Association Football

Association football, commonly called football or soccer, is a team sport played between two sides of eleven players who try to move a ball into the opposing goal using any part of the body other than the arms and hands, except for the goalkeeper. The modern sport was codified in England in 1863, when representatives of several London clubs and schools met to found the Football Association and agreed a single set of laws, ending a period in which different schools and clubs had played the game under different, incompatible rules. Football-like ball games with contested claims to being ancestors of the modern sport are far older and much less documented, including cuju, a kicking ball game played in China during the Han dynasty, and various local folk football games recorded in medieval England, so while the 1863 codification is well documented, no single origin point for football as a broad kicking game commands scholarly consensus. A standard match is two 45-minute halves; the side scoring more goals wins, a goal counted whenever the whole ball crosses the opposing goal line between the posts and under the crossbar. Each side fields one goalkeeper, permitted to handle the ball inside a marked penalty area, and ten outfield players customarily grouped into defenders, midfielders and forwards in a formation the team chooses and can change during play, most commonly written as a number code such as four defenders, four midfielders, two forwards.