Umm… ever heard of Polo? Buzkashi? Chovgan? Pato? All of those are ball games played on horseback (except Buzkashi which is played on horseback but uses a a goat carcass instead of a ball)
Your analogy is also false because cars were invented before planes.
That was exactly my point… do you think nobody thought of kicking a ball around BEFORE they decided to break horses, train them and then push a ball around with a stick while on horseback?
To risk a valuable commodity as a horse in a game, it implies humanity was already well off enough (at least some people) to keep horses around with relative ease
My point was that the simplest form of a sport (on foot) would have likely existed (and indeed they did) WAAAAAAYYYYY before we decided to play sports on horses
At the end of the day, it seems both sources are valid: Horseback sports were the only ones officially recognized during medieval times; AS WELL AS, historical records showing games played by kicking balls from way before. Which of those 2 sources or both to a certain extent are part of the etymology of the modern word “football”
do you think nobody thought of kicking a ball around BEFORE they decided to break horses
of course they did, but why would a self respecting elite adopt peasant terminology for a beloved pass time? How could it get away with skewing early rules and standards if they couldb’t frame it entirely as theur own? How could they exclusively commodify it if it were not mythologized as their own creation?
Of course these point are vastly irrelevant to the discussion at hand but, make no mistake, i’d never have made them if they were to begin with.
That was exactly my point… do you think nobody thought of kicking a ball around BEFORE they decided to break horses, train them and then push a ball around with a stick while on horseback?
To risk a valuable commodity as a horse in a game, it implies humanity was already well off enough (at least some people) to keep horses around with relative ease
My point was that the simplest form of a sport (on foot) would have likely existed (and indeed they did) WAAAAAAYYYYY before we decided to play sports on horses
At the end of the day, it seems both sources are valid: Horseback sports were the only ones officially recognized during medieval times; AS WELL AS, historical records showing games played by kicking balls from way before. Which of those 2 sources or both to a certain extent are part of the etymology of the modern word “football”
of course they did, but why would a self respecting elite adopt peasant terminology for a beloved pass time? How could it get away with skewing early rules and standards if they couldb’t frame it entirely as theur own? How could they exclusively commodify it if it were not mythologized as their own creation?
Of course these point are vastly irrelevant to the discussion at hand but, make no mistake, i’d never have made them if they were to begin with.
Sure, but the term Football wasn’t coined when ball games were invented. It was coined much later when there were already lots of different sports.
Among the sports people people played at the time, Football was one where the participants are on foot.