"Football's coming home?" Yes, but not to England – claims a historian from Scotland

"Football's coming home." English football fans sing this anthem whenever their national team comes even close to winning a tournament— most recently, for example, in the 2024 European Championship final they lost at Berlin's Olympic Stadium. While the "Three Lions" hardly ever win a title (their last appearance was at the 1966 World Cup), the English at least sing of their pride that their ancestors invented the sport.

But now a football historian is even shaking up this certainty. Ged O'Brien, founder of the Scottish Football Museum, recently told the BBC that the origins of the world's most popular game lie in Scotland. How does he come to that conclusion?

O'Brien found a letter from Samuel Rutherford, who served as a minister in Kirkcudbrightshire between 1627 and 1638. In it, the minister wrote that upon arriving at the parish, he was horrified to find "a piece of ground on Mossrobin Farm where people played football on Sunday afternoons." O'Brien said of the find: "This is one of the most important sentences in football history because it identifies the exact spot where this ground was located."

The former Mossrobin farm is located near Anwoth Kirk, a church ruin in southwest Scotland. O'Brien and a team of archaeologists discovered fourteen boulders arranged in a line on the property. Soil samples also suggested that the stones were placed in the meadow during the time Rutherford was active in the parish.

O'Brien concluded that the clergyman wanted to ban football in the village. He had his parishioners scatter the boulders across the square to prevent kicking on them.

O'Brien told the BBC that the discovery could force historians to "revise everything they think they know about the game and its early development."

So do the origins of modern football lie much further back than previously thought?

So-called mob football, an early form of modern football later standardized by codified rules, was already widespread in the early Middle Ages – in Great Britain as well as on the European mainland. It is considered an unorganized, violent game in which large crowds competed against each other. The goals were often the city gates of two towns, miles apart, and the ball was an air-filled pig's bladder. Historians date the birth of modern football to 1848, when students at Cambridge University first established binding rules for the game.

Until now, the oldest football field was considered to be a square in Sandygate in Sheffield, England. Founded in 1857, Sheffield FC, the oldest football club in the world still in existence, played there against local rivals Hallam FC on St. Stephen's Day 1860. Three years later, former graduates of the private schools of Eton and Harrow founded the national football association in London; Scotland's association was not established until 1873.

Rutherford's letter and the stones in Kirkcudbrightshire, however, indicate that people played football in an organized, rule-based manner not only in the industrial 19th century, but 200 years earlier: on a specially designated, clearly demarcated pitch, with regular matches ("on Sunday afternoons"). In Scotland, not in England.

If O'Brien's theory is correct, another song would probably be more fitting. One that opposing fans regularly use to taunt the English at major tournaments: "England's going home."

Perhaps it is not only the country's chronic lack of titles that is a legend.