The Brutal Origins of the Beautiful Game

How football went from being "a bloody and murthering practice" to a global sensation

An Italian calcio match, 1561 (public domain)

In 1583, a pamphleteer named Philip Stubbes railed against the growth of a violent game that was sweeping across England. He wrote about the game in his pamphlet “An Anatomie of Abuses,” calling it (in Old English, which I’ve cleaned up a bit) more of

A bloody and murthering practise, then a felowly sporte or …