Boxing Day and the Origins of the Beautiful Game

Today is Boxing Day, the English-speaking world's most sacred sports holiday. Damn near every soccer team in England has a match today. I'm not talking about Premier League soccer teams, although they're all playing; I mean every team in the country. Of the 92 fully professional teams in England's Football League, there are 46 live matches. Even in the Conference, England's fifth and sixth tiers, where many teams are semi-pro, every club is at it. In the Southern Hemisphere, things are just as festive and equally sporty. The Melbourne Cricket Ground, the fabled, 160-year-old temple to cricket, is full: Australia is taking on India in the annual Boxing Day Test. Similar matches, in addition to an uncountable number of other sporting events, are taking place in New Zealand and South Africa.

Like all good holidays, Boxing Day's origins are nebulous. Why it didn't take hold in the United States isn't completely clear. Many European countries have today off in celebration of the "second day of Christmas," something Americans abstain from. In England and the participating commonwealth nations, where Boxing Day was added to the national calendar in 1871, the holiday is secular.

"The best clue to Boxing Day's origins can be found in the song 'Good King Wenceslas,'" explains Claire Suddath in a 2009 Time piece:

"According to the Christmas carol, Wenceslas, who was Duke of Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day—Dec. 26—when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season—hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that pepper our neighborhoods during the winter—but King Wenceslas' good deed came the day after Christmas, when the English poor received most of their charity."

According to Suddath, more historically-grounded explanations suggest the holiday took its name from boxes traditionally used to collect donations for the poor during Advent, or that it sprung from the traditional boxed-up gifts aristocrats gave their servants after Christmas.

In soccer's murky prehistory, however, there are some overlooked clues. Before the English Football Association, before the game of rugby became its own observably different thing, a group of sportsmen in Sheffield wrote down the rules of their game, something nobody had ever done before. It was 1858, and it was under these Sheffield Rules—later combined with a different set of rules to create the modern game—that soccer history was made.

"The first ever challenge match took place against Sheffield FC on Boxing Day 1860 at Sandygate Road," reads the description on Hallam FC's webpage. Sheffield FC is the world's oldest soccer team. Hallam is the world's second oldest and it still plays at Sandygate Road. "This is still believed to be the first ever Inter Club game and the oldest to survive until today [sic]."

So when the historians argue about the origins of Boxing Day, about where the "box" comes from, they're obviously missing something: the penalty area is also called the 18-yard box. Soccer has always happened on Boxing Day—since before it was even a national holiday. The holiday has always celebrated the beautiful game. What more evidence do you need?