The year was 1862 and J.C.Thring, a schoolboy at Shrewsbury school, England, sat down and drew up ten rules for the game of football. Among the rules was one that there should be “no tripping” and another was that “kicks should be aimed at the ball”. These rules were then published in “The Winter Game: Rules of Football by J.C.Thring”.

J.C.Thring had thought it necessary to set down a set of rules for football because all the public schools had their own rules which caused many problems when the students went on to university and wanted to play there. The following year, 1863, the students at the university of Cambridge, who had been playing since the 1850s on an oval pitch on Parker’s Piece, a grassy area in Cambridge, improved the rules that became known as the “Cambridge rules”. The Cambridge rules were adopted by the Football Association which was founded the same year, 1863, and later by Fifa, the international federation. These are the basis of the rules that are used today to control the game of Association Football.