Throughout the world, the game of kicking balls is old! Maybe that’s why soccer has such a magical kind of appeal on every continent.
In his brilliant book, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Eduardo Galeano describes the history of the soccer ball:
“The Chinese used a ball made of leather and filled with hemp. In the time of the Pharaohs the Egyptians used a ball made of straw or the husks of seeds, wrapped in colorful cloths. The Greeks and Romans used an ox bladder, inflated and sewn shut. Europeans of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance played with an oval-shaped ball filled with horsehair. In America the ball was made of rubber and bounced like nowhere else.”
Galeano neglects to say that in France, a mouse named Louie LaSurie uses a dried pea as a ball.
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