do you think nobody thought of kicking a ball around BEFORE they decided to break horses

of course they did, but why would a self respecting elite adopt peasant terminology for a beloved pass time? How could it get away with skewing early rules and standards if they couldb't frame it entirely as theur own? How could they exclusively commodify it if it were not mythologized as their own creation?

Of course these point are vastly irrelevant to the discussion at hand but, make no mistake, i'd never have made them if they were to begin with.