Gaelic and Aussie rules aren't so much dependent on codified association football as they were each somewhat independent codifications of existing games. Assoc

Gaelic and Aussie rules aren't so much dependent on codified association football as they were each somewhat independent codifications of existing games. Association football has only existed as a codified game since 1863 - football before then was just a spectrum of local games played across Europe with little in common as areas got further away. Around the time of the codification of association football it was noted that different people in Ireland were playing association football, rugby football, and a third distinct game people referred to as "Irish football". Modern Gaelic football was codified in 1884, and its rules were "dependent" on English football forms in the sense that it's codifiers explicitly rejected anything that was regarded as an English influence in writing the rules. It was a very nationalist time in Ireland and the GAA is an Irish nationalist organisation - they tried to keep out elements that were perceived as foreign, and integrated a lot of elements of hurling (a very distinct Irish game played with sticks that predates written history in Ireland). The similarities between Gaelic football and Aussie rules is probably not a coincidence, but it's not because of soccer - the Irish diaspora played Irish football in Australia, and how the game was developed there had an influence in how the game was codified into Gaelic by the GAA. Irish football may have had an outsized influence in how football was played in Australia that it didn't have in Britain. American football does more directly descend from codified English rules of football - Harvard were big proponents of rugby-style rules, which evolved into modern American football.