I always wondered about the reason footballs field 11 players each during a game. It seemed like an odd number that needed exploring as to whether it was decided upon by a study of sorts which stated that this was the best number of players for the pitch area. Or maybe it was just a random number and that's it.

This question led me into two paths which were deeper holes than I thought I'd get myself into.

Path Number 1

It is believed that football as a sport had more ancient roots than anything the English have done. People often mentioned an old game played by Maya and Aztecs peoples before Christ was even born. In the 16th century for example, before football was even remotely to be a thing, there was a sport called "Calcio Storico Fiorentino".

The Calcio Storico Fiorentino was a mixture of football, rugby, and mixed martial arts, yeah you read that correctly, football, rugby, and mixed martial arts, that was the official description of the game. In reality, it was closer to street fights, but, what turned it into a sport was that a ball was thrown in the middle at some point. It was a sport where you saw people punching and kicking each other with blood all over the ball and ground.

The sport had 27 players, 4 goalkeepers, which I have no clue what they do in this game, 3 fullbacks, 5 midfielders, and 15 attackers and Muller was the ballboy of course. What does that have to do with football? Well, it is merely one of the phases of the journey to having football.

In England, the closest thing we had to football around the time it started, began with influence from the "Calcio Storico Fiorentino", or what later became known as, Rugby. It was a sport where kicking and punching were allowed along with what we Arabs call "Thief Scissors". To those uncultured, a thief scissor is when I hold you by the shoulder then swipe your Achilles heel, which results in you falling on your ass.

Long story short, the Calcio Storico Fiorentino turned into rugby which had approximately 15-21 players per team, depending on who shows up. If both teams weren't equal, the extra players would sit on the sideline waiting. This is where the idea of the bench came in probably.

The English aristocrats liked the sport but obviously didn't like the idea of getting bruised, kicked, punched, and concussed, so they began changing it into a sport started by Oxford and Cambridge students called Soccer. That's right, Americans are actually correct historically to call soccer but we will never let them have that. After that, the pitch's length was downsized from 200 yards to 130 yards.

So, this path suggested that the number of players was downsized to 11 because the pitch itself was downsized and it needed to be balanced or asymmetrical for the positions in football. However, I am not fully convinced by this one.

The reason the previous path isn't convincing is that by the time football began, the formations weren't balanced or asymmetrical. It was very common at the time that we see formations like 2-3-5 or 2-4-4 and sometimes 1-3-5, so it's very unlikely that the reason for downsizing the numbers is that they still had unbalanced positions.

It is also unlikely that those formations were used to describe a team the same we do today as football wasn't as evolved at the time and people were often only thinking of one phase of play, unlike today where all four phases are put in mind, defending, attacking, switching from defence to attack, and switching from attack to defence. It was very similar to football 2nd graders played in the street. This leads us to the second path.

Path Number 2

The organizers of football in English, basically the English Football Association, needed football to gain as much popularity as possible, so they mimicked @talesfrmthecrypt's favourite sport, cricket. Cricket used to be a royalty sport and existed way before football and was way more popular. By mimicking such a sport, the FA saw that football would gain popularity faster with that in common between the two.

The question now becomes, why does cricket have 11 players in each team? The popular answer is that England's king, Edward VII had 11 courtiers, with each of them having 1 replacement. So, each year they would often play against their replacements with the winning team becoming the main courtiers. Now the question becomes, why did Edward VIII have 11 courtiers in specific? The answer is, I don't really care. At some point, I had to stop researching and this was it.

In Conclusion

Sports don't come out of nowhere, at least not in their current form. Each sport has historical reasons for existing and the way it operates that could proceed the sport itself by thousands of years. Each sport was inspired by another, sometimes more than one sport and each sport had a long journey before each aspect of it became something people watching it rarely think about. One detail could have changed football entirely, making it extremely different to what we see today.