Soccer is maybe the most popular sport in the world. The history of soccer goes along, evidently, with the soccer ball history. When talking about soccer ball history there are several periods to distinguish. Thus we can talk about early ball history, the balls in the 1800s, balls in the 1900s, and modern models.
Early soccer ball history goes back to the times before Christ. It is known that people have liked kicking either a ball or something similar to one, since the beginnings of times. South American Indians were among the first to use a form of elastic ball that pre-dated the use of rubber, discovered a thousand years later. The early soccer balls consisted of different items from animal and human skulls to cow or pig bladders and stitched up cloth. The Chinese used to play a game that involved dribbling a ball through gaps in a net spread between two poles, and this happened as early as 255BC. Ancient Greeks and Romans played a game which involved kicking and carrying a ball, whereas in certain ancient Egyptian rites are said to have had similarities with soccer.
Pre-medieval and medieval legends and stories that can be considered as part of the soccer ball history, also talk about bladders and skulls used for game playing. An instance of the use of an animal bladder ball is presented in the legend about the ‘game’ between two villages. An entire village used to kick a skull along a path to a nearby village square. The other villagers will make similar attempts. In medieval times they used the bladders from animals killed for winter sustenance. They used to inflate them and then try to keep the ‘ball’ in the air by by means of both feet and hands. In time people noticed that covering the bladder with leather would maintain the shape better and longer.
The soccer ball history of the 1800s was marked by the 1836 patenting of vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear. In 1855 the same Charles Goodyear managed to create the first vulcanized rubber soccer balls. In 1862 H.J. Lindon came up with one of the first inflatable bladders for soccer balls. Although he is the father of the rugby ball too, he did not patent the idea at the time because of the preference for the round ball. By the 1900s the soccer ball history had entered on a different path, bringing these entertainment objects a lot closer to what they are today.
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