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At a London meeting in December 1863, club representatives argued over whether players should be allowed to kick each other in the shins. The club that wanted to keep that rule withdrew, and the game we call soccer was shaped by the ones who stayed.
Plenty of what fans take for granted, from colored cards to penalty shootouts, was invented later and for oddly practical reasons. Here are 5 facts about the sport, plus the story of how knockout ties used to be settled.
1. The first official rules are over 160 years old
The Football Association, founded in 1863 in England, standardized the first official rules of modern soccer — before that, each region had its own variations of the game.
The FA was formed on October 26, 1863, at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London. Ebenezer Cobb Morley drafted the first laws, which took six meetings to settle between October and December. The sticking point was handling: early drafts allowed running with the ball in hand and “hacking,” which meant kicking an opponent’s shins. When those provisions were struck out on December 8, the Blackheath club withdrew, and other clubs favoring that style followed. They went on to form the Rugby Football Union in 1871, which is why two different games share a common ancestor.
2. Yellow and red cards have only existed since 1970
Before the 1970 World Cup, referees had no standardized visual system for warnings and ejections — the card system was created specifically to avoid misunderstandings between players who spoke different languages.
The idea is credited to Ken Aston, an English referee who oversaw match officials at the 1966 World Cup. That tournament’s quarter-final between England and Argentina at Wembley left confusion about who had been cautioned, and Argentina’s captain Antonio Rattín was sent off in the 35th minute by referee Rudolf Kreitlein of West Germany. Aston is said to have drawn his inspiration from traffic lights: yellow for caution, red for stop. The reasoning was that colors cross language barriers in a way that shouted words cannot. The cards debuted at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
3. One official match went on for over 3 hours
There are records of matches that ran far beyond regular time due to multiple periods of extra time in knockout stages, before penalty shootouts became the standard tiebreaker.
The best-known example is a Third Division North Cup replay between Stockport County and Doncaster Rovers at Edgeley Park on March 30, 1946. It was 2-2 after 90 minutes, and after 30 minutes of extra time, nobody had scored, so the teams played on until someone did. Stockport thought they had won in the 173rd minute, but the referee disallowed the goal. He finally stopped the match at 203 minutes because of poor light and exhaustion. The tie was settled in a second replay, played at Doncaster after a coin toss decided the venue, where the home side won 4-0.
4. The “fastest goal” in professional history was timed in seconds
Claims of goals scored within roughly three seconds of kickoff exist, but the record books are messier than most fans assume, because football has no official timing system for this.
The most-cited example, by Saudi player Nawaf Al-Abed in 2009 at about two seconds, comes from a match later declared void because several players were over the age limit. The shortest time on one widely used list of such goals, 2.1 seconds, belongs to Gavin Stokes, who scored in a Scottish junior (non-league) game in 2017. At the World Cup finals, the quickest goal on record is Hakan Şükür’s 10.8-second strike for Turkey against South Korea in the 2002 third-place match. Many older claims were never filmed, so their timings cannot be checked.
5. Not every World Cup winner had the “best team” in history
Statistical analysis shows factors like bracket luck, refereeing, and specific tournament conditions play a big role in the final outcome — short, knockout-format tournaments have more variance than long round-robin leagues.
Spain’s 2010 title shows how thin the margins can be. They lost their opening match 1-0 to Switzerland, then scored just eight goals in seven games, the fewest ever by a champion; the previous low was 11. Their four knockout wins were each by a single goal, and the final was decided by Andrés Iniesta’s strike in the 116th minute. A different bounce in any of those games would have rewritten the record books, which is why one tournament rarely settles which team was truly the strongest ever.
From drawing lots to penalty shootouts
Before 1970, the laws of the game had no way to break a tie. The FA Cup used replays, but where a replay was impossible, matches were decided by drawing lots: Italy beat the Soviet Union that way in the 1968 European Championship semi-final. In 1968, Israel lost an Olympic quarter-final to Bulgaria by the same method, which reportedly inspired Israeli Yosef Dagan to propose penalty kicks as a fairer alternative. German referee Karl Wald is also credited with the idea and reportedly used shootouts unofficially in the early 1960s.
The International Football Association Board adopted the shootout on June 27, 1970. The first one in a World Cup finals match came on July 8, 1982, when West Germany beat France in a semi-final. Since then, the shootout has waited in reserve as the last tiebreaker in World Cup knockout rounds.
To keep exploring this subject, take a look at behind-the-scenes movie facts and video game facts.
If you follow the sport closely, you might also like our posts on water and hydration and the human body.
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A 203-minute cup tie and a 10.8-second World Cup goal sit at opposite ends of the same sport, and both exist only because the rules were still being written long after 1863.