Were South America’s Guarani people the creators of soccer?

South America’s Guarani people played a football-like game two centuries before the modern sport emerged, says the Paraguayan government in a new documentary based on Jesuit texts. The film, “The Guarani Invented Football,” retraces Catholic missionaries’ 17th-century descriptions of an indigenous game played with a rubbery inflatable ball that players had to control with their feet. But despite its title, the film stops short of claiming the Guarani invented modern association football, a sport that grew out of various games dating back to ancient times that was first codified into a widely used rulebook in 19th-century England.

We just want to highlight a curious historical fact, which is that they were already playing a ball game with their feet when the Jesuits arrived shortly after 1600.

Paraguayan Culture Minister Mabel Causarano

The first Jesuit missionaries to arrive in the colony wrote dispatches to the Vatican describing how native men would play a game with a “bouncing ball,” according to Antonio Betancort, the Spanish priest who today heads San Ignacio Guazu, the oldest Jesuit mission in Paraguay. The missionaries said the game was called “mangai,” named for the Mangaisi tree the natives tapped to extract the honey-colored, rubbery resin used to make the ball. There were no goals, and games lasted until one team got tired and quit, thus losing the match. “The problem is that every match ended 0-0,” joked Betancort. Latin America’s Aztec and Inca peoples also had ball games well before Europeans arrived in the Americas, but did not have any known links with the Guarani, said historian Jorge Rubbiani.

"The ball bounced a lot and players had to have good coordination to control it and dribble it.

Jesuit priest and expert in Guarani culture Bartomeu Melia

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