A brief history of the Crossbar
The concept of some form of line or bar to mark the height at which ball needs to be kicked to score is not new. In 1681 the doors of forts were used as goal markers when the King’s servants played an early form of ‘folk football’ against the servants of Duke of Albermale.
During the 1850’s Uppington school football rules held that the ball should go under a bar for a goal to have been scored. Also, in the 1840’s Surrey cricket and football club had a rule where in order to score a player had to kick the ball over the “goal rope”. Clearly, an early form of ‘rugby type’ goal scoring, the ball being kicked over not under a marked line. Our earliest references of a crossbar being used in rules and games linked to modern Association football rules comes as early as December 1861.
A Sheffield FC match report of a game at Hyde Park between Sheffield FC & Hallam FC describes the ‘… ball being headed under the crossbar..’ to score a goal for Hallam.
The crossbar rule was officially introduced into the Sheffield Football rules in 1862. Sheffield FC argued for a crossbar to become part of the London FA‘s new code in late 1863 during their initial meetings. Unfortunately, the fledgling London FA rejected a crossbar rule at that point meaning in early London FA games you could score a goal at any height between the 2 goal posts.
An 8th April 1865 Bells Life match report of a game played on 30th March between Sheffield FC & Nottinghamshire FC describes ‘Dixon kicking splendidly onto the crossbar’. This tells us that by early 1865 the crossbar in Sheffield at least was a hard bar, likely made of wood that a ball could be “kicked onto”. If the bar was made of just tape the likely result of a ball hitting it would be to pull the tape and posts with it over or out of the ground.
More evidence of a crossbar being used in matches involving Sheffield clubs come from a report by the Leeds Evening Express of game at Leeds Royal Park in December 1865 between Sheffield Norfolk & Leeds. The report explains that ‘the ball went within a foot of the crossbar’.
The London FA eventually introduced a taped crossbar into it’s rules in 1866 and by 1882 it had become mandatory to have a hard crossbar in all association rules matches. London finally caught up but like most of our modern rules, the original idea in modern association football came from the football being played in Sheffield.
Do you have more information about this that we could add? Are any of the facts wrong? Please get in touch if so.
Source: Steve Wood
