Association football got its first rules in a London tavern in 1863, and a British student nickname for it, soccer, stuck in the United States. These tiles follow the game from Victorian cricket grounds to the modern World Cup: goalkeepers who became legends, clubs with surprising origins, tournaments that turned on borrowed boots or a lost trophy, and rules that began with a disputed goal or a traffic light.
Every tile in a Soccer game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Legends
nine stories
1The goalkeeper who was also a national sprint champion
On the tile: Arthur Wharton1886
Arthur Wharton came to England from the Gold Coast, now Ghana, in 1882 to train as a Methodist missionary, and chose sport instead. In 1886 he won the Amateur Athletic Association's national 100-yard title, running the distance in ten seconds. He also kept goal for Preston North End, Rotherham Town and Sheffield United, and is widely regarded as the world's first Black professional soccer player. He died penniless in 1930 and lay in an unmarked grave until campaigners gave him a headstone in 1997.
In 2019 a life-size bronze of Lily Parr was unveiled at the National Football Museum in Manchester, the first statue of a woman soccer player in England. The Football Association counted 110 statues of male players. Parr began at St Helens Ladies in 1919 and a year later joined Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston, starting at fullback before becoming a prolific scorer. In 1922 she and three teammates beat the American women's Olympic team in a relay race. Her cousin said it was well known in the family that Lily "had a kick like a mule."
Stanley Matthews, the Wizard of Dribble, played his final league match for Stoke City against Fulham on February 6, 1965, just after his 50th birthday. A month earlier the Queen had knighted him for services to the sport, while he was still playing. In 1956 he had won the first European Footballer of the Year award. His longevity owed much to training and a strict diet: no smoking, no alcohol, carrot juice every day and, by his own account, no food at all on Mondays. He was never booked or sent off.
4The keeper who won a Cup final with a broken neck
On the tile: Trautmann1956
Bert Trautmann came to England as a German prisoner of war and first played in goal at a camp near Wigan. After his release he impressed Manchester City and played more than 500 games for the club between 1949 and 1964. In the 1956 FA Cup final at Wembley he played the last 17 minutes of a 3-1 win over Birmingham City with a broken neck. Years later he admitted that this fame rankled: being the first German to play in an FA Cup final at Wembley, a year earlier, meant more to him.
In 1953 Real Madrid and Barcelona both claimed the Argentine forward Alfredo Di Stéfano. The Spanish football federation ruled that the two clubs would share him, with Di Stéfano playing alternate seasons for each. Barcelona soon sold its rights, and a few weeks into his Real Madrid career he scored twice against them in a 5-0 win. With Real Madrid he won five straight European Cups, from 1956 to 1960, scoring in every final. He represented three countries, Argentina, Colombia and Spain, yet never played at a World Cup.
Lev Yashin was sent to work in a munitions factory at the age of 12, and Dynamo Moscow discovered him keeping goal for the factory team. At first he could not hold a place in Dynamo's soccer team and for a while did better in goal for the club's ice hockey section. He went on to spend his whole career at Dynamo, win Olympic gold in 1956 and, in 1963, be voted European Footballer of the Year, the award known as the Ballon d'Or. He remains the only goalkeeper to have won it.
Edson Arantes do Nascimento was named after the inventor Thomas Edison, though his parents misspelled the name, and where the nickname Pelé came from is something of a mystery. He worked as a shoeshine boy before Santos signed him as a teenager. When wealthy Italian clubs offered Santos a then-unheard-of $1 million for him, Brazil's president, Jânio Quadros, declared Pelé a "non-exportable national treasure" in 1961. He stayed at Santos for almost two decades, then joined the New York Cosmos, whose first game with him was televised in 22 countries.
The story goes that Eusébio's career turned on a conversation in a Portuguese barbershop. A coach from Brazil's São Paulo club, touring Portugal after a trip to Mozambique, praised a young striker he had seen there, and Benfica's coach, Béla Guttmann, was listening. Within a week Guttmann flew to Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, to sign him. What is on the record is the result: Eusébio played for Benfica from 1961 to 1975 and was top scorer at the 1966 World Cup with nine goals, four of them in a 5-3 quarterfinal win over North Korea.
At the 1974 World Cup the Netherlands wore orange shirts supplied by Adidas, with the company's three stripes on the sleeves. Johan Cruyff's shirt had only two. He had a personal deal with Puma, Adidas's rival, refused to wear the three stripes and insisted on a two-striped version, and he got it. Doing things his own way was a habit: from 1970 he wore number 14, when starting players normally wore 1 to 11. At the 1978 World Cup, the van de Kerkhof twins demanded two-striped shirts too, and got them.
1The world's oldest club was started by cricketers
On the tile: Sheffield FC1857
Sheffield FC was founded on October 24, 1857, by two local cricketers, William Prest and Nathaniel Creswick, and FIFA calls it the oldest soccer club in the world. There was no national code of rules yet, so the club wrote its own, the Sheffield Rules, and at first members mostly played among themselves, in games such as Married versus Singles. For its 150th anniversary in 2007, the small non-league club played Inter Milan at Bramall Lane, with Pelé in attendance. Inter won 5-2.
Juventus of Turin, founded by a group of students in 1897, first played in pink shirts, and washing faded them badly. In 1903 the club asked an English member, John Savage, to find sturdier replacements. His friend in Nottingham happened to support Notts County and shipped out a set of that club's black-and-white striped shirts. Juventus has worn the stripes ever since. In 2011 the Italian giant returned the favor, inviting Notts County, then 12th in England's third tier, to help open its new stadium.
3Scotland's oldest club stayed amateur for 152 years
On the tile: Queen's Park2019
Queen's Park, Scotland's oldest soccer club, played as amateurs for 152 years under the Latin motto Ludere Causa Ludendi, "to play for the sake of playing." By 2019 it was the last amateur side in the Scottish Professional Football League, and it was selling Hampden Park, the stadium it had long owned, to the Scottish Football Association. Amateur status had a cost: when talented players such as Liverpool's Andrew Robertson moved on, the club earned nothing. In November 2019, 91 percent of members voted to turn professional.
Celtic was founded in Glasgow in 1887 by Brother Walfrid, an Irish Marist brother, to raise money for a charity that fed poor children in the city's East End. Eighty years later, on May 25, 1967, Celtic beat Inter Milan 2-1 in Lisbon to become the first British team to win the European Cup. Every player in the team had been born within a 30-mile radius of Glasgow. They became known as the Lisbon Lions, and their manager, Jock Stein, said there was not a prouder man on God's earth.
5Brazil's Corinthians was not founded by Englishmen
On the tile: Corinthians1910Myth busted
It is sometimes said that Corinthians, one of Brazil's biggest clubs, was founded by English railway workers. In 1976 the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo set that straight: the founders were Brazilians from São Paulo's Bom Retiro neighborhood, among them employees of the São Paulo Railway. Only the name was English. In 1910 they chose it to honor Corinthian, an English amateur club whose touring team had just played in the city. In 1988 the English club, by then Corinthian-Casuals, returned, and the Brazilian star Sócrates played part of a match in its chocolate and pink.
Boca Juniors, founded in 1905 in the port district of Buenos Aires, tried several shirts before finding its colors. The club's own history says a port worker, Juan Bricchetto, saw a Swedish ship in La Boca and proposed its colors, the blue and yellow of Sweden's flag. A popular version of the story adds that Boca lost a match played to decide which of two similar-looking teams could keep its shirts, then took the colors of the next ship into the harbor. Either way, the yellow band became a gold stripe in 1913.
Mexico City's Estadio Azteca opened in 1966 and hosted the World Cup final twice: in 1970, when Pelé's Brazil won, and in 1986, when Diego Maradona's Argentina did. After a renovation that kept it closed from 2024, it staged the opening match of the 2026 World Cup, Mexico against South Africa, on June 11. That made it the only stadium to host games at three World Cups: 10 matches in 1970, nine in 1986 and five in 2026, for 24 in all.
8Real grass for the World Cup's first indoor match
On the tile: Silverdome1994
The Pontiac Silverdome near Detroit had a roof and artificial turf, yet it was chosen to host games at the 1994 World Cup. A team from Michigan State University developed natural grass that could grow indoors, laid in nearly 2,000 separate containers. It was tested in June 1993, when Germany beat England 2-1 there, then taken apart and stored in the parking lot to be reassembled the next year. On June 18, 1994, the United States and Switzerland drew 1-1 in the first World Cup match ever played indoors.
9The women's team that outdrew the men, then was banned
On the tile: Dick, Kerr1920
The day after Christmas in 1920, some 53,000 people packed Goodison Park in Liverpool, with thousands more turned away, to watch Dick, Kerr Ladies, a team from a Preston munitions factory, play for charity. Less than a year later, on December 5, 1921, the Football Association banned women's matches from its members' grounds, declaring the game "quite unsuitable for females." The ban lasted about half a century. The team played on, and in 1922 it toured the United States, facing mostly men's teams and losing only three of nine games.
1The first World Cup final used two different balls
On the tile: 1930 final1930
When Argentina and Uruguay met in Montevideo on July 30, 1930, for the first World Cup final, they could not agree on whose ball to use. According to FIFA, the host nation's ball was supposedly a little larger. The compromise was to use Argentina's ball in the first half and Uruguay's in the second. Argentina led 2-1 at halftime. After the switch, Uruguay scored three times, won 4-2 and became the first world champions, receiving the trophy from FIFA president Jules Rimet.
2The first World Cup hat trick, credited 76 years late
On the tile: Patenaude1930
On July 17, 1930, Bert Patenaude of Fall River, Massachusetts, scored all three goals in the United States' 3-0 World Cup win over Paraguay. His teammates and his manager's report said so, but FIFA's records gave one goal to the captain, Tom Florie. Patenaude died in 1974 without official credit. Historian Colin Jose dug up South American newspaper reports, including goal diagrams from Buenos Aires's La Prensa, and sent them to FIFA in 1995. In 2006 FIFA recognized Patenaude as scorer of the first hat trick in World Cup history.
3The part-timers who beat England at the World Cup
On the tile: Belo Horizonte1950
England came to the 1950 World Cup in Brazil as heavy favorites. The United States brought a team of part-timers: goalkeeper Frank Borghi drove a hearse, Walter Bahr was a schoolteacher in Philadelphia, and Haitian-born Joe Gaetjens was studying accounting and washing dishes in a Brooklyn restaurant. On June 29 in Belo Horizonte, Bahr tried a long shot before halftime, and Gaetjens dived headlong to redirect it past the goalkeeper with his head. Then Borghi made save after save. The 1-0 win is still counted among the biggest upsets in World Cup history.
4Brazil's yellow shirt was designed by a Uruguay fan
On the tile: Brazil's shirt1953
Brazil wore white shirts in 1950, when Uruguay beat them in the deciding match of their home World Cup at the Maracanã, and the white took some of the blame. In 1953 the Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã held a contest for a new uniform using all four colors of the flag. The winner was Aldyr Garcia Schlee, a teenage newspaper illustrator in Pelotas, near the Uruguayan border, who decided the shirt "just had to be yellow." Brazil first wore it in 1954. Schlee supported Uruguay all his life.
At the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland, Hungary's Magical Magyars beat West Germany 8-3 in the group stage. The score was misleading. Under the tournament's format, West Germany could lose that game and still advance by winning a playoff, so coach Sepp Herberger made seven changes to his team, then beat Turkey with a stronger lineup. Two weeks after the 8-3, the teams met again in the final in Bern. The Germans came back from two goals down to win 3-2, ending Hungary's 31-match unbeaten run in what became known as the Miracle of Bern.
Just Fontaine went to the 1958 World Cup in Sweden having scored one international goal in 53 months, and he started up front only after René Bliard was injured. He then scored in every one of France's six matches, 13 goals in all, including four in the third-place game against West Germany. He did it in a pair of boots borrowed from a teammate, Stéphane Bruey. When Fontaine died in 2023, nobody had scored more goals at a single World Cup.
Less than four months before England hosted the 1966 World Cup, the Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen from a stamp exhibition in London. A week later, on March 27, Dave Corbett took his collie, Pickles, for a walk in Norwood, south London. Pickles was running around a neighbor's car, where Corbett noticed a package wrapped in newspaper and tightly bound with string. Inside was the trophy. At the police station, the sergeant said it did not look very "World Cuppy." After England won the final, Corbett recalled, Bobby Moore held Pickles up to a cheering crowd.
8The ball everyone draws was named for a satellite
On the tile: Telstar1970
The black-and-white soccer ball that artists and cartoonists still draw went to the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. Adidas, beginning its long partnership with FIFA, supplied a 32-panel leather ball with white hexagons and black pentagons, and for the first time a World Cup ball had its own name: Telstar. The name came from a small, roughly spherical communications satellite launched in 1962. Its light surface was dotted with dark panels, much like the ball.
9The unofficial women's World Cup that drew 110,000
On the tile: Mexico 19711971
Twenty years before FIFA held its first women's world championship, Mexico staged an unofficial World Cup. Sponsored by the drinks company Martini & Rossi, the 1971 tournament drew record crowds for women's soccer: an estimated 110,000 fans watched Denmark beat Mexico in the final at the Azteca Stadium. To appeal to families, organizers painted pink hoops on the goalposts and dressed staff in pink. England's squad included 13-year-old Leah Caleb, and Denmark's 15-year-old Susanne Augustesen scored all three goals in the 3-0 final.
On October 26, 1863, representatives of London clubs and schools met at the Freemasons' Tavern on Great Queen Street to form the Football Association and agree on one set of rules. Ebenezer Cobb Morley of Barnes drafted them at his home, and it took six meetings to approve them. Along the way the draft lost rules allowing players to run with the ball in their hands and to hack, or kick, opponents' shins. Blackheath refused to accept the change and left the association, and in 1871 it helped found the Rugby Football Union. Soccer and rugby had split.
The word soccer sounds American to many British fans, but it was coined in England. Once the Football Association wrote its rules, the two main codes were known as rugby football and association football. Students at Oxford and Cambridge liked to add "er" to shortened words, so rugby became rugger, and a clipped form of association became soccer, in print by the 1890s. The British used soccer widely for decades, even more after World War II, before turning against it in the 1980s as it came to seem American.
3The first international had a tape for a crossbar
On the tile: Scotland 18721872
The first official international match, Scotland against England, was played on November 30, 1872, at a cricket ground in Partick, Glasgow. Scotland had no football association yet, so the Queen's Park club organized its team. The Scotsman estimated the crowd at 4,000; men paid a shilling, and women got in free. The goals had a tape instead of a crossbar, and there were no nets. Late in the first half, a shot by Scotland's Robert Leckie went just over the tape, and much of the crowd cheered a goal that was not. It ended 0-0.
4The first FA Cup final was won under a false name
On the tile: FA Cup 18721872
The FA Cup, the oldest soccer competition still being played, held its first final on March 16, 1872, at the Kennington Oval, a London cricket ground. About 2,000 people paid a shilling each to watch Wanderers beat Royal Engineers 1-0. The only goal came from Morton Betts, who played under the pseudonym "A.H. Chequer," after Harrow Chequers, a club he belonged to. Harrow Chequers had entered that first competition too, but withdrew before playing, handing Wanderers a walkover in the first round.
William McCrum, the son of a linen magnate, kept goal for Milford in County Armagh, which finished the first Irish League season, 1890-91, without a point. In 1890 he proposed a penalty kick to stop defenders from deliberately tripping, holding or handling near their own goal. Many considered it too revolutionary, a mad scheme. Jack Reid, the Irish Football Association's secretary, took up the idea, and for twelve months the two men lobbied other delegates. On June 2, 1891, the International Football Association Board passed it unanimously at a meeting in Glasgow.
At Everton's match against Accrington on October 26, 1889, the referee ruled that a shot had not gone through the goal, and the crowd hooted him. John Alexander Brodie, a Liverpool engineer, is said to have been watching. On November 28 he applied for a patent on goal nets, and a revised design was approved in 1890. After trials in local matches, nets had their first big outing at a representative match in Nottingham in January 1891. Brodie went on to become Liverpool's city engineer and helped plan New Delhi, but he said the goal net was the invention he was most proud of.
7Four British associations hold half the votes on the rules
On the tile: IFAB votes1886
Soccer's Laws of the Game are kept not by FIFA alone but by the International Football Association Board, founded in 1886 by the football associations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The four British associations, Northern Ireland's now among them, still have one vote each. FIFA, which speaks for the more than 200 other national associations, has four. Changing a law takes a three-quarters majority, six of the eight votes, so FIFA cannot change the rules by itself, and neither can the British.
8One offside change in 1925 produced a third more goals
On the tile: Offside rule1925
For decades an attacker was offside unless at least three opponents were between him and the goal line when the ball was played. By the early 1920s defenders had turned that into a trap, pushing up almost to the halfway line to catch forwards offside, a tactic usually credited to Newcastle's Billy McCracken. Games grew monotonous with stoppages. In June 1925 the International Football Association Board cut the number to two. The next season, goals in the English Football League rose by about a third, from 4,700 to 6,373.
After England played Argentina at the 1966 World Cup, newspapers reported that the referee had cautioned both Bobby and Jack Charlton, though he had not made that clear during the game, and England's manager, Alf Ramsey, asked FIFA for clarification. Ken Aston, a former referee and schoolteacher in charge of refereeing at the tournament, began looking for a better way. "As I drove down Kensington High Street, the traffic light turned red," he recalled. "Yellow, take it easy; red, stop, you're off." The cards debuted at the 1970 World Cup.