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What is the world’s oldest soccer club?

The Sheffield Football Club was founded in 1857 in Sheffield by Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, and is now recognized as the world’s oldest club. The club initially played its own code of football: the Sheffield rules. Players were allowed to push or hit the ball with their hands, and there was no offside rule at all, so that players known as “kick throughs” could be permanently positioned near the opponents’ goal.

Quickies

Did you know …

• records at Cambridge University show that a sixteenth-century soccer match between “town and gown” (locals and students) ended in a brawl which caused the school’s vice-chancellor to forbid students from playing “footeball” outside of college grounds?

What are the Cambridge Rules?

In 1848, representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, and Shrewsbury schools gathered at Trinity College, at Cambridge University, for a meeting to codify the rules of soccer. These were the first set of rules to be used collectively by multiple school teams. When the country’s leading clubs and schools got together to form the Football Association in 1863, they used the Cambridge Rules as the basis for a new set of FA rules.