The very earliest form of the game for which there is scientific evidence was an exercise from a military manual dating back to the second and third centuries BC in China.

For all the evidence of early ball sports played elsewhere in the world, the evolution of football as we know it today took place in Britain.

The spread of football outside of Great Britain, mainly due to the British influence abroad, started slowly, but it soon gathered momentum and rapidly reached all parts of the world.

Women's football matches once pulled bigger crowds than most men's games - sometimes more than 50,000.
In the 1920s the sport flourished with around 150 women's teams in England.
But then the women's game was effectively banned, with the FA at the time saying the game of football is "quite unsuitable for females".

The Perth Stadium and Sports Precinct transport solution integrates train, bus and pedestrian options. It supports a cultural shift in the reliance on cars and will efficiently and safely move, within an hour of an event finishing, up to 50,000 people, or 83 per cent of a capacity crowd while reducing the impacts on nearby residential and environmental areas.

Taking World Cup qualification matches outside the main metro cities has been a deliberate strategy following the Socceroos’ AFC Asian Cup success.

Cultural diffusion is the term used to describe the spread of cultural ideas from the Core (in the case of culture regions) and the culture hearth. There are three methods of cultural diffusion.
The first is called direct diffusion and occurs when two distinct cultures are very close together. Over time, direct contact between the two leads to an intermingling of the cultures. Historically this occurred through trade, intermarriage, and sometimes warfare because members of the various cultures interacted with each other for long periods. An example today would be the similar interest in soccer in some areas of the United States and Mexico.

Geographers and other experts divide cultural diffusion into two categories: relocation diffusion and expansion diffusion. Relocation diffusion is the spread of a trait as people migrate to new homes within their countries or across national boundaries, bringing their culture traits with them. Migration is a process that begins with the decision to leave one's homeland, then physically moving to a new land (and possibly new cultural environment), and, in the post-migration stage, becoming integrated, to a greater or less degree, into the structures of the adopted society.

Culture is an accumulation of knowledge, values, attitudes, social roles, perceptions of place and time, way of life, way of earning, and of socially conveyed expectations. A culture is a way of life for a group of people that is learned and communicated to younger generations over time.

Football, more than any other sport, has thrived on globalisation.

It is believed this game, Marngrook -- a traditional Aboriginal ball game played for millennia in what is now western Victoria -- provided the first lawmakers of football with some of the fundamentals of the game millions know and love as Australian rules football.

In each Australian state and territory the word 'football' has a different meaning. For those living in the Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia, football usually refers to Australian Rules Football. In the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, and Queensland, it could mean rugby league or rugby union. The word 'soccer' equates to the game played by the Football Federation Australia for all of Australia.

Mobile phones and tablets have allowed social media to flourish and now football stadiums such as Liverpool’s Anfield and the Etihad Stadium, home of Manchester City, offer fans Wi-Fi, enabling not only more interactions at live events but more commercial activity, too.

The growth of the A-League in the past few years has clearly helped, and with it being shown on free-to-air television channel SBS for the first time this year, officials are hoping for a further lift in numbers.