This article is based on a talk I gave to the British Society of Sports History conference in Edinburgh, on 27 August 2026.

​Why do footballers use their head? It might seem a daft question: in association football, the act of heading the ball is an essential part of the game, from defence to attack. Nearly one in five goals at this year's World Cup came from headers, and Spain's winning goal in the final came from a headed knock-down.
   It's a universally accepted feature, but that wasn't always the case, as players didn't start heading until nearly a decade after the Laws of the Game were drawn up in 1863.
   The origins of heading have had only a cursory examination in academic and sporting literature, so in this article I will outline the story of how and why this particular skill arrived on the scene.

First, it has to be said that heading in association football is an outlier, a quirk. The head is not used to propel a projectile in any other widely-played sport, and more specifically it does not play a part in any other code of football, and never has – the shape of the ball or the heavier weight make it impractical or downright dangerous.
   Even in soccer, it is barely mentioned in the Laws of the Game, except tangentially – for example, you can head a pass-back to the goalkeeper without sanction, your head could put you offside in these days of VAR scrutiny, you can be guilty of violent conduct for head-butting, and there are protocols for head injuries. But in the normal course of the game, heading is essentially unregulated.

On the other hand, perhaps it should be regulated. It is now generally accepted that heading carries an element of risk, and several high profile players have suffered an early death from neuro-degenerative disease, with heading a ball during their career being an attributable cause. The sad examples of Jeff Astle and Gordon McQueen are illustrated above.
   Recent research from Loughborough University even determined that heading a ball creates a pressure wave energy transfer to the brain which is comparable to some military gunshots and blasts.
   Consequently the last few years have seen attempts to redesign the ball to make it safer, while new medical protocols have been put in place - for example, the Scottish FA has banned heading in training the day before and after a professional match, and there are moves to exclude heading completely from youth football.
   The risks are clear, but there is little prospect of heading being banned completely as it is too deeply ingrained in the game. So the question remains, why do it?
   The answer to that requires an analysis of changes in football laws and playing styles that led to its adoption, as it is clear that heading was not a part of the game when the Football Association was founded in 1863.
   It did not emerge until the following decade, and only in 1871 do we have the first reports of deliberate heading. So, what happened?

A simplistic answer is that heading was an innovative ploy which was an unintended consequence of the abandonment of the 'fair catch', a feature which survives in other codes of football. But it's not as straightforward as that, as heading was not taken up universally in response to that rule change.
   Let's have a closer look at the fair catch, which was a relic of various school codes of football, and which equates to the 'mark' in rugby. The fair catch survived the drawing up of the Laws of the Game in 1863 but the FA soon realised their mistake and, as part of their drive to distinguish the association game from rugby, they dropped it in February 1866. The pioneers at Cambridge University did not even go that far, and having had it in their 1856 rules, it was gone in 1863.
   Despite that, in London and Cambridge there is no known evidence of a player using those changes to start heading the ball. Was it because the idea simply did not occur to anyone? I think it is more likely that they were in thrall to their old school games, where the ball must be kicked and dribbling was king.
   Further north, however, the story is different. When we talk of Sheffield Rules, that means a changing landscape. First, we had Sheffield FC who published theirs in 1858, and they went with the fair catch. Then the Sheffield Football Association redrafted those laws when it was founded in 1867 and dropped the fair catch to align with London. But a year later, due to popular local demand, they brought it back again, and it survived until 1871.
   As for Glasgow, the other early hotbed of football, they never had a fair catch rule. When Queen's Park were founded in 1867 they adopted the FA's laws of the game, then took it a step further by formally joining the FA in 1870.
   What Glasgow and Sheffield had in common, and set them apart from London, was an expansive style of football that encouraged passing, facilitated by a more liberal interpretation of offside. This essentially meant that the ball was more likely to be kicked in the air, to travel a distance, and that appears to be the genesis of heading when catching was no longer an option.

It was in Sheffield that we have the first record of a headed goal, but it was a lucky accident. In October 1870, a Mackenzie player whacked the ball clear only for it to rebound back into goal from the head of William Booker of Broomhall. It wasn't a deliberate act, so the only thing that can be taken from this is that it shows there was no problem in the laws with the ball hitting the head.
   I should point out that match reports in Sheffield were often more comprehensive than elsewhere at this time, making details such as this accessible to researchers.

Two weeks later, on 23 January, the Sheffield FA changed their rules so that the fair catch was deleted, on a trial basis to the end of the season.
   It was not universally welcomed locally but almost immediately you read of Sheffield players attempting to deliberately head the ball, albeit not with much success. What is interesting is that the examples illustrated were games against non-Sheffield teams, from Nottingham and Manchester, whereas in games involving Sheffield clubs only, there are no such reports of heading around that time.
   The fair catch rule was scrapped definitively by the Sheffield FA on 10 October 1871, but only by a 44-36 majority, after a fiercely contested debate among the member clubs.

It took until almost the end of the year, on 5 November 1871, for the first report anywhere of a deliberately headed goal begins scored. In a practice match to choose the Sheffield select to face London, Henry Ash, an Attercliffe player, 'judiciously headed the ball through'. But while the potential was now recognised, it still does not appear to be widely practised as there was no mention at all of heading when the Sheffield faced London in December, under Sheffield rules.
   However, a few weeks later, on 27 January 1872, Henry Ash was in the Sheffield team to face London in the return at The Oval, under Association rules, and by now, Sheffield players were clearly becoming more used to the idea of heading.

It caused a minor sensation – the Londoners thought this was hilarious, not football as they knew it. The press described heading as 'ingenious' and it was such a novelty that they even had to describe the act as 'stopping the ball with the head, so placed as to make the ball rebound in the direction it came from'. 
   I've seen it said that this proves that Sheffield invented heading. But how about this: just five weeks later, Queen's Park travelled outside Scotland for the first time to play Wanderers in the FA Cup semi-final, at the Oval on 5 March 1872. There had been no prior contact between the footballers of Glasgow and Sheffield but the Scots were also well versed in heading. The Field reporter wrote that 'their method of driving the ball with the head is precisely the same as that adopted in Sheffield'.
   So by early 1872, Sheffield and Glasgow footballers were adept at heading, whereas it was unknown in London.
   The start point for Sheffield is reasonably clear, related to their abandonment of the fair catch, but the genesis for Queen's Park is harder to pin down. Although the club was founded in 1867, this was the first time there was any kind of detailed newspaper report on their style of play. I would argue that Queen's Park had probably adopted heading early on, because they never had the fair catch rule, nor did they have the inherited baggage of public school rules and etiquette. However, the lack of reports makes it impossible to prove.

Later that year, on 30 November 1872, we have the first illustration of a player heading the ball, an unidentified Scotland player against England in the first international, described rather incongruously by The Graphic as 'making good kicks off his head'. For me, that drawing is a clear indication that heading was now a well-practised skill – a skill that the English players did not possess, with the possible exception of their one player from Sheffield. Combined with the Scots' ability to pass the ball as a team, this momentous occasion really did bring two very different ways of playing football face to face.
   You might think that was that, and heading swiftly became a universal part of the game, with everyone following the example of Glasgow and Sheffield, and that is demonstrably true in Scotland and the North of England.
   However in London, where the public school amateurs still dominated and clung on to football's dribbling roots, heading was perceived as a dark art, somehow against the spirit of the game. There was a marked reluctance to learn and to change, which remained in place for a generation and I found a couple of examples from over a decade later.
   Norman Coles Bailey, a Westminster School old boy who captained England 15 times, suggested in the Football Annual for 1885 that heading (or butting, as he called it) was taken to excess, and wondered whether it might be better for the game if it was outlawed, on the same lines as handling the ball. He went on to describe heading in front of goal by a forward as 'detrimental' and a waste of time. Try telling that to Erling Haaland.

And Bailey was not alone. In 1887 Charles Alcock, Secretary of the FA, so often an innovator, wrote disparagingly of 'half a dozen men hitting up the ball like so many goats'. He was firmly of the opinion that the foot was made for kicking and the head was made for thinking. Not a fan!
   But in essence, Norman Bailey and Charles Alcock were swimming against the tide, and with the decline of the amateur influence and the rise of the professionals came the recognition that heading was here to stay.
   To conclude, heading was a late starter in football, an unintended consequence of a law change, but only where it fitted with the local style of play. It was not invented by any one player or in any one place, although patchy newspaper reporting makes it difficult to see the full picture. Heading spread from Sheffield and Glasgow around the country but was derided by some as being unsporting.
   Today, having been part of the game for 150 years, the wheel has now gone full circle, and this universally admired skill is also recognised as a potential health hazard. So this may not be the end of the story, and there may be restrictions ahead.

I will leave you with this lovely 1882 cartoon of Charles Campbell, a Queen's Park and Scotland star, described as 'a handy man with his head at football'. It was one of a series of humorous drawings in the book 'Free Kicks at Football'.

When Edinburgh hosted an International Exhibition in 1890, the organisers knew that they would have to put on special entertainment to draw the crowds through the summer and autumn months.
   Alongside the displays of new technology, the balloon rides and the fireworks, a key part of their strategy was to stage a series of top class football matches at the exhibition’s recreation ground at Meggetland, in the west of the city. Over a dozen attractive fixtures featured all of Edinburgh's clubs as well as guests from the west of Scotland and from England.

This built on the success of the Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, which was staged on the Meadows in 1886 and concluded with a short series of football matches.
   In 1890, football was a much stronger element of the Exhibition and the large crowds of visitors could be whisked to the ground by electric railway from Haymarket Station, or by launch on the Union Canal. The series kicked off in August with two local derbies, Hearts v Hibs and Leith Athletic v St Bernard's, before branching out to include teams from far and wide.
   It was still the amateur era in Scotland so the organisers made sure the players were rewarded with something tangible. The winners of the first three matches – Hearts, Leith Athletic and Dumbarton – were presented with silver cups, the first of which is in the Hearts Museum at Tynecastle; also, the players in every game were awarded medals, a couple of which have come up at auction in recent years.

Another collectable souvenir of the matches was the daily events programme which contained full line-ups of all the big games including Hearts v Nottingham Forest and Rangers v Sunderland Albion, not to mention those featuring Dumbarton, Queen's Park and Third Lanark.
   A bound volume of the programmes is held in Special Collections at the National Library of Scotland, and for several of the clubs these issues represent their oldest known match programmes. If any individual programmes ever turned up at auction they would surely fetch a high price.
   Hearts, who won all three of their matches, even played a home Scottish Cup tie at Meggetland rather than Tynecastle and their 3-0 victory over Methlan Park (from Dumbarton) in October is in the programme collection.

For Hibs the Exhibition was less memorable as the club was then struggling for existence due to the recent exodus of players to Celtic and the impending loss of their ground. Their 2-0 defeat to Hearts was followed by a humiliating 9-0 reverse at the hands of Queen’s Park, and few were surprised when Hibs effectively went out of business before the year was out (they re-formed in 1893).
   Among other interesting ties, the organisers scheduled matches to coincide with local holidays elsewhere in Scotland, which explains why Rangers came to Edinburgh on a Thursday afternoon, and the same applies to visiting teams from Kilmarnock, Moffat, Dundee and Kirkcaldy. Some games were distinctively parochial, such as those featuring local butchers and grocers, while the Exhibition staff pitched in to provide the opposition for three games, including one where Kirkcaldy FC failed to turn up against Raith Rovers.
   Although football was the main attraction, the Exhibition also hosted a rugby match in September between Hawick and Stewart's College, while the pioneering Lady Cricketers played a three day match in August.

Edinburgh Exhibition matches 1890
 
6 August: Heart of Midlothian 2 Hibernian 0
13 August: Leith Athletic 3 St Bernard’s 1
20 August: Dumbarton 3 Leith Athletic 1
27 August: Queen’s Park 9 Hibernian 0
30 August: Third Lanark 2 Our Boys 1
10 September: Butchers 1 Grocers 3
15 September: Heart of Midlothian 1 Nottingham Forest 0
17 September: Kilmarnock 8 Wishaw Thistle 1
24 September: Exhibition Attendants v Leith Butchers
2 October: Rangers 2 Sunderland Albion 0
6 October: Exhibition Attendants 0 Raith Rovers 7
9 October: Moffat 6 Kirkintilloch Athletic 4
13 October: Lochee 4 Edinburgh Postal 1
17 October: Dumfries Wanderers 8 Exhibition Attendants 0
18 October: Heart of Midlothian 3 Methlan Park 0 (Scottish Cup tie)
29 October: Cameron Highlanders 0 Lancashire Fusiliers 1 (Army Cup tie)

The pages above show the team pages from the daily events programmes at the 1890 Edinburgh Exhibition. They are all held at the National Library of Scotland. Note that the numbering of matches is not correct!

Below, some programme covers from other exhibitions in Edinburgh and Glasgow, all of which featured football.