The Origins of American Football: From Rugby and Soccer

By 4Football Staff · September 21, 2026 · 11 min read

American football, soccer and rugby share a family tree. Here is how a street game became two codes in England and then a third, very different game on American campuses.

Ask a visitor from almost anywhere else in the world what "football" means and you will get a different answer than you get in the United States. Much of the planet says it for the game Americans call soccer. Canada, Australia and Ireland each have their own football with its own rules. Yet the American game, with its helmets, downs and forward passes, is a close relative of all of them.

The relationship is not a straight line from one game to the next. It is more like a family tree with a long period of shared ancestors, a split in England, a hybrid phase on American college campuses, and finally a set of rule changes that made the result unrecognizable to anyone who started in either of the parent games. This article walks through that tree, separates the well-documented parts from the legends, and explains why the game you watch on Saturday looks the way it does.

If you want the other chapters of this story, they follow in order: the first intercollegiate game of 1869, the rule-making work of Walter Camp, and the arrival of the forward pass. Here we stay with the beginning.

Before there were rules: folk football

For centuries, villages in the British Isles and parts of continental Europe played ball games between neighboring communities. Historians group these under the name folk football or mob football. They were played with a ball of some kind, with goals that could be a church door or a stream a mile or two apart, and with teams that were whatever number of people showed up. Many of these games were rough and were played on holidays such as Shrove Tuesday.

Two things matter about folk football for our purposes. First, the ball could usually be moved by kicking, carrying or throwing, depending on the town. There was no single idea of "football" that excluded the hands. Second, the rules were local and unwritten. A game in one town might forbid something that was required in the next.

The idea that the sport was invented at one moment by one person is a modern simplification. What actually happened is that schools and universities, which had young men with free afternoons and an interest in organized contests, began writing local rules down. Those written rules are where the family tree starts to branch.

England's split: the schools and the 1860s

By the early nineteenth century, the English public schools (which are private boarding schools) each played their own version. Some schools, with narrow cloisters and hard ground, favored a game based on kicking and dribbling. Others, such as Rugby School, allowed players to pick up the ball and run with it under certain conditions. Because each school had different rules, graduates who wanted to keep playing at university or in clubs ran into arguments about whose rules to use.

A popular story says that a Rugby School pupil named William Webb Ellis, in 1823, picked up the ball during a game and ran with it, inventing rugby. The story is known and repeated, but historians treat it as a legend. It was first recorded decades after the supposed event and there is little firm evidence for it. The truth is more gradual: running with the ball was already becoming part of the game at several schools.

The decisive moment came in London in 1863. Representatives of clubs met to agree on a common set of rules, and they split over two questions: whether players could carry the ball, and whether they could hack at an opponent's shins. The side that gave up carrying and hacking formed the Football Association, and its game became known as association football. The side that wanted to keep carrying and hacking went their own way, and in 1871 clubs formed the Rugby Football Union.

The word soccer is a nickname that grew out of "association" in English slang; it was not an American invention. So from 1863 and 1871 on there were two codes in England, association football and rugby football, both called football by the people who played them. Which one a given English-speaking country adopted as "football" depended on where its sports culture came from.

American campuses before 1869

The United States had its own versions of campus ball games long before anything resembling a national sport. A few are documented well enough to name.

• At Harvard, freshmen and sophomores held an annual contest that students nicknamed "Bloody Monday." It was a rough, loosely governed ball game between classes, and the college faculty eventually discouraged it.
• At Princeton, a game known as "ballown" was played on campus, in which students moved a ball mostly by kicking or batting it.
• In Boston, a group of schoolboys known as the Oneida Football Club played in the early 1860s and is often described as one of the first organized football clubs in the country, though claims about "firsts" in this period are hard to settle because records are thin.

These early games shared one trait: they were local and unstandardized, usually varying from year to year. What changed in the 1860s and 1870s was that colleges began playing each other, which forced the sides to agree on shared rules. The first such game on record, in 1869, is covered in its own article. For the purposes of tracing ancestry, the useful detail is that those first matches were played under rules that looked more like association football than like rugby: players moved the ball by kicking and batting it, and carrying it was not permitted.

The rugby turn

If the story had stopped there, the United States might have ended up with a game much closer to soccer. It did not, and the reason has a lot to do with Harvard.

In 1873, representatives from several eastern colleges met in New York to try to agree on common rules. Harvard did not take part in that effort, and in the following years it went its own way. In May 1874, Harvard hosted a team from McGill University in Montreal, and the two schools played two games, one under Harvard's rules and one under McGill's rugby rules. Harvard players reportedly liked what they saw: running with the ball, tackling and the fluid movement of rugby appealed to them more than the kicking game then used at several eastern schools.

The next year, Harvard played Yale under a compromise set of rules often called the "concessionary rules," which blended Harvard's preferences with what Yale was willing to accept. Then, in 1876, representatives of several northeastern colleges met in Massachusetts and agreed to base their rules on those of the Rugby Football Union, with some changes. That is why most historians describe the American game as descending from rugby more than from soccer, even though the very first intercollegiate match looked more like soccer.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, American schools were arguing about who should write the rules at all. England had two governing bodies, one for each code. The United States had a committee of colleges, and that committee became the engine of change. That detail matters for what follows.

What rugby gave American football

When you compare today's American football with rugby, several features are clearly inherited. It helps to see them side by side.

Three of these deserve more explanation.

The oval ball and the tackle

Rugby brought the idea of carrying an egg-shaped ball and stopping the runner by tackling. In the early American games, carrying and tackling were at first limited and then, as rugby influence grew, central to the game. The ball itself changed over decades, and a later article in this series covers how the football itself evolved.

The word touchdown

In rugby, a player scores a try by grounding the ball in the opponent's in-goal area, and that earns the right to attempt a kick at the goal. In the early American game, the same structure existed: reaching the end zone area mainly gave you a free attempt at a kick, and kicked goals counted for more than the touchdown itself in the first years. The name touchdown stayed even as the rules changed. In the American game of the 1870s, a player had to touch the ball down in the goal area, which is where the word comes from. Over the following decades, touchdowns became more valuable than kicks, and by 1912 the touchdown was worth six points, the value it still has.

The scrum and what replaced it

Rugby restarts play with a scrum, a contest in which players push against each other for possession. Early American football used a version of it. That became the first target of reform, because a scrum is hard to control, and a team that won it could keep the ball for as long as it wanted. That led directly to the next stage in the family tree.

What made the American game its own

By the early 1880s, American football was still recognizably rugby with local adaptations. Over the next thirty years, a series of rule changes made it into something else. The main steps, in the order they happened, were these.

1. A line of scrimmage instead of a scrum (1880). Teams lined up facing each other and the ball was put in play by a snap. Teams were also reduced to eleven players.
2. Downs and yardage (1882). After teams used the new snap to hold the ball for long stretches without advancing, the rules required a team to gain a set distance in a set number of plays or give up the ball.
3. Tackling lower, and mass formations. Rules that allowed tackling below the waist led to tight, wedge-shaped plays that put players at greater risk.
4. The safety crisis and reform (1905 to 1906). Following public outcry, rule makers opened the game with the forward pass and other changes that were intended to reduce mass plays.
5. Modern structure (1912). The field was set at one hundred yards between goal lines with end zones, the touchdown became six points, and a team received four downs.

Each of these steps is covered in the articles linked above. The big picture is that American football moved away from rugby because its rule makers were willing to change things, a college committee could vote them in, and the game was played by teams that had a strong incentive to find an edge.

Why it diverged from rugby

You might ask why American football did not simply stay a rugby variant, since Canada's game and Australia's game each stayed closer to their parent codes. There are a few reasons that historians point to, and some of them are argued about.

• Rule-makers held real authority. College committees could change the rules each year, so ideas such as downs spread quickly.
• Strong rivalries and a close eye on winning. Teams from colleges that cared about their reputations were motivated to find tactical edges, and rule changes responded to those edges.
• No competing governing body. English rugby had a union that kept the code relatively stable. In the United States, no equivalent body stood in the way of rapid change.
• The influence of individual rule makers. A small number of people had unusual sway, and the next article in this series focuses on the best-known of them.

Those are interpretations rather than proven laws, and reasonable historians weigh them differently. What is not in dispute is the sequence: soccer and rugby split in England, rugby won the argument at the American colleges in the mid-1870s, and the American rule makers then took the game in their own direction.

Names, and why they confuse people

The vocabulary is a source of misunderstanding, so a few clarifications help.

• Football. In the United States and Canada, this means a gridiron code. In most other countries it means association football.
• Soccer. An English nickname for association football. It was widely used in England in the late nineteenth century before it became uncommon there and stuck in North America.
• Gridiron. A nickname for the American field. It is usually connected to the pattern of regularly spaced lines across the field, which look like the bars of a cooking grill. When the lines were first drawn is something sources describe differently, so treat any exact year you read with caution.
• Rugby football. The older name of the rugby code, and the immediate parent of the American game.

A common mistake is to say that American football "came from" soccer or that it is "just rugby with pads." Both claims leave out the important parts: soccer and rugby share a common ancestor and a split, and American football inherited more from rugby, then changed it deeply.

Myths to leave behind

• "Football was invented at one college." No single college invented it. Several played a part, and the process took decades.
• "William Webb Ellis invented rugby." This is a legend, and the evidence for it is thin.
• "The 1869 game was American football." It was the first intercollegiate game, and it was closer in style to association football than to the modern game.
• "Walter Camp wrote the rules alone." Camp was hugely influential, but he worked with committees, and many of the changes were debated and compromised.
• "The forward pass was always part of the game." It was not legal until 1906, as covered in the article linked above.

Where to see the family resemblance today

You can still see traces of each parent in the modern game if you know where to look. The oval ball, the tackle and the word touchdown belong to the rugby side. The idea of a game decided in part by field position, by kicking, and by clocks that are managed to the second is a later American addition. College football games, which you can follow on our college page and the scores page, keep much of the old campus spirit. The pro game, which has its own history, grew from those college roots.

If you want to see how the rules differ today from level to level, the rankings and the college programs listed on the site are a good starting point, and the article on how rules differ between college and the NFL covers the modern details.

The short version

• Folk football was local, unwritten and varied from town to town; no single person invented the sport.
• In England, the 1863 split created association football (soccer) and the 1871 union created rugby football as a separate code.
• Early American campus games were local, and the first intercollegiate match in 1869 looked more like soccer than modern football.
• Harvard's contact with McGill rugby in 1874, and the 1876 rules built on the Rugby Football Union, set the American game on a rugby path.
• Between 1880 and 1912, new rules for the line of scrimmage, downs, the forward pass and scoring turned that rugby base into American football.
• The word touchdown is a rugby leftover; the Webb Ellis story is a legend; and the evidence for many "firsts" is thin enough that you should be careful with them.