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Football was invented around 1876 by a man by the name of Walter Camp. He got the idea from William Ebb Ellis who was playing a game of soccer when he picked up the ball and started to run with it, therefore breaking the rules and giving Camp the idea for the game.
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Viper1
AnswerIf you're asking about the ball itself, that came from Rugby, which used an egg-shaped ball to help facilitate handling, passing, and carrying. American football originally used a rugby ball, but after the forward pass was legalized, the American ball gradually became skinnier, to make it easier for the passer to handle, and pointier at the ends, which made it more aerodynamic.William Webb Ellis is credited with inventing rugby, but the story is most likely apocryphal. At the most, he ran with the ball after catching it, which was prohibited under the rules of the day. In early soccer, players were allowed to catch the ball with their hands, but if they did so, they had to immediately kick it away. Ellis's "innovation," if indeed there was one at all, was to run with the ball he had just caught, rather than kicking it as he was supposed to.
Walter Camp was aware of the English rugby code, but there's no evidence whatsoever that he was inspired by Ellis. Americans, by and large, knew about rugby because Harvard played a game of rugby against McGill College in Montreal and brought the game back to the United States. Harvard loved the game so much that it pushed other American football-playing colleges to adopt a uniform set of rules based on the English rugby code. That's when our modern game of football first began to take shape.
