The History of Kicking: From Straight-On to Soccer-Style

By 4Football Staff · November 2, 2026 · 11 min read

Football began as a kicking game, drifted away from it, and then handed the job to specialists. Here is how the drop kick, the toe-first kicker and the soccer-style approach each took over.

Watch any modern field goal attempt and you will see the same sequence: a snap, a hold, a short curved run-up from the side, and a kick with the inside of the foot that sends the ball through the uprights. It looks like the only way to kick a football. For most of the game's history, it was not even the usual way. Kickers once ran straight at the ball and struck it with the toe of a square-ended shoe, and before that, the dominant kick was a drop kick that would look bizarre in an NFL stadium today.

The history of kicking is also the history of how football's scoring values, its ball and its goal posts changed. This article follows the kick from the rugby fields that football grew out of to the specialists who now spend careers on a single skill.

Football started as a kicking game

The earliest versions of American football were close cousins of rugby and soccer, and in all of them the foot was the main tool. Kicking the ball between goal posts was the central way to score in the 1870s and 1880s. Running the ball over a goal line eventually became a major way to score, but the rules took years to catch up. Early scoring systems valued kicked goals far above touchdowns, which helps explain why the word "goal" still sits inside "goal line," "goal post" and "field goal."

Through the 1880s and 1890s, the scoring tables were rewritten again and again. Touchdowns gained value, kicked goals lost it, and the point value of a field goal dropped over time. The three-point field goal that we know today dates to 1909, when the scoring value was cut to three, and it has stayed there since. Yale's Walter Camp, whose rule proposals shaped the early game, is the best-known name behind those changes.

The drop kick

The kick most associated with the early game was the drop kick. The kicker holds the ball in both hands, drops it, and kicks it just after it hits the ground, as the ball begins to rise. Drop kicks were useful because they did not require a teammate to snap and hold the ball, and a skilled kicker could use the same motion for field goals, extra points and kickoffs.

The drop kick has one non-negotiable requirement: the ball has to bounce reliably. In the early days of football, the ball was rounder and fatter than it is now, closer to a rugby ball in shape, and it bounced fairly predictably off a firm surface. As the sport moved toward the forward pass, the ball was slimmed down and made more pointed, which made it easier to throw and harder to bounce. The rule books did not ban the drop kick; the ball itself made it impractical.

The place kick

The alternative was the place kick, in which a teammate holds the ball upright on the ground while the kicker strikes it. Place kicking needs a snap, a holder and a kicker working in rhythm, but it gave better control over where the ball would be at the moment of contact. As the ball changed shape and the drop kick faded, the place kick became the standard method for field goals and extra points. The drop kick became a curiosity, and today it appears as a novelty. The most famous recent one came in the 2005 season, when a veteran quarterback drop-kicked an extra point in an NFL game, the first successful drop kick in that league in decades. Its rarity was the whole point.

The straight-on era

For roughly the middle half of the twentieth century, place kicking meant straight-on kicking. The kicker lined up behind the ball, took a short run directly at it, and drove through with the top of the foot, striking the ball with the toe. Straight-on kickers wore shoes with a blocked, squared-off toe, a design that was built specifically to make contact with the ball. The result was a low, hard kick with a particular feel that old-time kickers talked about the way golfers talk about irons.

Straight-on kickers could be very good. Lou Groza, who played for the Cleveland Browns and was known by the nickname "The Toe," was one of the most accomplished kickers of his era and later gave his name to the award for the best place-kicker in college football. Groza also played offensive tackle, which points to something essential about this period: kicking was rarely a full-time job.

Kickers were also players

Until the late 1960s and 1970s, most teams did not carry a roster spot for a dedicated kicker. The man who kicked was often a position player who happened to have a strong leg. A running back might kick extra points. A quarterback might punt and kick. A lineman might handle field goals. George Blanda, who played quarterback and kicker, had a career that stretched across more than two decades, ending in the mid-1970s when he was in his late forties, a span that reflects how the line between kicker and position player used to blur.

Roster limits and the way coaches viewed kicking were the cause. If a team had only so many roster spots and a kicker contributed only a few plays a game, a player who could contribute more broadly was more valuable. Kicking was a skill, but not yet a profession.

The soccer-style revolution

The change that gave us the modern kicker arrived from the world of soccer. In soccer-style kicking, the kicker stands several steps back from the ball and off to one side, approaches at an angle, plants the non-kicking foot beside the ball, and swings the leg through, striking with the instep rather than the toe. Because the approach is angled and the leg swing is long, the kicker can generate a lot of speed, and the ball can be struck with a large part of the foot rather than a small one.

The man most associated with the change is Pete Gogolak, a Hungarian-born kicker who had grown up playing soccer. He kicked at Cornell, where he is widely credited as the first soccer-style kicker in major college football, and in 1964 he began kicking for the Buffalo Bills of the American Football League. Teams noticed that he could kick for more distance and with more accuracy than the toe-kickers of the day, and they noticed how few of those kickers there were.

The Gogolak affair

Gogolak's story has a second chapter that mattered well beyond kicking. After the 1965 season, he left the Bills and signed with the New York Giants of the rival NFL. Until then, the two leagues had mostly avoided signing each other's players who were under contract or had option obligations, because every raid invited retaliation. Gogolak's move was seen as a break in that unwritten peace, and it helped escalate the bidding war between the leagues that led to the merger agreement in 1966. We tell that story in more detail in our article on the AFL-NFL rivalry and merger. It is a small footnote to the history of kicking and a large one to the history of the sport.

Why it spread

Within a few years soccer-style kicking spread across football, and by the end of the 1970s it was clearly the new standard. Several factors pushed it.

• Results. Kickers who used the new approach were more accurate and could reach longer distances, and teams noticed.
• Recruitment. Soccer players could be recruited from outside the traditional football pipeline. Many early soccer-style kickers had grown up playing soccer, and some came from other countries. Jan Stenerud, a Norwegian who had been a ski jumper, kicked for the Kansas City Chiefs, and in 1991 he became the first player chosen primarily as a kicker for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The pipeline from abroad continues, and we explore why in our piece on kickers and punters from overseas.
• Specialization. If a team was going to pay attention to a kicker, it made sense to carry one full-time. Soccer-style kickers were rarely also linemen or running backs.

The straight-on style faded gradually rather than all at once. One of the last well-known straight-on kickers, Mark Moseley, was still productive into the 1980s and won the league's most valuable player award in the strike-shortened 1982 season, the only time a kicker has won it. After that generation retired, the toe-first kicker was essentially gone from the pro game.

The ball, the posts and the rules

Kickers changed, and the rules and equipment around them changed too, usually because kicking had become too good.

The goal posts

For much of the game's history, the goal posts stood on the goal line. That meant a field goal attempt from near the goal line was just a short kick, and posts in the field of play were a hazard to running backs and receivers. College football moved its posts back to the end line decades earlier than the NFL. The NFL followed in 1974, in a package of changes aimed at making field goals harder and reducing the number of times a missed attempt gave the other team good field position. The league also moved kickoffs back to the 35-yard line and changed where the other team takes over after a missed field goal. Together, those changes shifted how coaches thought about the kicking game.

The kicking shoe

The square-toed shoe had its own controversy. In 1970 Tom Dempsey, a New Orleans Saints kicker born without toes on his kicking foot, kicked a 63-yard field goal in the final seconds of a game, a distance that stood as the league record for decades. The shoe he used had a flattened, enlarged toe, and critics argued that it gave him an unfair advantage. The league later wrote shoe rules that, in general terms, require a kicking shoe to look like a conventional shoe rather than a specially built club.

The tee, the holder and the snap

Place kicking depends on a clean snap and a steady hold. The long snapper and the holder became recognized specialists, as the long snapper and the holder do for every kick. In the NFL, field goals and extra points are kicked off the holder's hands and the ground rather than a tee, which makes the holder's skill in placing the ball critical. Tees are for kickoffs, and tee rules for other kicks vary by level, so check the rulebook for your league.

The extra point

For decades the extra point was nearly automatic, and it was often treated as a formality. In 2015 the NFL moved the line of scrimmage for extra points to the 15-yard line, which turned the kick into a 33-yard attempt and made it less of a given. The same year, the league allowed the defense to score two points by returning a turnover on a try to the opposite end zone. The modern kick is a routine part of every game.

What the specialization produced

By the 1980s every professional team had a full-time kicker, and kicking had become a specialized career. Several things followed.

• Accuracy rose. The ability to kick from 40 or 50 yards with reasonable reliability changed how coaches think about the middle of the field. Long field goals that once would have been unthinkable are now routine attempts in the right conditions.
• Coaches changed their decisions. A reliable kicker makes a drive that stalls at the 30-yard line a scoring chance rather than a punt, which feeds into fourth-down strategy.
• Training became a field of its own. Kickers work with coaches who focus only on kicking, practice with film, and treat the plant foot, hip rotation and follow-through as a repeatable routine. You can see the details in our kicking technique article.
• Kickoffs evolved. Rule changes have continually adjusted where kickoffs are taken, where touchbacks are placed and how the coverage team may move. The history of that process is in our kickoff rules article.

Kicking across the levels today

Kicking exists at every level, but the rules and the equipment are not identical.

Rules in the table can change from year to year, so confirm the current ones in your league's book. The pattern is clear, though: the farther down the ladder you go, the more the kicker is likely to be a student who also plays another position, the way pro kickers used to be.

Why the story matters

The shift from the drop kick to the toe-first kick to the soccer-style kick is a clean illustration of a theme that runs through football history. A rule change or new technique appears, the game adapts, and the rule makers respond with another change to keep the balance they want. Kicking changed because the ball changed, because a few people brought outside skills into the sport, and because teams discovered that a specialist would repay the roster spot.

The next time you watch a field goal, you can see the whole arc in a few seconds: a long snapper, a holder, a kicker approaching at an angle, and a ball that sails through uprights placed on the end line. All of it grew out of a game in which any player could kick and the foot was the main weapon. You can follow the current kicking numbers on the leaders page, see how your favorite team's kicker is doing on the team pages and check upcoming games on the schedule.

The short version

• Early football valued kicked goals highly, and the drop kick was a standard tool until the ball became narrower and more pointed.
• The field goal was reduced to three points in 1909, and it has stayed there.
• Straight-on, toe-first kicking dominated place kicking for decades, and the kicker was often also a position player.
• Soccer-style kicking arrived in pro football in the 1960s through Pete Gogolak, whose move to the Giants also helped push the two leagues toward their merger.
• The NFL moved its goal posts to the end line in 1974 and moved the extra point to the 15-yard line in 2015.
• Today every professional team carries specialists: a kicker, a punter, a long snapper and a holder.