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Flute

The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, flutes are edge-blown aerophones. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist or flutist.

Paleolithic flutes with hand-bored holes are the earliest known identifiable musical instruments. A number of flutes dating to about 53,000 to 45,000 years ago have been found in the Swabian Jura region of present-day Germany, indicating a developed musical tradition from the earliest period of modern human presence in Europe. While the oldest flutes currently known were found in Europe, Asia also has a long history with the instrument. A playable bone flute discovered in China is dated to about 9,000 years ago. The Americas also had an ancient flute culture, with instruments found in Caral, Peru, dating back 5,000 years and in Labrador dating back about 7,500 years.

The bamboo flute has a long history, especially in China and India. Flutes have been discovered in historical records and artworks starting in the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046-256 BC). The oldest written sources reveal the Chinese were using the kuan (a reed instrument) and hsio (or xiao, an end-blown flute, often of bamboo) in the 12th–11th centuries BC, followed by the chi (or ch'ih) in the 9th century BC and the yüeh in the 8th century BC. Of these, the bamboo chi is the oldest documented transverse flute.

Musicologist Curt Sachs called the cross flute (Sanskrit: vāṃśī) "the outstanding wind instrument of ancient India", and said that religious artwork depicting "celestial music" instruments was linked to music with an "aristocratic character". The Indian bamboo cross flute, Bansuri, was sacred to Krishna, who is depicted with the instrument in Hindu art. In India, the cross flute appeared in reliefs from the 1st century AD at Sanchi and Amaravati from the 2nd–4th centuries AD.

According to historian Alexander Buchner, there were flutes in Europe in prehistoric times, but they disappeared from the continent until flutes arrived from Asia by way of "North Africa, Hungary, and Bohemia". The end-blown flute began to be seen in illustration in the 11th century. Transverse flutes entered Europe through Byzantium and were depicted in Greek art about 800 AD. The transverse flute had spread into Europe by way of Germany, and was known as the German flute.

Etymology and terminology
The word flute first appeared in the English language during the Middle English period, as floute, flowte, or flo(y)te, possibly from Old French flaute and Old Provençal flaüt, or possibly from Old French fleüte, flaüte, flahute via Middle High German floite or Dutch fluit. The English verb flout has the same linguistic root, and the modern Dutch verb fluiten still shares the two meanings. Attempts to trace the word back to the Latin flare (to blow, inflate) have been called "phonologically impossible" or "inadmissable". The first known use of the word flute was in the 14th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this was in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Hous of Fame, c. 1380.

A musician who plays any instrument in the flute family can be called a flutist, flautist, or flute player. Flutist dates back to at least 1603, the earliest quotation cited by the Oxford English Dictionary. Flautist was used in 1860 by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Marble Faun, after being adopted during the 18th century from Italy (flautista, itself from flauto), like many musical terms in England since the Italian Renaissance. Other English terms, now virtually obsolete, are fluter (15th–19th centuries)  and flutenist (17th and 18th centuries).

History
A fragment of a juvenile cave bear's femur, with two to four holes, was found at Divje Babe in Slovenia and dated to about 43,000 years ago. It may be the oldest flute discovered, but this has been disputed. In 2008, a flute dated to at least 35,000 years ago was discovered in Hohle Fels cave near Ulm, Germany. It is a five-holed flute with a V-shaped mouthpiece and was made from a vulture wing bone. The discovery was published in the journal Nature, in August 2009. This was the oldest confirmed musical instrument ever found, until a redating of flutes found in Geißenklösterle cave revealed them to be older, at 42,000 to 43,000 years.

The Hohle Fels flute is one of several found in the Hohle Fels cavern next to the Venus of Hohle Fels and a short distance from the oldest known human carving. On announcing the discovery, scientists suggested that the "finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe". Scientists have also suggested that this flute's discovery may help to explain "the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between" Neanderthals and early modern human.

An 18.7 cm flute with three holes, made from a mammoth tusk and dated to 30,000–37,000 years ago, was found in 2004 in the Geißenklösterle cave near Ulm, in the southern German Swabian Alb. Two flutes made from swan bones were excavated a decade earlier from the same cave and dated to about 36,000 years ago.

A playable 9,000-year-old Chinese Gudi (literally, "bone flute") was excavated from a tomb in Jiahu along with 29 similar specimens. They were made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes and each has five to eight holes. The earliest extant Chinese transverse flute is a chi (篪) flute discovered in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at the Suizhou site, Hubei province, China, dating from 433 BC, during the later Zhou Dynasty. It is fashioned of lacquered bamboo with closed ends and has five stops on the flute's side instead of the top. Shi Jing, traditionally said to have been compiled and edited by Confucius, mentions chi flutes.

The earliest written reference to a flute is from a Sumerian-language cuneiform tablet dated to c. 2600–2700 BC. Flutes are mentioned in a recently translated tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem whose development spanned the period from about 2100–600 BC. A set of cuneiform tablets knows as the "musical texts" provide precise tuning instructions for seven scales of a stringed instrument (assumed to be a Babylonian lyre). One of those scales is named "embūbum", which is an Akkadian word for "flute".

The Bible, in Genesis 4:21, cites Jubal as being the "father of all those who play the ugab and the kinnor". The former Hebrew term is believed by some to refer to a wind instrument, or wind instruments in general, the latter to a stringed instrument, or stringed instruments in general. As such, Jubal is regarded in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the inventor of the flute (a word used in some translations of this biblical passage). In other sections of the Bible (1 Samuel 10:5, 1 Kings 1:40, Isaiah 5:12 and 30:29, and Jeremiah 48:36) the flute is referred to as "chalil", from the root word for "hollow". Archeological digs in the Holy Land have discovered flutes from the Bronze Age (c. 4000–1200 BC) and the Iron Age (1200–586 BC), the latter era "witness[ing] the creation of the Israelite kingdom and its separation into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judea."

Some early flutes were made out of tibias (shin bones). The flute has also always been an essential part of Indian culture, and the cross flute believed by several accounts to originate in India as Indian literature from 1500 BC has made vague references to the cross flute.

Acoustics
A flute produces sound when a stream of air directed across a hole in the instrument creates a vibration of air at the hole. The airstream creates a Bernoulli or siphon. This excites the air contained in the resonant cavity (usually cylindrical) within the flute. The flutist changes the pitch of the sound produced by opening and closing holes in the body of the instrument, thus changing the effective length of the resonator and its corresponding resonant frequency. By varying the air pressure, a flutist can also change the pitch by causing the air in the flute to resonate at a harmonic rather than the fundamental frequency without opening or closing any of the holes.

Head joint geometry appears particularly critical to acoustic performance and tone, but there is no clear consensus among manufacturers on a particular shape. Acoustic impedance of the embouchure hole appears the most critical parameter. Critical variables affecting this acoustic impedance include: the length of the chimney (the hole between the lip-plate and the head tube), chimney diameter, and radii or curvature of the ends of the chimney and any designed restriction in the "throat" of the instrument, such as that in the Japanese Nohkan Flute.

A study in which professional flutists were blindfolded could find no significant differences between flutes made from a variety of metals. In two different sets of blind listening, no flute was correctly identified in a first listening, and in a second, only the silver flute was identified. The study concluded that there was "no evidence that the wall material has any appreciable effect on the sound color or dynamic range".

Materials
Historically, flutes were most commonly made of reed, bamboo, wood, or other organic materials. They were also made of glass, bone, and nephrite. Most modern flutes are made of metal, primarily silver and nickel. Silver is less common than silver alloys. Other materials used for flutes include gold, platinum, grenadilla and copper.

Types

In its most basic form, a flute is an open tube which is blown into. After focused study and training, players use controlled air-direction to create an airstream in which the air is aimed downward into the tone hole of the flute's headjoint. There are several broad classes of flutes. With most flutes, the musician blows directly across the edge of the mouthpiece, with 1/4 of their bottom lip covering the embouchure hole. However, some flutes, such as the whistle, gemshorn, flageolet, recorder, tin whistle, tonette, fujara, and ocarina have a duct that directs the air onto the edge (an arrangement that is termed a "fipple"). These are known as fipple flutes. The fipple gives the instrument a distinct timbre which is different from non-fipple flutes and makes the instrument easier to play, but takes a degree of control away from the musician.

Another division is between side-blown (or transverse) flutes, such as the Western concert flute, piccolo, fife, dizi and bansuri; and end-blown flutes, such as the ney, xiao, kaval, danso, shakuhachi, Anasazi flute and quena. The player of a side-blown flute uses a hole on the side of the tube to produce a tone, instead of blowing on an end of the tube. End-blown flutes should not be confused with fipple flutes such as the recorder, which are also played vertically but have an internal duct to direct the air flow across the edge of the tone hole.

Flutes may be open at one or both ends. The ocarina, xun, pan pipes, police whistle, and bosun's whistle are closed-ended. Open-ended flutes such as the concert flute and the recorder have more harmonics, and thus more flexibility for the player, and brighter timbres. An organ pipe may be either open or closed, depending on the sound desired.

Flutes may have any number of pipes or tubes, though one is the most common number. Flutes with multiple resonators may be played one resonator at a time (as is typical with pan pipes) or more than one at a time (as is typical with double flutes).

Flutes can be played with several different air sources. Conventional flutes are blown with the mouth, although some cultures use nose flutes. The flue pipes of organs, which are acoustically similar to duct flutes, are blown by bellows or fans.

Wooden one-keyed
Usually in D, wooden transverse flutes were played in European classical music mainly in the period from the early 18th century to the early 19th century. As such, the instrument is often indicated as baroque flute. Gradually marginalized by the Western concert flute in the 19th century, baroque flutes were again played from the late 20th century as part of the historically informed performance practice.

Concert
The Western concert flute, a descendant of the medieval German flute, is a transverse treble flute that is closed at the top. An embouchure hole is positioned near the top, and the flutist blows across it. The flute has circular tone holes larger than the finger holes of its baroque predecessors. The size and placement of tone holes, key mechanism, and fingering system used to produce the notes in the flute's range were evolved from 1832 to 1847 by Theobald Boehm, who helped greatly improve the instrument's dynamic range and intonation over its predecessors. With some refinements (and the rare exception of the Kingma system and other custom adapted fingering systems), Western concert flutes typically conform to Boehm's design, known as the Boehm system. Beginner's flutes are made of nickel, silver, or brass that is silver-plated, while professionals use solid silver, gold, and sometimes even platinum flutes. There are also modern wooden-bodied flutes usually with silver or gold keywork. The wood is usually African Blackwood.

The standard concert flute is pitched in C and has a range of three octaves starting from middle C or one half step lower when a B foot is attached. This means that the concert flute is one of the highest-pitched common orchestra and concert band instruments.

Concert variants
The piccolo plays an octave higher than the regular treble flute. Lower members of the flute family include the G alto and C bass flutes that are used occasionally, and are pitched a perfect fourth and an octave below the concert flute, respectively. The contra-alto, contrabass, subcontrabass, double contrabass, and hyperbass flutes are other rare forms of the flute pitched up to four octaves below middle C.

Other sizes of flutes and piccolos are used from time to time. A rarer instrument of the modern pitching system is the G treble flute. Instruments made according to an older pitch standard, used principally in wind-band music, include D♭ piccolo, E♭ soprano flute (Keyed a minor 3rd above the standard C flute), F alto flute, and B♭ bass flute.

Indian

The bamboo flute is an important instrument in Indian classical music, and developed independently of the Western flute. The Hindu God Lord Krishna is traditionally considered a master of the bamboo flute. The Indian flutes are very simple compared to the Western counterparts; they are made of bamboo and are keyless.

Two main varieties of Indian flutes are currently used. The first, the Bansuri (बांसुरी), has six finger holes and one embouchure hole, and is used predominantly in the Hindustani music of Northern India. The second, the Venu or Pullanguzhal, has eight finger holes, and is played predominantly in the Carnatic music of Southern India. Presently, the eight-holed flute with cross-fingering technique is common among many Carnatic flutists. Prior to this, the South Indian flute had only seven finger holes, with the fingering standard developed by Sharaba Shastri, of the Palladam school, at the beginning of the 20th century. The quality of the flute's sound depends somewhat on the specific bamboo used to make it, and it is generally agreed that the best bamboo grows in the Nagercoil area of South India.

In 1998 Bharata Natya Shastra Sarana Chatushtai, Avinash Balkrishna Patwardhan developed a methodology to produce perfectly tuned flutes for the ten 'thatas' currently present in Indian Classical Music.

In a regional dialect of Gujarati, a flute is also called Pavo. Some people can also play pair of flutes (Jodiyo Pavo) simultaneously.

Chinese
In China there are many varieties of dizi (笛子), or Chinese flute, with different sizes, structures (with or without a resonance membrane) and number of holes (from 6 to 11) and intonations (different keys). Most are made of bamboo, but can come in wood, jade, bone, and iron. One peculiar feature of the Chinese flute is the use of a resonance membrane mounted on one of the holes that vibrates with the air column inside the tube. This membrane is called a di mo, which is usually a thin tissue paper. It gives the flute a bright sound.

Commonly seen flutes in the modern Chinese orchestra are the bangdi (梆笛), qudi (曲笛), xindi (新笛), and dadi (大笛). The bamboo flute played vertically is called the xiao (簫), which is a different category of wind instrument in China.

Korean
The Korean flute, called the daegeum, 대금, is a large bamboo transverse flute used in traditional Korean music. It has a buzzing membrane that gives it a unique timbre.

Japanese
The Japanese flute, called the fue, 笛, encompasses a large number of musical flutes from Japan, include the end-blown shakuhachi and hotchiku, as well as the transverse gakubue, komabue, ryūteki, nōkan, shinobue, kagurabue and minteki.

Sodina and suling

The sodina is an end-blown flute found throughout the island state of Madagascar, located in the Indian Ocean off southeastern Africa. One of the oldest instruments on the island, it bears close resemblance to end-blown flutes found in Southeast Asia and particularly Indonesia, where it is known as the suling, suggesting the predecessor to the sodina was carried to Madagascar in outrigger canoes by the island's original settlers emigrating from Borneo. An image of the most celebrated contemporary sodina flutist, Rakoto Frah (d. 2001), was featured on the local currency.

Sring
The sring (also called blul) is a relatively small, end-blown flute with a nasal tone quality found in the Caucasus region of Eastern Armenia. It is made of wood or cane, usually with seven finger holes and one thumb hole, producing a diatonic scale. One Armenian musicologist believes the sring to be the most characteristic of national Armenian instruments.

Ọjà
The Ọjà is a traditional musical instrument utilized by the Igbo people, who are indigenous to Nigeria. The ọjà (flute) is used during cultural activities or events where Igbo music is played. It is skillfully carved from wood/bamboo or metal and is played by blowing air into one end while covering and uncovering holes along the body to create different notes.

Breathing techniques
There are several means by which flautists breathe to blow air through the instrument and produce sound. They include diaphragmatic breathing and circular breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing optimizes inhalation, minimizing the number of breaths. Circular breathing brings air in through the nose and out through the mouth, enabling a continuous sound.

title: Flute


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Flageolet (disambiguation)

A flageolet is a wind instrument similar to a recorder.

Flageolet may also refer to:
 * Flageolet (organ stop), a pipe organ component
 * The flageolet bean, a type of common bean
 * A method of playing a string harmonic

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Flageolet (disambiguation)


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Talk:FootBall

That which one buys a large screen television for...

Not to start a religious war or anything, but the definition above is for what we Americans call SocceR. FootBall is what they play in the SuperBowl. :-) --Jimbo Wales

I suggest AmericanFootball and EuropeanFootball as topics. :-) -- Larry Sanger

Do non-Americans refer to Soccer as Soccer as well as FootBall?

If so, we could change this page to simply be a pointer to AmericanFootball, SocceR, and AustralianFootball. I think AustralianFootball is the same thing as RugBy, but I'm not an expert!

Actually AustralianFootball, more commonly known as Aussies Rules is a completely different sport to Rugby, more formally known as Rugby Union which is sometimes called Rugby Football. Not to forget the other varieties of rugby including Rugby 7's - a 7-a-side version of the 15 man Rugby Union game - as well as Rugby League which is similar to Rugby Union except it is more of a running game with much less physical contact.

I have never heard of a SportS called EuropeanFootball. I believe that Soccer is an North American term that has spread also to Australia. I think EuropE, South America and AfricA uses the term FootBall for what Americans call Soccer.

Do the following investigation yourself:
 * British site: http://www.football.co.uk/
 * French site: http://www.football.fr/
 * Italian site: http://www.football.it/
 * South africa: http://www.safa.org.za/misstat.html
 * Mexico: http://www.terceradivision.com.mx/
 * Argentina: http://www.afa.org.ar/home.htm
 * Brasil: http://www.brasilfutebol.com/select_language.sps
 * India: http://www.indianfootball.8m.com/
 * England http://www.mypremierfootball.co.uk

A quick Internet-investigation leads me to believe that United States, CanadA, AustraliA and NewZealand use the word Soccer and the rest of the world uses the word FootBall.

-- LinusTolke

Americans, when for whatever reason we speak about soccer as "football," in order to avoid confusion with the sport we call "football," call soccer "European football." Even [http://uk.sports.yahoo.com/foot/ital/t/inte/ Yahoo! UK] is determined to annoy you by calling it this.

Yahoo! UK - just as any other decent sports site - calls it European FootBall in order to distinguish between FootBall played in Europe and FootBall played on other continents, eg. South America. I would like to remind my fellow Americans that FootBall, by definition is played using one's feet, and not by holding on to it with your hands and running around like a headless chicken.

''Whoever wrote this deserves a round of applause, it made me laugh out load''--Jimbo Wales

And then enters the XFL or XfL

I've got it! I've got it! The American non-soccer sport can be FootbalL while the European (etc.) sport that Americans call "soccer" can be called FootBall!

Oops, we're going to be switching to a way of indicating links not LikeThis. Back to the drawing board. Maybe we should just stick with the old link system just so we can implement this solution to the "football" problem. -- Larry Sanger

title: Talk:FootBall


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Association football

Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players each, who primarily use their feet to propel a ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is to score more goals than the opposing team by moving the ball beyond the goal line into a rectangular-framed goal defended by the opposing team. Traditionally, the game has been played over two 45-minute halves, for a total match time of 90 minutes. With an estimated 250 million players active in over 200 countries and territories, it is the world's most popular sport.

The game of association football is played in accordance with the Laws of the Game, a set of rules that has been in effect since 1863 and maintained by the IFAB since 1886. The game is played with a football that is 68 – in circumference. The two teams compete to get the ball into the other team's goal (between the posts, under the bar, and across the goal line), thereby scoring a goal. When the ball is in play, the players mainly use their feet, but may use any other part of their body, except for their hands or arms, to control, strike, or pass the ball. Only the goalkeepers may use their hands and arms, and only then within the penalty area. The team that has scored more goals at the end of the game is the winner. There are situations where a goal can be disallowed, such as an offside call or a foul in the build-up to the goal. Depending on the format of the competition, an equal number of goals scored may result in a draw being declared, or the game goes into extra time or a penalty shoot-out.

Internationally, association football is governed by FIFA. Under FIFA, there are six continental confederations: AFC, CAF, CONCACAF, CONMEBOL, OFC, and UEFA. Of these confederations, CONMEBOL is the oldest one, being founded in 1916. National associations (e.g. The FA or JFA) are responsible for managing the game in their own countries both professionally and at an amateur level, and coordinating competitions in accordance with the Laws of the Game. The most senior and prestigious international competitions are the FIFA World Cup and the FIFA Women's World Cup. The men's World Cup is the most-viewed sporting event in the world, surpassing the Olympic Games. The two most prestigious competitions in European club football are the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Women's Champions League, which attract an extensive television audience throughout the world. Since 2009, the final of the men's tournament has been the most-watched annual sporting event in the world.

Name
Association football is one of a family of football codes that emerged from various ball games played worldwide since antiquity. Within the English-speaking world, the sport is now usually called "football" in Great Britain and most of Ulster in the north of Ireland, whereas people usually call it "soccer" in regions and countries where other codes of football are prevalent, such as Australia, Canada, South Africa, most of Ireland (excluding Ulster), and the United States. A notable exception is New Zealand, where in the first two decades of the 21st century, under the influence of international television, "football" has been gaining prevalence, despite the dominance of other codes of football, namely rugby union and rugby league.

The term soccer comes from Oxford "-er" slang, which was prevalent at the University of Oxford in England from about 1875, and is thought to have been borrowed from the slang of Rugby School. Initially spelt assoccer (a shortening of "association"), it was later reduced to the modern spelling. This form of slang also gave rise to rugger for rugby football, fiver and tenner for five pound and ten pound notes, and the now-archaic footer that was also a name for association football. The word soccer arrived at its current form in 1895 and was first recorded in 1889 in the earlier form of socca.

History
Kicking ball games arose independently multiple times across multiple cultures. The Chinese competitive game  (蹴鞠, literally "kick ball"; also known as tsu chu) resembles modern association football. This is the earliest form of a kicking game for which there is scientific evidence, a military manual from the Han dynasty.  players would pass the ball around, again having to avoid it touching the ground at any point. It was then passed to a designated player, who attempted to kick it through the fengliu yan, a circular goal atop 10-11 meter poles. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE),  games were standardised and rules were established. FIFA cites Cuju as the earliest form of football. Cuju and other ancient games demonstrate humanity’s innate predisposition to play with a ball. The Silk Road facilitated the transmission of cuju, especially the game popular in the Tang dynasty, the period when the inflatable ball was invented and replaced the stuffed ball. Other East Asian games included ' in Japan and ' in Korea, both influenced by cuju.  originated after the year 600 during the Asuka period. It was a ceremonial rather than a competitive game, and involved the kicking of a mari, a ball made of animal skin. In North America, pasuckuakohowog was a ball game played by the Algonquians; it was described as "almost identical to the kind of folk football being played in Europe at the same time, in which the ball was kicked through goals".

' and ' were Greek ball games. An image of an  player depicted in low relief on a stele of c. 375–400 BCE in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens appears on the UEFA European Championship trophy. Athenaeus, writing in 228 CE, mentions the Roman ball game harpastum.  and harpastum were played involving hands and violence. They all appear to have resembled rugby football, wrestling, and volleyball more than what is recognisable as modern football. As with pre-codified mob football, the antecedent of all modern football codes, these three games involved more handling the ball than kicking it.

Association football in itself does not have a classical history. Notwithstanding any similarities to other ball games played around the world, FIFA has described that no historical connection exists with any game played in antiquity outside Europe. The history of football in England dates back to at least the eighth century. The modern rules of association football are based on the mid-19th century efforts to standardise the widely varying forms of football played in the public schools of England.

The Cambridge rules, first drawn up at the University of Cambridge in 1848, were particularly influential in the development of subsequent codes, including association football. The Cambridge rules were written at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a meeting attended by representatives from Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester and Shrewsbury schools. They were not universally adopted. During the 1850s, many clubs unconnected to schools or universities were formed throughout the English-speaking world to play various forms of football. Some came up with their own distinct codes of rules, most notably the Sheffield Football Club, formed by former public school pupils in 1857, which led to the formation of a Sheffield FA in 1867. In 1862, John Charles Thring of Uppingham School also devised an influential set of rules.

These ongoing efforts contributed to the formation of The Football Association (The FA) in 1863, which first met on the morning of 26 October 1863 at the Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, London. The only school to be represented on this occasion was Charterhouse. The Freemasons' Tavern was the setting for five more meetings of The FA between October and December 1863; the English FA eventually issued the first comprehensive set of rules named, forming modern football. The laws included bans on running with the ball in hand and hacking (kicking an opponent in the shins), tripping and holding. Eleven clubs, under the charge of FA secretary Ebenezer Cobb Morley, ratified the original thirteen laws of the game. The sticking point was hacking, which a twelfth club at the meeting, Blackheath FC, had wanted to keep, resulting in them withdrawing from the FA. Other English rugby clubs followed this lead and did not join the FA, and instead in 1871, along with Blackheath, formed the Rugby Football Union. The FA rules included handling of the ball by "marks" and the lack of a crossbar, rules which made it remarkably similar to Victorian rules football being developed at that time in Australia. The Sheffield FA played by its own rules until the 1870s, with the FA absorbing some of its rules until there was little difference between the games.

The world's oldest football competition is the FA Cup, which was founded by the footballer and cricketer Charles W. Alcock, and has been contested by English teams since 1872. The first official international football match also took place in 1872, between Scotland and England in Glasgow, again at the instigation of Alcock. England is also home to the world's first football league, which was founded in Birmingham in 1888 by Aston Villa director William McGregor. The original format contained 12 clubs from the Midlands and Northern England.

Laws of the Game are determined by the International Football Association Board (IFAB). The board was formed in 1886 after a meeting in Manchester of the Football Association, the Scottish Football Association, the Football Association of Wales, and the Irish Football Association. FIFA, the international football body, was formed in Paris in 1904 and declared that they would adhere to the Laws of the Game of the Football Association. The growing popularity of the international game led to the admittance of FIFA representatives to the IFAB in 1913. The board consists of four representatives from FIFA and one representative from each of the four British associations.

For most of the 20th century, Europe and South America were the dominant regions in association football. The FIFA World Cup, inaugurated in 1930, became the main stage for players of both continents to show their worth and the strength of their national teams. In the second half of the century, the European Cup and the Copa Libertadores were created, and the champions of these two club competitions would contest the Intercontinental Cup to prove which team was the best in the world.

In the 21st century, South America has continued to produce some of the best footballers in the world, but its clubs have fallen behind the still dominant European clubs, which often sign the best players from Latin America and elsewhere. Meanwhile, football has improved in Africa, Asia and North America, and nowadays, these regions are at least on equal grounds with South America in club football, although countries in the Caribbean and Oceania regions (except Australia) have yet to make a mark in international football. When it comes to men's national teams, Europeans and South Americans continue to dominate the FIFA World Cup, as no team from any other region has managed to even reach the final. These regional trends do not hold true for the women's game, as the United States women's national team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times, more than any other women's team.

Football is played at a professional level all over the world. Millions of people regularly go to football stadiums to follow their favourite teams, while billions more watch the game on television or on the internet. A very large number of people also play football at an amateur level. According to a survey conducted by FIFA published in 2001, over 240 million people from more than 200 countries regularly play football. Football has the highest global television audience in sport.

In many parts of the world, football evokes great passions and plays an important role in the life of individual fans, local communities, and even nations. Ryszard Kapuściński says that Europeans who are polite, modest, or humble fall easily into rage when playing or watching football games. The Ivory Coast national football team helped secure a truce to the nation's civil war in 2006 and it helped further reduce tensions between government and rebel forces in 2007 by playing a match in the rebel capital of Bouaké, an occasion that brought both armies together peacefully for the first time. By contrast, football is widely considered to have been the final proximate cause for the Football War in June 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. The sport also exacerbated tensions at the beginning of the Croatian War of Independence of the 1990s, when a match between Dinamo Zagreb and Red Star Belgrade degenerated into rioting in May 1990.

Women's association football
Women's association football has historically seen opposition, with national associations severely curbing its development and several outlawing it completely. Women may have been playing football for as long as the game has existed. Evidence shows that a similar ancient game (cuju, or tsu chu) was played by women during the Han dynasty (25–220 CE), as female figures are depicted in frescoes of the period playing tsu chu. There are also reports of annual football matches played by women in Midlothian, Scotland, during the 1790s.

Association football, the modern game, has documented early involvement of women. In 1863, football governing bodies introduced standardised rules to prohibit violence on the pitch, making it more socially acceptable for women to play. The first match recorded by the Scottish Football Association took place in 1892 in Glasgow. In England, the first recorded game of football between women took place in 1895. Women's football has traditionally been associated with charity games and physical exercise, particularly in the United Kingdom.

Association football continued to be played by women since the time of the first recorded women's games in the late 19th century. The best-documented early European team was founded by activist Nettie Honeyball in England in 1894. It was named the British Ladies' Football Club. Honeyball is quoted as, "I founded the association late last year [1894], with the fixed resolve of proving to the world that women are not the 'ornamental and useless' creatures men have pictured. I must confess, my convictions on all matters where the sexes are so widely divided are all on the side of emancipation, and I look forward to the time when ladies may sit in Parliament and have a voice in the direction of affairs, especially those which concern them most." Honeyball and those like her paved the way for women's football. However, the women's game was frowned upon by the British football associations and continued without their support. It has been suggested that this was motivated by a perceived threat to the "masculinity" of the game.

Women's football became popular on a large scale at the time of the First World War, when female employment in heavy industry spurred the growth of the game, much as it had done for men 50 years earlier. The most successful team of the era was Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. of Preston, England. The team played in one of the first women's international matches against a French XI team in 1920, and also made up most of the England team against a Scottish Ladies XI in the same year, winning 22–0.

Despite being more popular than some men's football events, with one match seeing a 53,000 strong crowd in 1920, women's football in England suffered a blow in 1921 when The Football Association outlawed the playing of the game on association members' pitches, stating that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged." Players and football writers have argued that this ban was, in fact, due to envy of the large crowds that women's matches attracted, and because the FA had no control over the money made from the women's game. The FA ban led to the formation of the short-lived English Ladies Football Association and play moved to rugby grounds. Women's football also faced bans in several other countries, notably in Brazil from 1941 to 1979, in France from 1941 to 1970, and in Germany from 1955 to 1970.

Restrictions began to be reduced in the 1960s and 1970s. The Italian women's football league was established in 1968. In December 1969, the Women's Football Association was formed in England, with the sport eventually becoming the most prominent team sport for women in the United Kingdom. Two unofficial women's World Cups were organised by the FIEFF in 1970 and in 1971. Also in 1971, Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) members voted to officially recognise women's football, while The Football Association rescinded the ban that prohibited women from playing on association members' pitches in England.

Women's football still faces many struggles, but its worldwide growth has seen major competitions being launched at both the national and international levels, mirroring the men's competitions. The FIFA Women's World Cup was inaugurated in 1991: the first tournament was held in China, featuring 12 teams from the respective six confederations. The World Cup has been held every four years since; by the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in France, it had expanded to 24 national teams, and 1.12 billion viewers watched the competition. Women's football has been an Olympic event since 1996.

North America is the dominant region in women's football, with the United States winning most FIFA Women's World Cups and Olympic tournaments. Europe and Asia come second and third in terms of international success, and the women's game has been improving in South America.

Gameplay
Association football is played in accordance with a set of rules known as the. The game is played using a spherical ball of 68 – circumference, known as the football (or soccer ball). Two teams of eleven players each compete to get the ball into the other team's goal (between the posts and under the bar), thereby scoring a goal. The team that has scored more goals at the end of the game is the winner; if both teams have scored an equal number of goals then the game is a draw. Each team is led by a captain who has only one official responsibility as mandated by the Laws of the Game: to represent their team in the coin toss before kick-off or penalty kicks.

The primary law is that players other than goalkeepers may not deliberately handle the ball with their hands or arms during play, though they must use both their hands during a throw-in restart. Although players usually use their feet to move the ball around, they may use any part of their body (notably, "heading" with the forehead) other than their hands or arms. Within normal play, all players are free to play the ball in any direction and move throughout the pitch, though players may not pass to teammates who are in an offside position.

During gameplay, players attempt to create goal-scoring opportunities through individual control of the ball, such as by dribbling, passing the ball to a teammate, and by taking shots at the goal, which is guarded by the opposing goalkeeper. Opposing players may try to regain control of the ball by intercepting a pass or through tackling the opponent in possession of the ball; however, physical contact between opponents is restricted. Football is generally a free-flowing game, with play stopping only when the ball has left the field of play or when play is stopped by the referee for an infringement of the rules. After a stoppage, play recommences with a specified restart.

At a professional level, most matches produce only a few goals. For example, the 2022–23 season of the English Premier League produced an average of 2.85 goals per match. The Laws of the Game do not specify any player positions other than goalkeeper, but a number of specialised roles have evolved. Broadly, these include three main categories: strikers, or forwards, whose main task is to score goals; defenders, who specialise in preventing their opponents from scoring; and midfielders, who dispossess the opposition and keep possession of the ball to pass it to the forwards on their team. Players in these positions are referred to as outfield players, to distinguish them from the goalkeeper.

These positions are further subdivided according to the area of the field in which the player spends the most time. For example, there are central defenders and left and right midfielders. The ten outfield players may be arranged in any combination. The number of players in each position determines the style of the team's play; more forwards and fewer defenders creates a more aggressive and offensive-minded game, while the reverse creates a slower, more defensive style of play. While players typically spend most of the game in a specific position, there are few restrictions on player movement, and players can switch positions at any time. The layout of a team's players is known as a formation. Defining the team's formation and tactics is usually the prerogative of the team's manager.

Laws
There are 17 laws in the official Laws of the Game, each containing a collection of stipulations and guidelines. The same laws are designed to apply to all levels of football for both sexes, although certain modifications for groups such as juniors, seniors and people with physical disabilities are permitted. The laws are often framed in broad terms, which allow flexibility in their application depending on the nature of the game. The Laws of the Game are published by FIFA, but are maintained by the IFAB. In addition to the seventeen laws, numerous IFAB decisions and other directives contribute to the regulation of association football. Within the United States, Major League Soccer used a distinct ruleset during the 1990s and the National Federation of State High School Associations and National Collegiate Athletic Association still use rulesets that are comparable to, but different from, the IFAB Laws.

Players, equipment, and officials
Each team consists of a maximum of eleven players (excluding substitutes), one of whom must be the goalkeeper. Competition rules may state a minimum number of players required to constitute a team, which is usually seven. Goalkeepers are the only players allowed to play the ball with their hands or arms, provided they do so within the penalty area in front of their own goal. Though there are a variety of positions in which the outfield (non-goalkeeper) players are strategically placed by a coach, these positions are not defined or required by the Laws.

The basic equipment or kit players are required to wear includes a shirt, shorts, socks, footwear and adequate shin guards. An athletic supporter and protective cup is highly recommended for male players by medical experts and professionals. Headgear is not a required piece of basic equipment, but players today may choose to wear it to protect themselves from head injury. Players are forbidden to wear or use anything that is dangerous to themselves or another player, such as jewellery or watches. The goalkeeper must wear clothing that is easily distinguishable from that worn by the other players and the match officials.

A number of players may be replaced by substitutes during the course of the game. The maximum number of substitutions permitted in most competitive international and domestic league games is five in 90 minutes, with each team being allowed one more if the game should go into extra-time; the permitted number may vary in other competitions or in friendly matches. Common reasons for a substitution include injury, tiredness, ineffectiveness, a tactical switch, or timewasting at the end of a finely poised game. In standard adult matches, a player who has been substituted may not take further part in a match. IFAB recommends "that a match should not continue if there are fewer than seven players in either team". Any decision regarding points awarded for abandoned games is left to the individual football associations.

A game is officiated by a referee, who has "full authority to enforce the Laws of the Game in connection with the match to which he has been appointed" (Law 5), and whose decisions are final. The referee is assisted by two assistant referees. In many high-level games there is also a fourth official who assists the referee and may replace another official should the need arise.

Goal line technology is used to measure if the whole ball has crossed the goal-line thereby determining whether a goal has been scored or not; this was brought in to prevent controversy. Video assistant referees (VAR) have also been increasingly introduced in high-level matches to assist officials through video replays to correct clear and obvious mistakes. There are four types of calls that can be reviewed: mistaken identity in awarding a red or yellow card, goals and whether there was a violation during the buildup, direct red card decisions, and penalty decisions.

Ball
The ball is spherical with a circumference of between 68 and 70 cm, a weight in the range of 410 to 450 g, and a pressure between 8.5 and 15.6 psi at sea level. In the past the ball was made up of leather panels sewn together, with a latex bladder for pressurisation, but modern balls at all levels of the game are now synthetic.

Pitch
As the Laws were formulated in England, and were initially administered solely by the four British football associations within IFAB, the standard dimensions of a football pitch were originally expressed in imperial units. The Laws now express dimensions with approximate metric equivalents (followed by traditional units in brackets), though use of imperial units remains popular in English-speaking countries with a relatively recent history of metrication (or only partial metrication), such as Britain.

The length of the pitch, or field, for international adult matches is in the range of 100 - 110 m and the width is in the range of 64 - 75 m. Fields for non-international matches may be 90 - 120 m in length and 45 - 90 m in width, provided the pitch does not become square. In 2008, the IFAB initially approved a fixed size of 105 m long and 68 m wide as a standard pitch dimension for international matches; however, this decision was later put on hold and was never actually implemented.

The longer boundary lines are touchlines, while the shorter boundaries (on which the goals are placed) are goal lines. A rectangular goal is positioned on each goal line, midway between the two touchlines. The inner edges of the vertical goal posts must be 24 ft apart, and the lower edge of the horizontal crossbar supported by the goal posts must be 8 ft above the ground. Nets are usually placed behind the goal, but are not required by the Laws.

In front of the goal is the penalty area. This area is marked by the goal line, two lines starting on the goal line 16.5 m from the goalposts and extending 16.5 m into the pitch perpendicular to the goal line, and a line joining them. This area has a number of functions, the most prominent being to mark where the goalkeeper may handle the ball and where a penalty foul by a member of the defending team becomes punishable by a penalty kick. Other markings define the position of the ball or players at kick-offs, goal kicks, penalty kicks and corner kicks.

90-minute ordinary time
A standard adult football match consists of two halves of 45 minutes each. Each half runs continuously, meaning that the clock is not stopped when the ball is out of play. There is usually a 15-minute half-time break between halves. The end of the match is known as full-time. The referee is the official timekeeper for the match, and may make an allowance for time lost through substitutions, injured players requiring attention, or other stoppages. This added time is called "additional time" in FIFA documents, but is most commonly referred to as stoppage time or injury time, while lost time can also be used as a synonym. The duration of stoppage time is at the sole discretion of the referee. Stoppage time does not fully compensate for the time in which the ball is out of play, and a 90-minute game typically involves about an hour of "effective playing time". The referee alone signals the end of the match. In matches where a fourth official is appointed, towards the end of the half, the referee signals how many minutes of stoppage time they intend to add. The fourth official then informs the players and spectators by holding up a board showing this number. The signalled stoppage time may be further extended by the referee. Added time was introduced because of an incident which happened in 1891 during a match between Stoke and Aston Villa. Trailing 1–0 with two minutes remaining, Stoke were awarded a penalty kick. Villa's goalkeeper deliberately kicked the ball out of play; by the time it was recovered, the clock had run out and the game was over, leaving Stoke unable to attempt the penalty. The same law also states that the duration of either half is extended until a penalty kick to be taken or retaken is completed; thus, no game can end with an uncompleted penalty.

Tie-breaking
In league competitions, games may end in a draw. In knockout competitions where a winner is required, various methods may be employed to break such a deadlock; some competitions may invoke replays. A game tied at the end of regulation time may go into extra time, which consists of two further 15-minute periods. If the score is still tied after extra time, some competitions allow the use of penalty shoot-outs (known officially in the Laws of the Game as "kicks from the penalty mark") to determine which team will progress to the next stage of the tournament or be the champion. Goals scored during extra time periods count towards the final score of the game, but kicks from the penalty mark are only used to decide the team that progresses to the next part of the tournament, with goals scored in a penalty shoot-out not making up part of the final score.

In competitions using two-legged matches, each team competes at home once, with an aggregate score from the two matches deciding which team progresses. Where aggregates are equal, the away goals rule may be used to determine the winners, in which case the winner is the team that scored the most goals in the leg they played away from home. If the result is still equal, extra time and potentially a penalty shoot-out are required.

Ball in and out of play
Under the Laws, the two basic states of play during a game are ball in play and ball out of play. From the beginning of each playing period with a kick-off until the end of the playing period, the ball is in play at all times, except when either the ball leaves the field of play, or play is stopped by the referee. When the ball becomes out of play, play is restarted by one of eight restart methods depending on how it went out of play:

 * Kick-off: following a goal by the opposing team, or to begin each period of play.
 * Throw-in: when the ball has crossed the touchline; awarded to the opposing team to that which last touched the ball.
 * Goal kick: when the ball has wholly crossed the goal line without a goal having been scored and having last been touched by a player of the attacking team; awarded to defending team.
 * Corner kick: when the ball has wholly crossed the goal line without a goal having been scored and having last been touched by a player of the defending team; awarded to attacking team.
 * Indirect free kick: awarded to the opposing team following "non-penal" fouls, certain technical infringements, or when play is stopped to caution or dismiss an opponent without a specific foul having occurred. A goal may not be scored directly (without the ball first touching another player) from an indirect free kick.
 * Direct free kick: awarded to fouled team following certain listed "penal" fouls. A goal may be scored directly from a direct free kick.
 * Penalty kick: awarded to the fouled team following a foul usually punishable by a direct free kick but that has occurred within their opponent's penalty area.
 * Dropped-ball: occurs when the referee has stopped play for any other reason, such as a serious injury to a player, interference by an external party, or a ball becoming defective.

On-field
A foul occurs when a player commits an offence listed in the Laws of the Game while the ball is in play. The offences that constitute a foul are listed in Law 12. Handling the ball deliberately, tripping an opponent, or pushing an opponent, are examples of "penal fouls", punishable by a direct free kick or penalty kick depending on where the offence occurred. Other fouls are punishable by an indirect free kick.

The referee may punish a player's or substitute's misconduct by a caution (yellow card) or dismissal (red card). A second yellow card in the same game leads to a red card, which results in a dismissal. A player given a yellow card is said to have been "booked", the referee writing the player's name in their official notebook. If a player has been dismissed, no substitute can be brought on in their place and the player may not participate in further play. Misconduct may occur at any time, and while the offences that constitute misconduct are listed, the definitions are broad. In particular, the offence of "unsporting behaviour" may be used to deal with most events that violate the spirit of the game, even if they are not listed as specific offences. A referee can show a yellow or red card to a player, substitute, substituted player, and to non-players such as managers and support staff.

Rather than stopping play, the referee may allow play to continue if doing so will benefit the team against which an offence has been committed. This is known as "playing an advantage". The referee may "call back" play and penalise the original offence if the anticipated advantage does not ensue within "a few seconds". Even if an offence is not penalised due to advantage being played, the offender may still be sanctioned for misconduct at the next stoppage of play.

The referee's decision in all on-pitch matters is considered final. The score of a match cannot be altered after the game, even if later evidence shows that decisions (including awards/non-awards of goals) were incorrect.

Off-field
Along with the general administration of the sport, football associations and competition organisers also enforce good conduct in wider aspects of the game, dealing with issues such as comments to the press, clubs' financial management, doping, age fraud and match fixing. Most competitions enforce mandatory suspensions for players who are sent off in a game. Some on-field incidents, if considered very serious (such as allegations of racial abuse), may result in competitions deciding to impose heavier sanctions than those normally associated with a red card. Some associations allow for appeals against player suspensions incurred on-field if clubs feel a referee was incorrect or unduly harsh.

Sanctions for such infractions may be levied on individuals or on clubs as a whole. Penalties may include fines, point deductions (in league competitions) or even expulsion from competitions. For example, the English Football League deduct 12 points from any team that enters financial administration. Among other administrative sanctions are penalties against game forfeiture. Teams that had forfeited a game or had been forfeited against would be awarded a technical loss or win.

Governing bodies
The recognised international governing body of football (and associated games, such as futsal and beach soccer) is FIFA. The FIFA headquarters are located in Zürich, Switzerland. Six regional confederations are associated with FIFA; these are:
 * Asia: Asian Football Confederation (AFC)
 * Africa: Confederation of African Football (CAF)
 * Europe: Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)
 * North/Central America & Caribbean: Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF)
 * Oceania: Oceania Football Confederation (OFC)
 * South America: Confederación Sudamericana de Fútbol (South American Football Confederation; CONMEBOL)

National associations (or national federations) oversee football within individual countries. These are generally synonymous with sovereign states (for example, the Cameroonian Football Federation in Cameroon), but also include a smaller number of associations responsible for sub-national entities or autonomous regions (for example, the Scottish Football Association in Scotland). 211 national associations are affiliated both with FIFA and with their respective continental confederations. Other national associations may be members of continental confederations but otherwise not participate in FIFA competitions.

While FIFA is responsible for arranging competitions and most rules related to international competition, the actual Laws of the Game are set by the IFAB, where each of the UK Associations has one vote, while FIFA collectively has four votes.

International competitions
International competitions in association football principally consist of two varieties: competitions involving representative national teams or those involving clubs based in multiple nations and national leagues. International football, without qualification, most often refers to the former. In the case of international club competition, it is the country of origin of the clubs involved, not the nationalities of their players, that renders the competition international in nature.

The major international competition in football is the World Cup, organised by FIFA. This competition has taken place every four years since 1930, with the exception of the 1942 and 1946 tournaments, which were cancelled because of World War II. As of 2022, over 200 national teams compete in qualifying tournaments within the scope of continental confederations for a place in the finals. The finals tournament, held every four years, involved 32 national teams (expanding to 48 teams for the 2026 tournament) competing over a four-week period. The World Cup is the most prestigious association football tournament as well as the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games; the cumulative audience of all matches of the 2006 FIFA World Cup was estimated to be 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the final match, one-ninth of the entire population of the planet. The 1958 World Cup saw the emergence of Pelé as a global sporting star, a period that coincided with "the explosive spread of television, which massively amplified his presence everywhere". The current champions are Argentina, who won their third title at the 2022 tournament in Qatar. The FIFA Women's World Cup has been held every four years since 1991. Under the tournament's current format that was expanded in 2023, national teams vie for 31 slots in a three-year qualification phase, while the host nation's team enters automatically as the 32nd slot. The current champions are Spain, after winning their first title in the 2023 tournament.

There has been a football tournament at every Summer Olympic Games since 1900, except at the 1932 games in Los Angeles when FIFA and the IOC had disagreed over the status of amateur players. Before the inception of the World Cup, the Olympics (especially during the 1920s) were the most prestigious international event. Originally, the tournament was for amateurs only. As professionalism spread around the world, the gap in quality between the World Cup and the Olympics widened. The countries that benefited most were the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, where top athletes were state-sponsored while retaining their status as amateurs. Between 1948 and 1980, 23 out of 27 Olympic medals were won by Eastern Europe, with only Sweden (gold in 1948 and bronze in 1952), Denmark (bronze in 1948 and silver in 1960) and Japan (bronze in 1968) breaking their dominance. For the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the IOC allowed professional players to compete. Since 1992, male competitors must be under 23 years old, although since 1996, three players over the age of 23 have been allowed per squad. A women's tournament was added in 1996; in contrast to the men's event, full international sides without age restrictions play the women's Olympic tournament.

After the World Cup, the most important international football competitions are the continental championships, which are organised by each continental confederation and contested between national teams. These are the European Championship (UEFA), the Copa América (CONMEBOL), the African Cup of Nations (CAF), the Asian Cup (AFC), the CONCACAF Gold Cup (CONCACAF) and the OFC Men's Nations Cup (OFC). These competitions are not strictly limited to members of the continental confederations, with guest teams from other continents sometimes invited to compete. The FIFA Confederations Cup was contested by the winners of all six continental championships, the current FIFA World Cup champions, and the country which was hosting the next World Cup. This was generally regarded as a warm-up tournament for the upcoming FIFA World Cup and did not carry the same prestige as the World Cup itself. The tournament was discontinued following the 2017 edition with its calendar slot replaced by an expanded FIFA Club World Cup. The UEFA Nations League and the CONCACAF Nations League were introduced in the late 2010s to replace international friendlies during the two-year cycle between major tournaments.

The most prestigious competitions in club football are the respective continental championships, which are generally contested between national champions, for example, the UEFA Champions League in Europe and the Copa Libertadores in South America. The winners of each continental competition contest the FIFA Club World Cup.

Domestic competitions

The governing bodies in each country operate league systems in a domestic season, normally comprising several divisions, in which the teams gain points throughout the season depending on results. Teams are placed into tables, placing them in order according to points accrued. Most commonly, each team plays every other team in its league at home and away in each season, in a round-robin tournament. At the end of a season, the top team is declared the champion. The top few teams may be promoted to a higher division, and one or more of the teams finishing at the bottom are relegated to a lower division.

The teams finishing at the top of a country's league may also be eligible to play in international club competitions in the following season. The main exceptions to this system occur in some Latin American leagues, which divide football championships into two sections named Apertura and Clausura (Spanish for Opening and Closing), awarding a champion for each. Most countries supplement the league system with one or more "cup" competitions organised on a knock-out basis. These include the domestic cup, which may be open to all eligible teams in a country's league system—both professional and amateur—and is organised by the national federation.

Some countries' top divisions feature highly-paid star players; in smaller countries, lower divisions, and many women's clubs, players may be part-timers with a second job, or amateurs. The five top European leagues – Premier League (England), Bundesliga (Germany), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), and Ligue 1 (France) – attract most of the world's best players and, during the 2006–07 season, each of these leagues had a total wage cost in excess of €600 million. These leagues also generated a combined €17.2 billion in revenue in the 2021–22 season from television contracts, matchday tickets, sponsorships, and other sources.

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Fox Film

The Fox Film Corporation (also known as Fox Studios) was an American independent film production studio formed by William Fox (1879–1952) in 1915, by combining his earlier Greater New York Film Rental Company and Box Office Attraction Company (founded 1913).

The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, but in 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood, California to oversee the studio's new West Coast production facilities, where the climate was more hospitable for filmmaking. On July 23, 1926, the company bought the patents of the Movietone sound system for recording sound onto film.

After the Wall Street crash of 1929, William Fox lost control of the company in 1930, during a hostile takeover. Under new president Sidney R. Kent, the new owners began conversations of a fusion with Twentieth Century Pictures, under founders Joseph M. Schenck and his friend Darryl Zanuck. Schenck, Zanuck, and Spyros Skouras merged the Fox Studios with Twentieth Century to form 20th Century-Fox in 1935.

Background
William Fox entered the film industry in 1904 when he purchased a one-third share of a Brooklyn nickelodeon for $1,667. He reinvested his profits from that initial location, expanding to fifteen similar venues in the city, and purchasing prints from the major studios of the time: Biograph, Essanay, Kalem, Lubin, Pathé, Selig, and Vitagraph. After experiencing further success presenting live vaudeville routines along with motion pictures, he expanded into larger venues beginning with his purchase of the disused Gaiety theater, and continuing with acquisitions throughout New York City and New Jersey, including the Academy of Music.

Fox invested further in the film industry by founding the Greater New York Film Rental Company as a film distributor. The major film studios responded by forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and the General Film Company in 1910, in an effort to create a monopoly on the creation and distribution of motion pictures. Fox refused to sell out to the monopoly, and sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, eventually receiving a $370,000 settlement, and ending restrictions on the length of films and the prices that could be paid for screenplays.

In 1914, reflecting the broader scope of his business, he renamed it the Box Office Attraction Company He entered into a contract with the Balboa Amusement Producing Company film studio, purchasing all of their films for showing in his New York area theaters and renting the prints to other exhibitors nationwide. He also continued to distribute material from other sources, such as Winsor McCay's early animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. Later that year, Fox concluded that it was unwise to be so dependent on other companies, so he purchased the Éclair studio facilities in Fort Lee, New Jersey, along with property in Staten Island, and arranged for actors and crew. The company became a film studio, using the name Box Office Attraction Company; its first release was Life's Shop Window.

Fox Film Corporation
Always more of an entrepreneur than a showman, Fox concentrated on acquiring and building theaters; pictures were secondary. The company's first film studios were set up in Fort Lee where it and many other early film studios in America's first motion picture industry were based at the beginning of the 20th century.

That same year, in 1914, Fox Film began making motion pictures in California, and in 1915 decided to build its own permanent studio. The company leased the Los Angeles Edendale studio of the Selig Polyscope Company until its own studio, located at Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, was completed in 1916. In 1917, William Fox sent Sol M. Wurtzel to Hollywood to oversee the studio's West Coast production facilities where a more hospitable and cost-effective climate existed for filmmaking. Between 1915 and 1919, Fox Films earned millions of dollars through films featuring Theda Bara, known as "The Vamp" due to her unique ability to display exoticism.

With the introduction of sound technology, Fox moved to acquire the rights to a sound-on-film process. In the years 1925–26, Fox purchased the rights to the work of Freeman Harrison Owens, the U.S. rights to the Tri-Ergon system invented by three German inventors, and the work of Theodore Case. This resulted in the Movietone sound system later known as "Fox Movietone" developed at the Movietone Studio. Later that year, the company began offering films with a music-and-effects track, and the following year Fox began the weekly Fox Movietone News feature, that ran until 1963. The growing company needed space, and in 1926 Fox acquired 300 acres (1.2 km2) in the open country west of Beverly Hills and built "Movietone City", the best-equipped studio of its time.

Because William Fox opted to remain in New York, much of the Hollywood filmmaking at the Fox Film Corporation was instead managed by Fox's movie makers. Janet Gaynor would also become one of the company's most prominent stars by the late 1920s.

Decline
When rival Marcus Loew died in 1927, Fox offered to buy the Loew family's holdings. Loew's Inc. controlled more than 200 theaters, as well as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio. The Loew family agreed to the sale, and the merger of Fox and Loew's Inc. was announced in 1929; MGM studio bosses Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were not included in the deal, and fought back. Using powerful political connections, Mayer called upon the Justice Department's antitrust unit to delay giving final approval to the merger. William Fox was badly injured in a car crash in the summer of 1929, and by the time he recovered, he had lost most of his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, ending any chance of the Fox/Loew's merger being approved, even without the Justice Department's objections.

Overextended and close to bankruptcy, Fox was stripped of his empire in 1930 and later ended up in jail on bribery and perjury charges. Fox Film, with more than 500 theatres, was placed in receivership. A bank-mandated reorganization propped the company up for a time, but it soon became apparent that despite its size, Fox could not stand on its own. William Fox resented the way he was forced out of his company and portrayed it as an active conspiracy against him in the 1933 book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox.

Merger
Under new president Sidney Kent, the new owners began negotiating with the upstart, but powerful independent Twentieth Century Pictures in the early spring of 1935. The two companies merged that spring and became 20th Century-Fox. The company was purchased by News Corporation in 1985, becoming "20th Century Fox" without the hyphen, and in 2020 was purchased by The Walt Disney Company and renamed 20th Century Studios. For many years, 20th Century-Fox claimed to have been founded in 1915; for instance, it marked 1945 as its 30th anniversary. However, in recent years it has claimed the 1935 merger as its founding, marking its 75th rather than 95th anniversary in 2010.

Feature films
A 1937 fire in a Fox film storage facility destroyed over 40,000 reels of negatives and prints, including the best-quality copies of every Fox feature produced prior to 1932; although copies located elsewhere allowed many to survive in some form, over 75% of Fox's feature films from before 1930 are completely lost.

Newsreels
In 1919, Fox began a series of silent newsreels, competing with existing series such as Hearst Metrotone News, International Newsreel, and Pathé News. Fox News premiered on October 11, 1919, with subsequent issues released on the Wednesday and Sunday of each week. Fox News gained an advantage over its more established competitors when President Woodrow Wilson endorsed the newsreel in a letter, in what may have been the first time an American president commented on a film. In subsequent years, Fox News remained one of the major names in the newsreel industry by providing often-exclusive coverage of major international events, including reporting on Pancho Villa, the airship Roma, the Ku Klux Klan, and a 1922 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The silent newsreel series continued until 1930.

In 1926, a subsidiary, Fox Movietone Corporation, was created, tasked with producing newsreels using Fox's recently acquired sound-on-film technology. The first of these newsreels debuted on January 21, 1927. Four months later, the May 25 release of a sound recording of Charles Lindbergh's departure on his transatlantic flight was described by film historian Raymond Fielding as the "first sound news film of consequence". Movietone News was launched as a regular newsreel feature December 3 of that year. Production of the series continued after the merger with Twentieth Century Pictures, until 1963, and continued to serve 20th Century Fox after that, as a source for film industry stock footage.

Unlike Fox's early feature films, the Fox News and Fox Movietone News libraries have largely survived. The earlier series and some parts of its sound successor are now held by the University of South Carolina, with the remaining Fox Movietone News still held by the company.

Serials
Fox Film briefly experimented with serial films, releasing the 15-episode Bride 13 and the 20-episode Fantômas in 1920. William Fox was unwilling to compromise on production quality in order to make serials profitable, however, and none were produced subsequently.

Short films
Hundreds of one- and two-reel short films of various types were also produced by Fox. Beginning in 1916, the Sunshine Comedy division created two-reel comedy shorts. Many of these, beginning with 1917's Roaring Lions and Wedding Bliss, starring Lloyd Hamilton, were slapstick, intended to compete with Mack Sennett's popular offerings. Sunshine releases continued until the introduction of sound. Other short film series included Imperial Comedies, Van Bibber Comedies (with Earle Foxe), O'Henry, Married Life of Helen and Warren, and Fox Varieties. Fox's expansion into Spanish-language films in the early 1930s also included shorts.

title: Fox Film


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First National Pictures

First National Pictures was an American motion picture production and distribution company. It was founded in 1917 as First National Exhibitors' Circuit, Inc., an association of independent theatre owners in the United States, and became the country's largest theater chain. Expanding from exhibiting movies to distributing them, the company reincorporated in 1919 as Associated First National Theatres, Inc. and Associated First National Pictures, Inc.

In 1924 it expanded to become a motion picture production company as First National Pictures, Inc., and became an important studio in the film industry. In September 1928, control of First National passed to Warner Bros., into which it was completely absorbed on November 4, 1929.

A number of Warner Bros. films were thereafter branded First National Pictures until July 1936, when First National Pictures, Inc., was dissolved.

Early history
The First National Exhibitors' Circuit was founded in 1917 by the merger of 26 of the biggest first-run cinema chains in the United States. It eventually controlled over 600 cinemas, more than 200 of them first-run houses (as opposed to the less lucrative second-run or neighbourhood theatres to which films moved when their initial box office receipts dwindled).

First National was the brainchild of Thomas L. Tally, who was reacting to the overwhelming influence of Paramount Pictures, which dominated the market. In 1912, he thought that a conglomerate of theatres throughout the nation could buy or produce and distribute its own films. In 1917 Tally and J. D. Williams formed First National Exhibitors' Circuit.

The first film released through First National was the 1916 British film The Mother of Dartmoor. Between 1917 and 1918, the company made contracts with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, the first million-dollar deals in the history of film.

Chaplin's contract allowed him to produce his films without a set release schedule. However, the production of the feature film The Kid ran so long that the company started to complain.

To address their concerns, Chaplin invited the exhibitors to the studio, and they were so impressed by the project and charmed by the players, especially co-star Jackie Coogan, that they agreed to be patient. That patience was ultimately rewarded when The Kid became a major critical and box office success.

First National's distribution of films by independent producers is credited with launching careers including that of Louis B. Mayer.

First National Exhibitors' Circuit was reincorporated in 1919 as Associated First National Pictures, Inc., and its subsidiary, Associated First National Theatres, Inc., with 5,000 independent theater owners as members.

Associated First National Pictures expanded from only distributing films to producing them in 1924 and changed its corporate name to First National Pictures, Inc. It built its 62 acre studio lot in Burbank in 1926. The Motion Picture Theatre Owners of America and the Independent Producers' Association declared war in 1925 on what they termed a common enemy—the "film trust" of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, and First National, which they claimed dominated the industry not only by producing and distributing motion pictures but also by entering into exhibition as well.

Acquisition by Warner Bros.
The financial success of The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool enabled Warner Bros. to purchase a majority interest in First National in September 1928. Warner Bros. held 42,000 shares of common stock out of 72,000 outstanding shares while Fox Pictures held 21,000 shares; 12,000 shares were publicly held. Warner Bros. acquired access to First National's affiliated chain of theatres, while First National acquired access to Vitaphone sound equipment. Warner Bros. and First National continued to operate as separate entities.

On November 4, 1929, Fox sold its interest in First National to Warner Bros. for $10 million. The First National studio in Burbank became the official home of Warner Bros.–First National Pictures. Thereafter, First National Pictures became a trade name for the distribution of a designated segment of Warner Bros. product. 45 of the 86 Warner Bros. feature films released in 1929 were branded as First National Pictures. Half of the 60 feature films Warner Bros. announced for release in 1933–1934 were to be First National Pictures.

Although both studios produced "A" and "B" budget pictures, generally the prestige productions, costume dramas, and musicals were made by Warner Bros., while First National specialized in modern comedies, dramas, and crime stories. Short subjects were made by yet another affiliated company, The Vitaphone Corporation (which took its name from the sound process).

In July 1936, stockholders of First National Pictures, Inc. (primarily Warner Bros.) voted to dissolve the corporation and distribute its assets among the stockholders in line with a new tax law which provided for tax-free consolidations between corporations. Although the 1939 release, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, was released as a First National Picture.

From 1929 to 1958, most Warner Bros. films and promotional posters bore the trademark and copyright credits "A Warner Bros.–First National Picture" in their opening and closing sequences.

title: First National Pictures