What is “Florentine” football? And how do you play?

I progenitors of football and rugby they were medieval, violent and abusive sports, like the Florentine football and the soule (Northern France), where a broken nose or a sprained wrist were considered players’ trophies.

French origins. Souleit was a lot of ball game manescotook place in a campo which varied in size from tens to hundreds of metersincluding woods, streams or swamps, two teams competed in which all the able-bodied men of the two competing villages or parishes played, even reaching over 200 people in the “game”.

Objective of the game: to bring the ball from the half field where the game started (often the border between two parishes or two towns) to the opponent’s goalmarked by a line on the ground or represented by the opponent’s village square. There ball (in leather or made with a pig’s bladder filled with feathers, rags, horse hair) could be handled using hands and feet and any means was considered valid and “forbidden shot”.

“Florentine style”. More regulated, but no less violent, was the Florentine footballtoday known as costume football, a sport similar to a mix of football and rugby where the ball could be hit either with i punches both with i feet.

Every match saw each other face each other two teamsgenerally composed of 27 players in liverycalled footballers. The mob was kept at bay by 6 referees who watched the match from the top of a side stand, far from the scuffles for possession of the ball, which had to be carried beyond the line that marked the end of the opponent’s pitch.

The teams. Streets and squares were the ideal playing field and, just like in modern football, in this variant of the Middle Ages the teams were organized internally with distinct roles for each player.

The rear was composed of eight employersdivided into front players (full-backs and attacking midfielders) and back players (defenders); in the center were the four players who had the role of supporting the play of the fifteen in front, i.e. the attackers.

Every city has its own football. The rules of medieval football they varied from city to city. If small balls were used in Florence, in Prato, according to a chronicle of the time, “they use those big balloons“. And while in the illustrious city of art it was mostly played by hand, in the neighboring one “you don’t hit the ball with your fist, but always with football“.