A game of Frogball being played at GameCity festival in Nottingham. The rules of the game state that players must stand on lilypads, and are only allowed to carry the ball between their legs.
By Simon Parkin/The Guardian
Brian Clough stands in baggy jumper and easy slacks, hands clasped above his head in a pose of perpetual celebration.
From the vantage point of his bronze statue’s marble plinth, set at the babbling junction of Nottingham’s King and Queen Street, the city’s favourite football manager has a clear view of Old Market Square.
There, in 2004, thousands of fans turned up to mourn Clough’s death and honour his life.
Today, on an afternoon in late-October, cringing under a loaded sky, the crowds are here, not to spectate but to partake in the sport—or, more precisely, a cover version of the sport.
Two teams bustle on to the pitch. They are dressed, not in shorts and long socks, the traditional get-up of the contemporary soccer player, but in frog onesies. The pitch is roughly a quarter of the size of a football field and surrounded with bright green netting to keep the ball in, and it is spattered with lilypads. Each one is exactly 29cm in diameter and cut from felt.
The rules of Frogball—game designer Llaura Dreamfeel’s striking variant of the beautiful game—are simple. Every player must be standing on a lilypad at all times, one person per lilypad. Players are only allowed to carry the football between their legs, and shots and passes must be flicked, not kicked. For all its whimsy, the players look exhausted after just five minutes of play. If Clough disapproves of all this, his patina and pose say otherwise.
While the costumes give the scene the appearance of an over-indulged child’s party, this is, in fact, all part of a more serious experiment. Unbeknown to the crowd, some of the players work for the Football Association, the sport’s national governing body. They have come to see how people react to Frogball, and to the other eight football redesigns being trialled at Nottingham’s GameCity, a weeklong celebration of play in all its myriad forms. Anyone can sign up to play, and on a panoramic television screen above the pitch, live footage and commentary is relayed to lure in passersby.
Not all of the variants were as quirky as Frogball. In Go Wide, for example, a single goal is placed in the centre of the pitch. One team aim to shoot the ball through one side of the goal while the other team must do the reverse.
Vampire Football stipulates that players must hide under a sheet at all times. The number of points awarded for a goal is equal to the number of players creeping under the sheet (a minimum of two).
This introduces a tactical element: do you have numerous duos on the pitch, or larger groups that are less manoeuvrable but enjoy an improved score ratio? In Frozen Football, by contrast, players are allowed to run only when the ball isn’t in possession.
As soon it touches a player’s foot, everyone must freeze to the spot. From this simple rule, a complex game of positioning and strategy unfurls.
Football is in a moment of mild crisis. Not at the top end of the game, where sales of tickets to Premiership matches are on the rise, and where the money continues to swill, grotesquely.
Rather, at the grassroots level, where there has been a marked decline in the number of people across the UK playing each week.
Football remains the most popular team sport. According to the latest figures, an average of more than 1.8 million people played the game once a week during the past 12 months.
“That figure, however, represents a decline of over 200,000 since December 2012,” says Phil Smith, director of sport at Sport England.
This decline of national engagement has a knock-on effect at every level, contributing toward the frequency of both foreign transfers in the professional leagues and wounding losses in international games.
Causes of the decline are unclear. Some put it down to the rise in popularity of individual fitness activities such as running. More than a million people have taken up regular sporting activities since the 2012 Olympics. But it’s a rise that has, according to Smith, meant team sports have had to fight harder for attention.
Others say the selling off of local football pitches to property developers has made it more difficult for amateur players to find suitable locations to play—as has a decline in the standard of facilities more generally.
Then there are the practical challenges baked into the game’s design: simple though football is, if you want to play a proper match there’s still the need for goals and nets and an empty diary slot shared by 22 players.
As Smith puts it, “Changes in people’s footballing habits have been driven by a range of factors including lifestyle changes, family pressures, increasing costs and pitch access and quality”. Some say that any money intended to draw more people into football should be spent on more equipment and better facilities.
Others, however, argue that investing only in resources fails to address some more fundamental issues with the game’s practicality and appeal.
Sport England is responsible for helping to reverse the decline by any means necessary. Historically, the organisation paid money to the FA to inspire more people to play football at least once a week, as measured by the Active People Survey, a telephone survey intended to gauge our engagement in sports and active recreation. Recently, in a rather game-like twist, these payments to governing bodies have become dependent on performance.
In December 2013, when Sports England found a “significant decline” in football participation, £1.6mn in funding was promptly diverted away from the FA. It was largest amount to be taken from a national governing body (England Golf Partnership lost £496,000, England Netball £275,000 and British Rowing £236,000 for their various failings).
Rather than simply offering the funds to another football body, Sport England conjured a new plan to appoint a City of Football. For two years this city will act as a beacon of advocacy and invention, promoting the cultural, social, health and educational benefits of football and supporting diversity among those playing the game.
The experiment aims to be instructive. “We want to be able to use the lessons from the City of Football project to inform and influence the way that other partners and places approach this kind of work,” says Smith.
Nottingham beat rivals Portsmouth and Manchester in the bid to become this football mecca for a year.
Iain Simons, director of the GameCity videogame festival, was invited to help with the pitch despite, he says, having spent most of his school years trying to avoid the game.
“I don’t even like football,” he says. “But it was exciting to get the chance to work with a group of people from a culture I had little experience of and knew next to nothing about. I ended up being hugely personally committed to the bid for reasons that I still don’t fully understand.”
Simons was, in fact, instrumental to Nottingham’s success. “I think Nottingham got the bid because of the creativity of their approach,” says Viv Anderson, the former England player who is the City of Football’s ambassador. “The idea of inventing different ways of playing the game is appealing. It gets people interacting in new ways, and even debating.”
Indeed, Simons’ idea to use the GameCity festival as a platform to invite designers to redesign the game resonates with a wider trend in the sport, where modifications to the usual 11-a-side, 90-minute match have, in many cases, become more popular than the vanilla game.
Five and six-a-side football is now the preferred form of the game for more than 50% of men and women. His decision to predominantly use videogame designers to mess with the rules was also key. These are the people, Simons believes, who are better equipped than any to apply their skills of playtesting and iterative design to a centuries-old sport.
While the basic rules of professional football have remained unchanged for more than 100 years, the game has nevertheless shifted shape dramatically over the centuries.
Football has numerous source points, including Cuju in ancient China, Kemari in Japan and Episkyros in ancient Greece, each of which had its own distinct rules.
Nevertheless, the earliest description of football played in England, offered by Thomas Becket’s biographer William FitzStephen in the 12th century, has the ring of familiarity. “After lunch all the youth of the city go out into the fields to take part in a ball game,” he writes. “The students of each school have their own ball; the workers from each city craft are also carrying their balls. Older citizens, fathers, and wealthy citizens come on horseback to watch their juniors competing, and to relive their own youth, vicariously.”
The ambiance surrounding contemporary football stretches back to Tudor times, then. But the game of historical English football itself was deadly. In the 16th century, more people died playing football than any other sport apart from archery.
Mob football, as the game was sometimes known at the time, often involved an unlimited number of players (“base” characters, as the Earl of Kent puts it in Shakespeare’s King Lear), who would punch and trample one another in search of a winning strike. The chaotic game eventually split and formalised into football and rugby. Today, aside from a few, notable violent clashes on the field, contemporary football is a much more formal, cleaner game. (For one thing, the ball is neither made from an animal’s bladder nor, mercifully, an executed criminal’s head.)
While football has long ago settled into an orthodoxy, many rival team sports continue to be tweaked and changed to suit the times.
Twenty20 cricket, for example, which was introduced in 2003 by the England and Wales Cricket Board, limits each side to a single innings of no more than 20 overs. These restrictions (and what is a game, if not a mesh of interesting restrictions?) make it more opportune to our schedules and, perhaps, more legible for newcomers.
Rugby, meanwhile, has seen its rules tweaked endlessly throughout the game’s history. The original rules, for example, stipulated that touching the ball down over the line did not score points. Instead, it presented the opportunity to “try” for a goal by kicking the ball between the goal posts. The values allotted to tries and penalties were only settled in 1992.
Sport England itself has had some success twisting the rules of familiar sports in order to increase participation among young people.
After the Lawn Tennis Association lost some of its funding in April 2014 after failing to meet targets, Sport England invited local authorities to submit proposals for finding alternative ways to get young people involved in tennis. Cheshire West and Chester council won the bid with the idea for a project dubbed Tennis Havoc.
A huge number of people participated in playing the variant “pop-up tennis” game, which uses scaled-down nets and rackets, and lower-density foam balls. The organisers found that, in the spirit of playfulness, many participants even ended up devising their own scoring and rules for the game, including “football tennis”, which involved kicking the ball back and forth over the net.
Pop-up tennis is unlikely to bother Wimbledon’s trimmed lawns any time soon, but every popular sport has gone through a similar nascent phase, where the rules are tweaked before they settle. According to Smith, more than 1,000 young people became “active” as a result of the programme, many of whom have since been trained to become organisers and coaches.
Part of the challenge for any designer hoping to establish a folk variant of a popular sport is ensuring that it retains some essential spirit of the real thing.
Move too far away from the source material and, at some point, you are no longer hockey on horses, you’re “polo”. Stay close enough together and you’re Rugby League and Rugby Union. You may have irreconcilable differences, but like it or not, you’re also yoked by a name and family likeness.
Subtle changes appear to be the most valuable in establishing the popularity of a variant. While Frogball was mesmerising, it was Ricky Haggett’s Go Wide that proved the most popular game at GameCity.
“People saw the pitch, recognised the elements of it, and then seeing the single goal in the centre made them gently curious,” says Simons. “It was a subtle rearrangement of the game that was easily accessible for teams to pick up and play themselves.”
Haggett, says that by the end of the first day he had “pretty much forgotten” that he wasn’t watching normal football: “At this point, the teams were really comfortable with the rules and had started employing some deeper strategic play.
It was clear from listening to the way they explained the rules to new players that they totally got how Go Wide works, and why it was interesting. One guy told me that they’d probably give it a go at his club training session. That felt like a strong endorsement.”
Holly Gramazio, who designs games for public spaces and hosted the weekly matches, agrees: “I think Go Wide proved especially popular because the layout of the pitch enforces its new rules. You simply can’t play traditional football when the goal is in the middle of the field.”
For Gramazio, the experiment was a clear success. “I wasn’t prepared for how easy it would be to get people involved,” she says, noting that convincing the public to play her games is often the hardest part of the job. “I think it’s because people love football. And people love trying out different versions of familiar games. Everyone understands the basic rules, so even the variants are quite welcoming.”
Those variants are currently being collated, and will be shared with local schools and sports clubs.
“The idea was very much that this is a starting point in the life of these games,” says Simons. “It’s critical that the games aren’t just for that week, though—they’re a gift for people to play for as long as they want to.”
For Haggett, however, the most enduring games are not those with a single author, but the ones that change and grow. “Any enduring sport requires a special combination of simplicity and flexibility,” he says. “But really, does anyone ‘invent’ these folk variants, or do they kind of coalesce over time?”
