Sports Invented by Country: Where 35 Sports Began, from Football to Futsal

Most of the world’s major sports were invented or first written down in a handful of countries. England gave the world association football (rules agreed in London in 1863), rugby, cricket, lawn tennis, badminton, table tennis and squash. Scotland gave golf and curling; the United States produced basketball (1891), volleyball (1895), baseball and American football; Canada organised ice hockey (Montreal, 1875) and lacrosse; Japan created judo (1882) and preserved sumo; Korea developed taekwondo; India gave chess and kabaddi; Persia (Iran) gave polo; and Hawaii gave surfing.

All 35 Sports in One Table: Country, Place and Date

Where a sport grew from older folk games, the date is when its rules were first written down; for ancient games it is the earliest reliable record.

England’s Victorian Rulebooks: Football, Rugby, Cricket and the Racket Games

England’s lead comes mostly from writing games down. Football had no shared rules until 26 October 1863, when representatives of eleven London clubs and schools met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in Great Queen Street and formed the Football Association. Its rules are the root of the Laws of the Game, maintained by the International Football Association Board since 1886.

The handling game took its name from Rugby School in Warwickshire, where pupils wrote the first rules down in 1845. The story that William Webb Ellis ran with the ball in 1823 was first told by Matthew Bloxam in 1876, and some rugby historians now discount it as an origin myth. English clubs formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871, and in 1895 northern clubs meeting in Huddersfield broke away over payments to players, creating what became rugby league.

Cricket is far older. The earliest definite reference is evidence given at a court case in Guildford, Surrey, in January 1597 (1598 by today’s calendar). The first known code of Laws was drafted in 1744, and the Marylebone Cricket Club in London has looked after them since 1788. It followed the empire to India, Australia, South Africa and the Caribbean, which is why the cricket-playing nations still map so closely onto the old empire.

The racket sports have English roots too, with qualifications. Real tennis began in 12th-century France as jeu de paume, but lawn tennis was first played between 1859 and 1865 by Harry Gem and Augurio Perera on a croquet lawn in Birmingham; Walter Clopton Wingfield patented his version, “sphairistikè”, in December 1873, devised for a garden party in Wales. Badminton is named after the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House in Gloucestershire, yet its first rules were drawn up by British officers in Poona (Pune), India, in 1873. Squash appeared around 1830 at Harrow School, and table tennis began as a Victorian after-dinner parlour game. Netball grew from basketball, introduced to students in Hampstead in 1893.

Scotland’s Links and Lochs, Ireland’s GAA

Golf’s first written record is a ban: in 1457 James II of Scotland outlawed the game because it distracted men from archery practice. The oldest surviving rules were compiled in March 1744 for the Gentlemen Golfers at Leith, now the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, and in 1764 St Andrews cut its Old Course from 22 holes to 18, creating the standard round. Curling grew up on Scotland’s frozen ponds and lochs. A stone inscribed with the date 1511 was found when a pond was drained at Dunblane, and the first written reference to a contest with stones on ice comes from the records of Paisley Abbey in February 1541.

Ireland organised its field sports as a cultural project. On 1 November 1884 a group led by Michael Cusack of County Clare and Maurice Davin met in the billiard room of Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles, County Tipperary, and founded the Gaelic Athletic Association to preserve “Ireland’s unique games”. Hurling, a stick-and-ball game far older than any written rules, is now on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. Gaelic football was arranged into a playing code by the GAA in 1884 and its rules were widely distributed in 1887, the year of the first All-Ireland Senior Football Championship final.

Springfield, Holyoke and Montreal: North America’s Indoor and Ice Games

Two American sports came from the YMCA network in western Massachusetts within four years. In December 1891 James Naismith, a Canadian-born instructor at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, needed an indoor game to keep a class active. He wrote 13 basic rules and nailed a peach basket to an elevated running track; the baskets were not replaced by metal hoops with backboards until 1906. Naismith was born in Almonte, Ontario, in 1861, so basketball has a Canadian inventor and an American birthplace.

In 1895 William G. Morgan, the YMCA physical education director in nearby Holyoke, devised a gentler alternative he called “mintonette” because it borrowed from badminton. Renamed volleyball, it joined the Olympic programme at Tokyo in 1964. Baseball’s modern form dates from the Knickerbocker Rules, codified in 1845 by New York’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club; the first recorded game under them was played on 19 June 1846 at Hoboken, New Jersey. American football started as a soccer-style match between Rutgers and Princeton on 6 November 1869, before Walter Camp’s rules from 1880 added the line of scrimmage and downs. Snowboarding (Muskegon, Michigan) and pickleball (Bainbridge Island, Washington) followed in 1965.

Canada’s contribution centres on Montreal. The first organised indoor game of ice hockey was played at the Victoria Skating Rink on 3 March 1875 with James Creighton and McGill University students. Lacrosse is older than any European arrival: Indigenous peoples of North America were playing it by the 12th century. The Montreal dentist William George Beers founded the Montreal Lacrosse Club in 1856 and codified the game in 1860, cutting teams to 12 players. In 1994 the National Sports of Canada Act named lacrosse the national summer sport and ice hockey the winter one, as our guide to the national sport of Canada explains.

From the Kojiki to the Kodokan: Japan, Korea and China

Japan’s three entries span more than a thousand years. Sumo is first mentioned in the Kojiki of 712, which describes a wrestling match between two gods deciding possession of the Japanese islands. Karate developed in the Ryukyu Kingdom, now Okinawa Prefecture, from local “te” fighting mixed with Chinese martial arts. Judo has a precise birth. In February 1882 Kanō Jigorō opened a dōjō at the Eishō-ji temple in Tokyo, now treated as the founding of the Kodokan. Judo entered the Olympics in 1964.

Taekwondo was developed in Korea in the 1940s and 1950s by martial artists with experience of karate and Chinese styles; its sparring has been an Olympic event since 2000. China’s cuju, a kicking game aimed at a raised opening, appears in a military work from the 3rd–2nd century BC. FIFA cites it as the earliest kicking game with documentary evidence, though the modern game descends from the English rules of 1863 rather than from cuju.

Polo, Chess and Kabaddi: Persia and the Indian Subcontinent

Polo began as chovgan, an equestrian game played in Persia and Central Asia from about the 6th century BC. The modern name came later from Manipur in north-east India, where British tea planters learned the game and founded a club at Silchar, Assam, in 1859; for Iran today, see our guide to the national sport of Iran. Chess descends from chaturanga, whose earliest clear reference comes from north India under the Gupta Empire in the 6th century AD; it reached Europe through Persia. Kabaddi has ancient Indian antecedents, but its rules were formalised in India in the 1920s and it became an Asian Games medal sport in Beijing in 1990.

Melbourne, Montevideo, Berlin and Hawaii: Codes Born Far from Britain

Australian rules football has one of the oldest written football codes, drafted four years before the FA’s. In July 1858 the cricketer Tom Wills, who had played early rugby at Rugby School, wrote to a Melbourne newspaper calling for a football club to keep cricketers fit in winter, and the Melbourne Football Club published the first laws in May 1859. Futsal comes from Montevideo, where in 1930 the teacher Juan Carlos Ceriani wrote rules for an indoor five-a-side game for YMCAs. Handball was codified in northern Europe: the Danish teacher Holger Nielsen published rules in 1906, and the modern rules were issued in Berlin on 29 October 1917.

Surfing comes from the Pacific. Polynesians reached Hawaii from Tahiti and the Marquesas from around AD 400, and it was in Hawaii that riding waves standing upright on boards developed. Duke Kahanamoku spread it abroad, surfing at Freshwater Beach, Sydney, on 24 December 1914. Southeast Asia’s sepak takraw, a net game played with the feet, was standardised in 1960 when officials from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Myanmar met in Kuala Lumpur, and it is now counted as the national sport of Malaysia.