Football William & Mary Athletics

Calcio Fiorentino – a modern revival of Renaissance football from 16th century Florence. Tag Rugby – non-contact variant in which a flag attached to a player is removed to indicate a tackle. Founded 1869 as the Hamilton Foot Ball Club, they eventually merged with the Hamilton Flying Wildcats to form the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a team still active in the Canadian Football League. The iconic ball with a regular pattern of hexagons and pentagons did not become popular until the 1960s, and was first used in the World Cup in 1970. A pair of football boots were ordered by King Henry VIII of England in 1526.
Nonetheless, the sport has retained a following in the United Kingdom; the NFL operates a media network in the country, and since 2007 has hosted the NFL International Series in London. Japan was introduced to the sport in 1934 by Paul Rusch, a teacher and Christian missionary who helped to establish football teams at three universities in Tokyo. Play was halted during World War II, but the sport began growing in popularity again after the war. As of แทงบอล , there are more than 400 high school football teams in Japan, with over 15,000 participants, and over 100 teams play in the Kantoh Collegiate Football Association . The college champion plays the champion of the X-League (a semi-professional league in which teams are financed by corporations) in the Rice Bowl to determine Japan’s national champion.
The league has an annual revenue of around US$15 billion, making it the most valuable sports league in the world. Other professional leagues exist worldwide, but the sport does not have the international popularity of other American sports like baseball or basketball. American football also plays a significant role in American culture.
The National Football League was founded in 1920 and has since become the largest and most popular sport in the United States. The NFL has the highest average attendance of any sporting league in the world, with an average attendance of 66,960 during the 2011 NFL season. The NFL championship game is called the Super Bowl, and is among the biggest events in club sports worldwide.
In Canada, the first documented football match was a practice game played on 9 November 1861, at University College, University of Toronto (approximately 400 yards west of Queen’s Park). One of the participants in the game involving University of Toronto students was William Mulock, later Chancellor of the school. In 1864, at Trinity College, Toronto, F. Barlow Cumberland, Frederick A. Bethune, and Christopher Gwynn, one of the founders of Milton, Massachusetts, devised rules based on rugby football. A “running game”, resembling rugby football, was then taken up by the Montreal Football Club in Canada in 1868. Public schools’ dominance of sports in the UK began to wane after the Factory Act of 1850, which significantly increased the recreation time available to working class children. Before 1850, many British children had to work six days a week, for more than twelve hours a day.