People live for Football

It is the highly popular and proclaimed sport all around the world. Football has been included in every Summer Olympic Games except 1896 and 1932 as a men's competition sport. Women's football was added to the official program in 1996. In the London Games of 1908 a proper international tournament was organized by the Football Association, featuring just six teams, rising to 11 in 1912 at which event the competition was organized by the Swedish Football Association. These early matches were fairly unbalanced, as witnessed by some large scores; two players, Sophus Nielsen in 1908 and Gottfried Fuchs in 1912, each scored ten goals in a match, a record that stood for over 90 years. All players were amateurs, in accordance with the Olympic spirit, which meant that some countries could not send their full international team. Great Britain got around this problem by sending the England national amateur team who managed to win the first two official tournaments convincingly, beating Denmark on both occasions.

The Olympics after the First World Cup

With Henri Delaney’s proposal, in 1929, to commence a professional World Championship of football, FIFA did not want the Olympic tournament to overshadow their own showpiece event, so football was dropped from the 1932 Los Angeles Games, and it returned at the 1936 Berlin Games. The German organizers were intent on the return of the game to the Olympic movement since it guaranteed vital income into the organization’s coffers. In any event, it proved to be a considerable success, more so since the German national side was defeated by Norway in a second round match that was attended by Adolf Hitler. As professionalism spread around the world, the gap in quality between the two tournaments widened. The countries that benefited most were the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, where the top athletes were state sponsored while retaining their status as amateurs. Between 1948 and 1980, 23 out of 27 Olympic medals were won by Eastern European countries, with only Sweden with gold, Denmark with silver and Japan with bronze breaking their dominance.

For football large stadium was required and for this purpose Olympic venues were always set far away from the main cities. It could be 120 miles away from the main city. One known example was two early-round venues for the 1984 Games were on the U.S. East Coast, well over 2,000 miles from the host city of Los Angeles. The next Games held in the United States, the 1996 Games, were unique in that no matches were held in the host city of Atlanta; the nearest venue and the site of all finals was about 65 miles away on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. Men’s football was added in Olympics in 1900 but women’s football didn’t part of the competition until 1996. The 1900 and 1904 tournaments were originally a pair of demonstration matches between the three teams, but have subsequently been upgraded to official status by the IOC with medals attributed to the teams based upon the match results. People all around the world are crazy after this game and this game has strong roots especially in Europe, where people live for football. In USA, this game is still highly proclaimed and being in Olympics is great for all football fans.