A History of Girls Soccer
It’s winter sports season here at ACP, which means one of our favorite sports is back… soccer! This noble sport is enjoyed worldwide by several countries and is even enjoyed right here in Arizona. Since soccer, or more specifically for this article-girls soccer, is back, we thought it to be fitting to give a brief history of the noble sport of girls soccer.
To start off with, several kingdoms, empires, and nations have been playing soccer dating back up to 2000 years ago in ancient China, but Greece, Rome and parts of Central America have also made their claims to fame as the “first peoples to play soccer”. Eventually, England transitioned it into what we consider to be modern soccer (aka football outside of the United States).
By the 19th century, soccer had skyrocketed to international fame, with the first international game being played in late 1872. Because of its popularity, women began to take interest in soccer, which meant that after some convincing, the government sanctioned the first-ever women’s soccer match in March of 1895, and according to sources, the game drew in a crowd of 10,000 people and local newspapers at the time called it an “incredibly entertaining game”. Even though this was the first official game, several other unofficial games had been played prior to the game.
Even though women had played in 1895, it took until 1920 for the first international women’s soccer game to take place, which involved an English team that faced off against an opposing French team, and won making them the strongest team in Europe at the time.
But this is only part of the story, which comes together at an international basis, involving title 5, which brought the popularity of the sport to schools across the United States, but that is a different story for a different time.
