The earliest varieties of soccer can be traced back almost 3000 years ago. The earliest texts that refer to a game that closely resembles soccer came from Japan and China. As early as 1004 BC, players in Japan were known to kick a ball on a small field. There is a Chinese text in the Munich Ethnological Museum from approximately 50 BC where it mentions teams from Japan and China that played a game that closely resembled soccer. In 611 AD in Kyoto, the ancient Japanese capital, it is known for sure that a soccer game was played. The ancient Romans played a game that somewhat resembled modern soccer. The early Olympic Games in ancient Rome featured twenty-seven men on a side who completed so vigorously that two-thirds of them had to be hospitalized after a fifty-minute game.
Although it is unclear how the sport traveled from Asia to Europe, it did eventually make it to England and by the time it did it had gained a bad reputation. The reputation of soccer was so bad that the government had passed laws that banned soccer. In King Edward's reign of England (1307-1327), laws there were laws that punished anyone caught playing soccer with imprisonment. King Edward's proclamation said: "For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise, which God forbid, we command and forbid on behalf of the King, on pain of imprisonment, such game to be used in the city future." King Henry IV and Henry VIII passed laws against the sport, and Queen Elizabeth I "had soccer players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance" Laws could not stop the sport, which was finally granted official sanction in England in 1681. A historical record of the development of soccer in England shows that Eton College had the earliest known rules of the game in 1815. Standardized rules known as the Cambridge rules were adopted by England's major colleges.
