Sports are all around you. They are a way of living for many and they produce stars with millions of followers, but also stars with millions of profit. Sports are not anymore just a game. They aren’t only a way of keeping body and spirit healthy and in good condition. Thanks to television and marketing, today sports are business and every major sport event is spectacle for it self.

But, it wasn’t  always like this. Then athletes were just ordinary people, usually underpaid and they were involved into sports because they wanted to play it, not to become superstars. At the beginning, although the rules were pretty much the same as today, the sports were different. And when we are speaking about beginning of the sports, there is one country (or more precisely kingdom that unites more countries) where some of the today`s most popular sports were born. We are talking about United Kingdom which has given birth to sports like: football, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, hockey, boxing and many more.

Yes, it looks like we are mentioning all famous sports from some Summer Olympic games but that is a fact and a tribute to people and organizations from United Kingdom that gave us these sports and that we will write a few lines about some of the most famous. Let’s start with the list of the most popular sports given to us from the UK:

Football or Soccer

Officially the most popular game in the world, currently played by 250 millions of people in more than 200 countries, all over the world. Modern football (we must distinguish that because games with players and ball were noticed in almost every period of the history of the human kind) is born, or better said its rules was codified in England in 1863. Its name was Association Football, and that is to distinguish from other forms of football played at that time, as Rugby football, for example.

If anyone in the world still don`t know what is football (and that is hard to believe) here is a brief explanation of the rules and gameplay.

Football  is a sport played between two teams of typically eleven players with a spherical ball. In general play, the goalkeepers are the only players allowed to touch the ball with their hands or arms (unless the ball is carried out of play, where the field players are required to restart by a throw-in of the game ball), while the field players typically use their feet to kick the ball, occasionally using other parts of their legs, their torso, or their head. The team that scores the most goals by the end of the match wins. If the score is tied at the end of the game, either a draw is declared or the game goes into extra time and/or a penalty shootout, depending on the format of the competition.

Cricket

Cricket was first played in England in 16 century. Two centuries later it becomes the national sport of England. With the expansion of British Empire cricket was introduced to other overseas nations that are united under the Crown. In mid 19-th century first international matches were being held, and today this game is most popular in England, Australia, New Zealand, all over Indian subcontinent and South Africa.

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on a field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the runs scored by the batting team. A run is scored by the striking batsman hitting the ball with his bat, running to the opposite end of the pitch and touching the crease there without being dismissed. The teams switch between batting and fielding at the end of an innings.

In professional cricket the length of a game ranges from 20 overs of six bowling deliveries per side to Test cricket played over five days.

Rugby

Rugby  is a full contact team sport which originated in England in the early 19th century.

It is played with an oval-shaped ball with dimensions of 28–30 centimetres (11–12 in) in length, circumference over length of 74–77 centimetres (29–30 in) and circumference over width of 58–62 centimetres (23–24 in). It is played on a field up to 100 metres (330 ft) long and 70 metres (230 ft) wide with H-shaped goal posts on each goal line.

Tennis

The modern game of tennis originated in Birmingham, England, in the late 19th century as “lawn tennis”.The rules of tennis have not changed much since the 1890s. Two exceptions are that from 1908 to 1961 the server had to keep one foot on the ground at all times, and the adoption of the tie-break in the 1970s. A recent addition to professional tennis has been the adoption of electronic review technology coupled with a point challenge system, which allows a player to contest the line call of a point.

Tennis is a sport usually played between two players (singles) or between two teams of two players each (doubles). Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net and into the opponent’s court. The object of the game is to play the ball in such a way that the opponent is not able to play a good return.

Golf

Modern competitive golf originated in Scotland. In the early 20th century British golfers were the best in the world, winning nearly all of the U.S. Open championships before World War I

Golf is a precision club and ball sport in which competing players (or golfers) use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes.It is one of the few ball games that does not require a standardized playing area. Instead, the game is played on a “course”, generally consisting of an arranged progression of either 9 or 18 “holes”. Each hole on the course must contain a “tee box” and a “putting green” with the actual hole, and there are various other standardized forms of terrain in between such as the fairway, rough, and hazards, but each hole on a course and indeed among virtually all courses is unique in its specific layout and arrangement.

Source: Wikipedia