Did Soccer Originate in Scotland? New Claim Draws Jeers in England.

Since the mid-19th century, England has been widely accepted as the birthplace of modern soccer. The sport’s lineage is commonly traced back to mob football, a violent and chaotic game popular in the British Isles during the Middle Ages. Hundreds of players from neighboring hamlets would separate into two teams, lock themselves into an enormous scrum and struggle blindly for control of a circular object, often an inflated pig’s bladder. The drunken pushing, kicking and pummeling could last for hours, even days, and had no time limit. The only set rule: weapons were prohibited.

In a 1583 broadside, “The Anatomie of Abuses,” the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs raged against the brutality of the pastime, which he called a “bloody and murdering practice.” In 1863, to reduce the mayhem and regulate gameplay, a young English solicitor drafted the first comprehensive rule book, which was adopted in London by the newly formed Football Association established by erstwhile boarding school lads from the likes of Eton and Harrow. Hence England’s claim to have pioneered today’s game.

“Unfortunately, that narrative is utterly without merit,” said Ged O’Brien, a retired schoolteacher and a founder of the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow. “The fact is that for centuries, football has been played in every town and village in Scotland. Not mob football, but proper football.”

Last month Mr. O’Brien and a team of archaeologists identified what they believe is the world’s oldest known soccer playing field, or pitch, on a former 17th-century farm in the town of Anwoth in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. The find offers rare physical proof of an organized playing field, in an era when written accounts of working-class recreations were scarce.

“Our discovery has serious implications for sports historians,” Mr. O’Brien said. “They will have to rewrite everything they think they know about the origins of the so-called beautiful game.”

The first clues emerged in a letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford, a Presbyterian cleric who was pastor at Anwoth Old Kirk (Church) from 1627 to 1638 and later a professor of divinity at St. Andrews University. In the document, he expressed dismay about parishioners who played “Foot-Ball” on Sabbath afternoons at a place called Mossrobin Farm.