I remember reading of people in the times around Henry VIII playing at individual games/sports: some sort of bowling and tennis, mostly, but when did team sports get their start?
Did they possibly not exist until there was a middle class to play in them?
(For the sake of discussion, let’s define a team sport as requiring more than one person each on at least two opposing teams, and it’s the team that is considered to have won or lost, not any one player.)
I’ve read that the Mayans (or possibly the Aztecs) had some sort of team game which involved putting a ball through a hoop which was played up to 3 thousand years ago. (And in which the losing team was kill, but that’s not the point.)
I’ve read that it used to be a tradition at local festivals to have a big game. You’d either have one village competing against another or you’d have something like the people on the south side of town competing against the north side. The rules were pretty informal - sort of like a version of rugby. Two crowds would gather in a field or market square and they’d try to push or carry a ball towards some goal line.
Rugby - as currently constituted - sprang from schools. Rugby School in particular (obviously). I think a large amount of the codification of sports into something that we might recognise today comes from Victorian Public Schools - as other posters point out, there were forms of many sports knocking around in the country, but I’m fairly sure actual common rules across the nation were formalised so that schools could play against once another.
Ah – this is the sort of thing I was thinking of. Where you have more of less established teams that play on a continuing basis, rather than some impromptu game springing up at a festival or market day or some such.
Which was why I was guessing it had to come after a middle class existed: you needed people used to, um, working as part of a team, plus enough people with enough money and leisure to indulge in such a clear non-necessity.
Every version of frontón / jai alai has a two-people version, with pairs often lasting for a long period. They don’t get “team names” but still, those games are quite old and so’s having a partner you usually play with. What’s not very old is having long championships or championships which involve going to lots of other places, as transportation Way Back When wasn’t exactly a matter of waiting for the 9:28 bus and being back in time for lunch.
I’m thinking maybe the issue isn’t so much a “lack of a middle class” (the people forming the first named sports teams in Spain were upper-middle at the very least, and the middle class has existed a lot longer than those teams) as the lack of long tournaments which would require permanent teams. This matches what Cumbrian said, too.
I am loathe to quote wiki with impunity but, for what it is worth, here is the wiki on the history of football. There are no citations but it sounds roundabout right from what I can remember reading in actual books.
It’s worth noting that the Cambridge Rules were drawn up by old boys of various different schools that would have played to their own rules - presumably to create a unified game to played between Cambridge’s colleges (though this is, in some respects, my own WAG - an educated WAG but a WAG nonetheless). This chimes with Nava’s point about there being no real codification until transport existed to allow the playing of games beyond your own town (both Cambridge and Oxford are small enough for people to walk to the various college sports grounds with no need for public transport).
ETA: Also, I should add that quite a lot of the oldest rugby clubs in England are old boys clubs from various different schools or other academic institutions. There’s bloody hundreds of those knocking around in London.
Certainly true in the US. There were a million versions of “base ball”, “town ball”, and “rounders” knocking around until the railroad brought a push for codification and standardization.