Table football, also known as foosball, is a tabletop game loosely modeled on association football in which two opposing sides turn rows of rods fitted with miniature player figures to strike a small ball into the other side's goal. Matches are played as singles, one player per side, or doubles, two players per side, and informal games sometimes stretch to three or four players on a team. Similar games were patented in Germany and France as early as the 1890s, but the first widely recognized patent belongs to Harold Searles Thornton, who patented an apparatus for playing a game of table football in the United Kingdom in 1921 after reportedly drawing inspiration from a matchbox. The game spread through pubs, bars and recreation rooms, and grew especially popular in North America between the 1950s and 1970s. The International Table Soccer Federation, founded in 2002, now governs standardized international competition alongside the game's enduring casual play.
Facts
Sport
Game Type (category) Classification
Player CountSmall Group (3-6 Players) 1 Connections
Sources
1. Table football (Wikipedia)
Lead, first sentence
Table football is a tabletop game loosely based on association football.
Lead, origins paragraph
Harold Searles Thornton received the first recognized patent in 1921 in the United Kingdom for Apparatus for playing a game of table football.
Lead, player count sentence
The game accommodates various configurations, from singles to doubles, with informal matches sometimes featuring three or four players per team.
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