Where Was Soccer Invented? A New Archaeological Discovery Suggests Scotland, Not England, Was the Sport’s Birthplace Archaeologists say they’ve found the ruins of a soccer field in southwest Scotland that date to the 17th century England has long been considered the birthplace of modern soccer. But new archaeological evidence is challenging that long-held belief. Pixabay An archaeological discovery in Scotland is stirring up debate about the origins of soccer. England has long claimed to be the birthplace of soccer, known around the world as “football.” However, researchers recently identified what they think was a 17th-century soccer field in Scotland. They argue the find proves football was invented in Scotland, not England. “Our discovery has serious implications for sports historians,” says Ged O’Brien, who founded the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow and helped find the field, to the New York Times’ Franz Lidz. “They will have to rewrite everything they think they know about the origins of the so-called beautiful game.” The quest started when they discovered a letter from Samuel Rutherford, who was a minister at a Presbyterian church in the town of Anworth in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, between 1627 and 1638. In the letter, he wrote: “There was a piece of ground on Mossrobin farm where on Sabbath afternoon the people used to play at foot-ball,” per the Telegraph’s Ben Rumsby. The minister then directed churchgoers to place stones across the field, to prevent athletes from playing on it. After reading this, O’Brien and a team of archaeologists decided to go looking for the stones. Sure enough, they found 14 large rocks lined up across a flat area that measured 147 feet wide by 280 feet long. The team also found five tracks leading to the edge of the field. Did Scotland invent modern football? | A View From The Terrace Watch on Based on their analyses, the stones do not appear to have been placed there for agricultural purposes, such as to mark the boundary between croplands or to fence in livestock. Soil samples suggest the stones were placed there around 400 years ago, which aligns with the timing of Rutherford’s letter. “This is not a wall. It’s a temporary barrier to stop a particular event happening—in this case, football,” says Phil Richardson, an archaeologist with Archaeology Scotland who worked on the project, to the Telegraph. O’Brien also argues that, if residents were playing football every Sunday, they must have established a set of agreed-upon rules for the game. They likely weren’t playing a violent version of the game, because they had to be able to go to work on Monday uninjured. “This is the ancestor, the grandparent, of modern world football, and it’s Scottish,” O’Brien tells the Telegraph. However, not everyone agrees with that interpretation. Perhaps Scots were playing “foot-ball” at Mossrobin farm, but their game may have “no known connection to modern association football,” says Steve Wood, a trustee at the Sheffield Home of Football, a British charity that aims to preserve the city’s football heritage, to the Times. Sheffield is home to the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield F.C., which was founded in 1857. Historians have long theorized that modern football evolved from “mob football,” a chaotic, violent game popular in the Middle Ages that had almost no rules and no set time limit. But by the mid-19th century, footballers decided to draft a set of rules. They were adopted by the Football Association in London, which was founded in 1863. Based on O’Brien’s interpretation of the evidence, however, footballers in Scotland had already invented the game more than 200 years earlier. “Football has been played in Scotland for hundreds of years,” O’Brien tells BBC Scotland’s “A View From the Terrace.” “Not mob-football, but proper football.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.