This week, the men’s football teams of England and Scotland play a friendly, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the first international football fixture, which took place at Hamilton Crescent, in Glasgow, in 1872. If you’re waiting up for the highlights, look away now: 4,000 people watched a nil-nil draw. Somehow, despite this drab start, association football has had a moderately successful century and a half since then.
Without any further delay, here’s this edition’s chart. It’s my favourite of the series so far.
Those of you who aren’t close followers of football may not be aware of the myth of ‘heavy balls’. It’s the idea that, before our ‘modern’ game was corrupted by long hair, foreign players, tactics and shiny boots, the balls were heavier. It’s partly figurative, a way of saying that the competitors (all men1) were tougher. You had to be, the balls were so much heavier. Goal kicks would rarely reach the halfway line. Accurate cross-field passes were a collector’s item.
Except, it isn’t true. From the earliest regulations about the size and weight of a football (in the 1880s) the specified dry weight of a ball hasn’t really changed. Between the 1880s and 1930s it was 13-15 ounces, since 1937 it has been 14-16 ounces.
In some matches, the ball would have got heavier as the game went on. When made out of leather (the norm before the 1970s) and played in wet conditions, the ball would absorb water. Leather was rougher and stitching would have made controlling the ball with anything other than your foot, and certainly heading it, much more painful. But the ball Geoff Hurst scored with in the 1966 World Cup final, and the ball that Lionel Messi scored with in the 2022 World Cup final would have weighed exactly the same.
There’s a point to this (my gratitude to any non-football fans who’ve made it this far). There’s a popular myth of decline that younger generations are softer – perhaps even explicitly weaker – than previous generations.
The Canadian researcher Paul Farie is, as ever, invaluable here. Using press clippings from the last century he reminds us that the kind of sentiment that sustains this myth of decline – and leads us to believe that footballs were heavier a few decades ago – has been repeated ad infinitum in popular discourse for generations.
As with all decline narratives – particularly those that rail against the attitudes and behaviours of younger generations – there’s not much basis in fact. Today’s footballers – men and women – kick the ball further, harder and more accurately then any previous generation did. They play more matches and run more yards. They do so because of their own hard-earned improvements in strength, skill and conditioning – and despite the ball weighing exactly as much as it always did.
What does this mean?
Concerns about the impact of repeatedly heading a football are just as valid now as they were then. It is highly likely that heading is effectively banned in training and youth development in the future.
If there’s a recurring theme in myths of decline, its that young people have it easier than their parents/grandparents and yet are still somehow an enduring disappointment. I’m yet to find any examples of this being empirically true (at a cohort-wide level).
The idea that we’re getting softer and weaker is easily disproved in the relatively narrow context of elite sportspeople. But it’s an accusation that seems especially likely to be levelled at men where in its more damaging articulations it’s a bedrock of the kind of toxicity that has sustained the notoriety and appeal of celebrity misogynists and traditionalists.
Despite the popularity of women’s football in the first few decades of the 20th century, the Football Association effectively banned it until 1970. Suzanne Wrack wrote an excellent long read on this (adapted from her book) last summer, just before the Lionesses won the Euros. It’s well worth your time.