented an alternative sport for the masses, called volata, which was a hybrid of soccer and rugby? The new game never caught on.

Who drew up the first set of soccer rules?

During the eighteenth century, the game of mob football evolved into a codified sport at England’s public schools like Eton, Westminster, Rugby, Charterhouse, and Harrow. The first-ever set of formal soccer rules were written at Eton College in 1815, though each school tended to have their own set of rules.