393. History of Football! (English Vocabulary Lesson)
6/22/202632 min
The World Cup is currently underway in North America, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about football, or soccer depending on where you are from. And specifically, we are going to explore the history of the world’s most popular sport.
Most people probably think football has always looked more or less the same. Two teams with eleven players. Referees and clear rules. Ninety-minute matches.
But that is not true at all. If you travelled back a few hundred years and watched a football match in England, you might not even recognise it as football.
In this episode, we are going to explore the development of football.
I want to talk about medieval folk football, the British schools that helped create modern rules, and cities like Sheffield that played their own versions of the game. We’ll also look at why football and rugby developed separately, where the word “soccer” actually comes from, and how industrialisation transformed football into a global professional sport watched by billions of people.
By the end of this episode, I think you’ll see football very differently. And you will also have learned lots of new English vocabulary!
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Transcript preview
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Tom Wilkinson· Host0:30
[gentle music] Hello, I'm Tom Wilkinson and welcome to the Thinking in English podcast, a podcast for intermediate to advanced level English learners. The World Cup is currently underway in North America. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about football or soccer, depending on where you're from. And specifically, we are going to explore the history of the world's most popular sport. Most people probably think football has always looked more or less the same. Two teams with 11 players, referees, clear rules, 90-minute matches. But that is not true at all. If you traveled back a few hundred years and watched a football match in England, you might not even recognize it as football. In this episode, I want to talk about medieval