Association Football
In association football, numbers were traditionally assigned based on a player's position or reputation on the field, with the starting 11 players wearing 1–11, and the substitutes wearing higher numbers. The goalkeeper would generally wear number 1, then defenders, midfield players and forwards in ascending order.
Numbers being assigned to each player in a squad was initiated for the 1954 World Cup, where each man in a country's 22-man squad wore a specific number for the duration of the tournament. In 1993, England's Football Association switched to persistent squad numbers, abandoning the mandatory use of 1–11 for the starting line-up. It became standard in the FA Premier League in the 1993–94 season, with names printed above the numbers. Most European top leagues adopted the system over the next five years.
Very high numbers, the most common being 88, are often reserved and used as a placeholder, when a new player has been signed and played by the manager prior to having a formal squad number.
Read more about this topic: Number (sports)
Famous quotes containing the words association and/or football:
“An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“You can’t be a Real Country unless you have A BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
—Frank Zappa (1940–1993)