History of Foosball

Essay by panhockey1025High School, 11th gradeA+, May 2004

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Foosball

The history of foosball takes us back to the Germans in the early 20's to late 30's. The game started to get popular when some of their soccer teams used to go to the bars and celebrate after they had won a match in the late 1940's. They thought it would be neat if they had a game that imitated soccer. This produced the coin-operated tables that are used in bars and public facilities. No one is sure who invented it because a lot of people were working on the same idea around that time. The first tables made all had different numbers of rods, players, balls, and sizes. Pretty soon almost every bar had one in Germany. In 1955 the first soccer games were imported in the United States but were not willingly accepted. The first person to actually make a commitment to distributing them was Larry Patterson. The name for foosball came from the German word for soccer, football. The word is spelled FuBball in German. The funny looking "B" is pronounced like two S's. Therefore Larry Patterson named his product "foosball". The sport has kept its name till this day. Patterson first distributed his foosball tables to the U.S. Armed Forces and they loved the competitiveness of the sport. So Patterson sold them to the public in 1969 and it was a huge success. The sport has been spreading ever since. It is now one of the most popular coin games and home games.

Some of the top brands that have formed are Tornado, Dynamo, and Shelti. I just bought a Tornado last year and it is great. It provides great ball control so you can move the ball to your players faster. The rods glide very smoothly which helps because you can spin them...