What is your favourite football team?! Let’s discover five fun football facts for kids.
Football is played daily in over 200 countries in the world. Over 250 million people play soccer everyday. It is no surprise looking at those figures that football is one of the most watched sports in the world. Football has over 3.5 billion fans all over the world. That is nearly half of the world, how crazy is that! Do you watch football?
The first ever football was made from pigs or sheep’s bladder. I know it’s disgusting right! We can thank Charles Goodyear for changing this. He decided the pigs bladder wasn’t the best material for the football and decided to invent a new football made of rubber.
Throughout the years, the football we know today started to take shape. The real leather was switched with a softer synthetic one to reduce the amount of head and neck injuries caused from headering the ball. Ouch, that had to hurt!
The word “soccer,” which was introduced by the British as another name for football. However, the word ”soccer” wasn’t used for long and instead football stuck. This may seem hard to believe as we use it regularly in Ireland. Early in the nineteenth century, numerous British universities created their own versions of the medieval game “football,” each with its own set of rules.
Only a couple of countries around the world call football ‘soccer’. America, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Ireland are some of these countries. If you say ‘football’ in the United States of America, people will think of American football. ‘Canadian football’ is played in Canada and it is similar to American football. In Ireland ‘Gaelic football’ is played.
Unlike many other sports women have been playing football since it was invented over 2,000 years ago. For many years, women were allowed to play football. However in 1921, women were banned from playing football on the football pitches as it wasn’t seen as ‘ladylike’ anymore. This did not stop women though as they continued to play football on the rugby pitches instead! Girl Power! Women’s soccer was eventually recognised as a sport over 50 years later in 1971.
With each game lasting 90 minutes without any extra time added on, it is no surprise that the average football player runs a few miles in every match. Researchers have found that male football players run about seven or eight miles in a game! On the other hand, female players run about five miles in a 90 minute game, with female midfielders running about six miles in a game. That is a lot of running!
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about football as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic this sport is, you can move on to learn about other sports and activities like: Baseball, Super Bowl, Football World Cup, Gymnastics and Olympic Games.
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