The Rules of the Game as Seen in Early Twentieth Century French Art

On a recent trip to the National Gallery in Washington D.C., one work piqued my interest. It, of course, had to do with soccer.

The work is called “Football Players” and was done by the French painter Albert Gleizes in 1912 or 1913. It is done in a cubist style (nothing beats Wikipedia for quickly acquiring knowledge and allowing me to avoid sounding like the art ignoramus that I truly am), seen below.

On seeing the painting and its title, my friend Hope asked a very logical question: is that football or soccer? After all, she said, they are using their hands.

Until last week, I would not have known, but it just happens that I am at the point in David Golblatt’s exhaustive history of soccer, The Ball is Round, to answer Hope’s question.

Goldblatt tells us that soccer in pre-World War I France had to compete against the already established sport of rugby. “Of the winter sports played, rugby was not merely the equal of football in terms of participation but in terms of participation and spectator-appeal marginally its superior” (154).

And as in many countries that played both rugby and soccer at this time, the rules that governed the two were often not clearly defined. Even though the split between rugby and soccer rules had already occurred in 1871, games between teams who played both games persisted. Goldblatt notes that “many teams often chose to play more than one code, often during the same game” (32). This overlapping of rules existed on the continent as well as in the UK.

So, while the title indicates that Gleizes was clearly painting football players, the game they were playing might also have involved aspects of what we know today as rugby. The player in the center of the painting running with the ball in his hands gives a clear indication that the “handball” had not been made illegal.

Another French painting of this same era shows that handling was quite common in the French football of that time. The subjects in Henri Rousseau’s 1908 painting The Football Players are also involved in a game with great differences from the current rules of the sport.

Just ten years after Rousseau painted his football players, another French painter’s work shows how the rules of soccer were becoming more defined. Painted at the end or just after World War, André Lohte’s 1918 Les Footballeurs shows a game with players clearly following today’s soccer rules more closely

The clear demarcation of rules of the new game that occurred around this time enabled “football [to] acquire national coverage and a significant place in the national culture” (159) of France. These three paintings offer an artistic representation of the split in rules which made soccer more easily recognizable, and more popular in early twentieth century France.