At the Freemasons' Tavern in London, delegates from a dozen clubs and schools convened over several meetings, culminating in mid-October, to hammer out a unified rulebook for football. The resulting Laws of the Game banned hacking and carrying the ball by hand, definitively splitting 'association football' from what would become rugby, and giving birth to the sport now played by billions.
Before 1863, football was chaos: every school and club played by its own rules, some allowing players to catch and run with the ball, others permitting shin-kicking ('hacking') as a legitimate tactic. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, a London solicitor and football enthusiast, wrote to newspapers proposing a governing body to standardize the game, and the Football Association was born from his initiative.
The fiercest debate concerned hacking. Blackheath's representative argued passionately that eliminating it would 'take all the pluck and courage out of the game' and introduce 'a lot of mere skipping and dancing.' When the vote went against him, Blackheath and several rugby-inclined clubs walked away from the FA entirely, eventually founding the Rugby Football Union in 1871.
Morley became the FA's first secretary and later president, and the original rulebook he helped draft, just thirteen laws, remains the DNA of modern football. Within decades the sport spread through the British Empire and beyond, becoming the world's most popular game.
Key people: Ebenezer Cobb Morley