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Few history books acknowledge the importance of that year. Before 1863, all the public schools of England—public, of course, meaning private—had had a ball game of some kind, but rules, when they existed at all, were strictly local. The desire of old Harrovians and Etonians to go on playing the game in adult life drew them to a conference at Cambridge, where an attempt was made to hammer out rules. The big question was: Should the ball be primarily handled or primarily kicked? Some said handled, and so evolved rugby football. Rugby has become the main game for other public schools. There the sons of gentlemen, who will never have to soil their hands in mine or factory, knock hell out of each other passing the ball backward. Americans, in their own padded and armored version of the game, pass the ball forward. This has always been taken by the British as typical American perverseness, like icing drinks and signing a Declaration of Independence.
The other kind of football, association or soccer, is mainly for the lower orders. The ball can be thrown into play, but play itself is a matter of booting. Most nations cling to the original English name—futbol or fussball or, for the Scots, fu'bo'. But the Italians logically call it il calcio (or if they're Roman, er carcio), meaning "the kick." It is perhaps the only human game theoretically playable by birds.
Soccer is traditionally crude, and it attracts roughs, drunks and roarers. It cannot be discussed in pubs without passion and obscenity. It is certainly not a gentleman's game. Even its subtlety and skill have failed to recommend it.
For those of us who are not gentlemen, the paradox of football delights and intrigues. Albert Camus played goal. Sir Frederick Ayer, the philosopher, is a fan, and there is a sense in which soccer is a fair subject for a logical positivist. It is, after all, a precise and yet various system of semeiotics.
And yet the game suffers more than it ever did from its bloodied-oaf aficionados—the rough, vulgar, vandalistic, stupid, even murderous. British supporters have become notorious for their train ripping, window smashing, bovver booting, bottle fights. Recent British fan conduct in Holland led to Times editorials and high-level apologies on behalf of the whole British nation. Volatile Latins, though less ebullient than the stolid Anglo-Saxons, have been known to bite ears off referees.
Here is an account of the news in Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul: "A retired general had died in Cordoba at the age of eighty; a few bombs had exploded in Bogotá, and of course the Argentine football team was continuing its violent progress through Europe." Of course. The old innocent view that the game itself could be, to its supporters and players alike, a purge of violent emotions has long been exploded. Soccer is not the poor man's Sophocles.
It is all but over now for another four years, and the winners will not noticeably earn for their country increased political prestige or an unwonted influx of tourists. Soccer remains a closed language, an alternative to politics, and perhaps after all a harmless substitute for war. For the aficionados of the working and middle classes, it is art, poetry, music, the sole palliation of the boredom of the office and workbench.