When where goal posts invented?

Answer 1

Rugby School in England was probably the first place where goalposts were used, as the students there developed their own version of football -- what we now know as rugby -- in the mid-19th century.

Initially, the posts were just that -- two vertical posts, not connected by a crossbar. Australian rules football still uses this kind of post. Rugby was probably the first football code to introduce a crossbar. Doing so prevented players from running the ball up to the goal line and then dribbling the ball between the posts, along the ground, for an easy score. (Keep in mind that originally, scoring a try -- rugby's equivalent of a touchdown -- counted for no points. Kicking goals was how you won the game, and scoring a try just gave you the right attempt a kick at goal -- which is where the extra point/PAT came from.) With the addition of a crossbar, scoring goals became more of a challenge and kept players from crowding in front of the goalposts -- either to make an easy score or to prevent one.

Soccer in the 1860s adopted the same concept, except that in soccer, the purpose of the crossbar was to prevent teams from scoring easy goals with towering kicks from far downfield. Once players had to kick the under the crossbar to score, they had to develop greater strategies for getting the ball into the goal.

Today, all football codes use some variation on the goalpost. Rugby and American football use virtually the same type of post. Soccer lost the top half of the post and added a net to the bottom, while Gaelic football retained the net and the posts extending above it. And of course, Aussie rules simply has the vertical posts with no crossbar at all.