I too have seen The English Game :) Competitive play may have started with the wealthy, but football had been played in various forms as early as the 15th cent

I too have seen The English Game :) Competitive play may have started with the wealthy, but football had been played in various forms as early as the 15th century. Wikipedia has a lot of good citations on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word) As with most organically adopted words, nothing is clear cut, but there's quite a lot of evidence that the foot in football is about being on foot rather than on a horse.