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Our care team consists of hundreds of professional animal behaviorists, aquarists, zoologists, veterinarians, and dieticians. What we have learned from caring for such a diverse set of animals over nearly 60 years is what informs the success of our mission, including rescue, rehabilitation, and return.

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Our marine animal habitats and animal practices are independently accredited, reviewed, audited, and certified by premier zoological and animal welfare organizations. This ensures that we not only meet, but exceed, the highest standards of animal care, anywhere. According to AZA, fewer than 10% of the ~2,800 animal exhibitors licensed by the USDA in the U.S. have met their standards, and we are one of them.

40,000 rescues & counting

Available 24 hours a day, every day of the year, our dedicated team of animal care, veterinary and animal rescue experts will always answer the call.

We're committed to protecting these incredible animals and their habitats, ensuring our promise to you: a visit to SeaWorld is a visit you can feel good about.

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seaworld theme parks orlando san antonio san diego

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Visit with Purpose: SeaWorld Orlando, San Diego & San Antonio - Park to Planet | SeaWorld

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From park to planet, SeaWorld theme parks offer up-close animal experiences, roller coasters and, most importantly, a chance for you to make a difference. Plan your trip to one of our theme parks in Orlando, San Diego or San Antonio today!

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Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida

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Welcome to Walt Disney World. Come and enjoy the magic of Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL. Plan your family vacation and create memories for a lifetime.

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Mojo Books & Records is Tampa's largest used & new book and record store. Located on Fowler Avenue, this iconic shop features an artisan coffee & tea bar. Mojo offers trading and selling for vinyl records, books, dvds, cds, cassettes, equipment.

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The basics of soccer are known by most people. There are 2 teams of 11 players who try to score more goals than their opponent.

In this post, we'll dig a little deeper and present you with some fun and interesting facts about soccer history that you probably didn't know yet.

1. Soccer is the biggest sport in the world.

There are over 250 million official soccer players in the world who play the game in over 200 countries. There are however over a billion people playing the game regularly as a hobby as well, making it the biggest sport in the world by participation.

2. What's the official name of the game.

In most countries, the game is referred to as soccer or football. The official name of the game is actually " Association Football."

3. Only 7 countries in the world actually call it soccer.

In most countries, including the United Kingdom, the game is simply known as "football." There are however 7 countries in which the game is referred to as "soccer." These include the United States and Canada and 5 other countries which use soccer or a variation of it to define the game.

4. Why do some other countries call it soccer?

This goes back to the period when soccer was invented. American football, for example, resembles rugby. Countries in which a variation of rugby became popular made the distinction between "soccer," which is short for " Asoccer" and an abbreviation of "Association Football, and " Football," which refers to the rugby-type game.

5. When was soccer invented?

The first "rules of the game" were created in 1848 in Cambridge, England. This was, however, a combination of Association football and a similar game called Rugby Football. In 1863, Association football had become a distinct game and specific rules were created to define it.

6. Kicking ball games were played thousands of years ago in China.

According to FIFA, the first kicking ballgame which can be verified was played in China during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) and was called " Cuju." The basics of the rules were pretty much the same as players couldn't use their hands and they were required to kick a leather ball filled with feathers into a small opening with a net.
Children playing the ancient kicking ball game Cuju / Wiki Commons

7. A Japanese version of Cuju emerged as well.

A game called " Kemari" that was influenced by the Chinese game of Cuju emerged in Japan as well. The first reference is made in the year 644 A.D. and official rules of this game were created in the 13th century.
The Japanese game of Kemari / From the LACM / Wiki Commons

Remarkably, this game is still played today and even more remarkably, it was played by George Bush during one of his presidential visits to Japan in the early 90s. It's a non-competitive game that resembles juggling the ball with multiple players involved.

8. There were many more ball games in history.

All around the world, similar types of games to soccer with different rules were played. In Greece, the game was called " Episkyros" and the Romans played a game called " Harpastum," which was probably influenced by the Greek games. Even the Mayas had a ballcourt to play a ball game at Chichen Itza.
Ballcourt at Chichen Itza / Source

One of the important facts about soccer history is that there was no reference to other games. In other words, it hasn't been influenced by any other games played in various parts of the world. British historian Tom Holland is pretty clear about it when asked about the historical references of Association Football:

I'm afraid I don't know anything about the classical origins of football, for the simple reason they don't exist. At no point did they come upon a local form of Association Football that needed to be eradicated before the British game could take root
Quote by British Historian Tom Holland / Bangkok Post

10. When was the first-ever soccer game played.

The first official game of soccer between two competing teams was played on November 6, 1869. The teams were Rutger and Princeton.

11. The first game was between two teams playing different sports.

During Rutger's home game, the rules of Association football were used, resulting in a grandiose victory for them. The following game on the Princeton ground was played by the rules of " rugby-football " at the time and the result was quite the opposite.

Then twenty-five of the best players in college were sent up to Brunswick to combat with the Rutgers boys. Their peculiar way of playing this game proved to Princeton an insurmountable difficulty; .... Two weeks later Rutgers sent down the same twenty-five, and on the Princeton grounds, November 13th, Nassau played her game; the result was joyous, and entirely obliterated the stigma of the previous defeat.
Typical Forms of '71" by the Princeton University Class of '72, 1869

12. The oldest soccer association in the world.

The FA ("Football Association") is the oldest soccer organization in the world. It's the governing body of association football in England and was created in 1863.

13. The FA had its first meetings in a bar.

The first meeting of the FA was held on the morning of 26 October 1863 at the Freemasons' Tavern in Great Queen Street, London. During these meetings, the rules of Association Football were created.
The Freemasons' Tavern where soccer rules were created / Wiki Commons

14. The world's oldest soccer competition.

The oldest soccer competition in the world is the FA Cup and it started in 1872. It was created by Charles W. Alcock, an important instigator to make soccer popular. The FA Cup was played between 15 English teams in a " sudden-death " format.

15. How was the FA Cup created?

By 1871, Charles W. Alcock was not just a soccer player, but also the secretary of the FA. He was the one to instigate the creation of the FA Cup by making the following request at one of the meetings:

That it is desirable that a Challenge Cup should be established in connection with the Association, for which all clubs belonging to the Association should be invited to compete.

16. Alcock didn't just create the FA Cup.

He also won it! The first FA Cup ever played was won by " Wanderers Football Club." They defeated Royal Engineers in what was the first FA Cup final in 1872 and Alcock was captain of the winning team.

17. When was the first international soccer game held?

The first-ever international game took place on 30 November 1872 at Hamilton Crescent in Glasgow, Scotland, which is actually a cricket ground. It was a game between Scotland and England and ended in a 0-0 draw. About 4,000 people were able to witness this historical moment.
Hamilton Crescent / Famous2005 / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

18. The first soccer league.

The first football league was also created in England, most specifically in Birmingham by the director of Aston Villa named William McGregor. This happened in 1888 and the league initially had 12 teams from the Birmingham area and North England.

19. FIFA is the international governing body of soccer.

One of the most interesting facts about soccer history is that the international governing body wasn't founded in the country the game was invented, but in France. FIFA refers to Fédération Internationale de Football Association and is the governing body of association football worldwide. Its headquarters are in Zürich, Switzerland.

20. Start of the FIFA World Cup.

The largest international sports competition is the FIFA World Cup. This soccer competition is held every 4 years and nearly 200 countries compete in qualifying rounds to be included in the tournament. It all started in 1930 when it was first held in Uruguay, and the home country was also the winner.
Team of Uruguay in 1930, the first World Cup winners / Wiki Commons

21. The FIFA World Cup skipped 2 years.

A black page in human history caused the World Cup to be skipped in the years 1942 and 1946. The second World War was the reason for this.

22. The FIFA World Cup has many fans tuning in.

It's hard to judge how many people really watched the games, but a study conducted by FIFA and Kantar Media has shown that a whopping 3.2 billion watched the games of the 2014 World Cup at home. Over a billion people watched the ultimate climax of the tournament, the final of the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Even higher numbers are estimated for the World Cup in Russia in 2018.
France won the FIFA World Cup in Russia in 2018 / Source

23. Soccer is an Olympic Game since 1900.

The first time soccer was included in the Olympic Games was in the year 1900 in France. The remarkable thing about this event was that the loser was certain to receive a medal as only 3 teams competed in it and there were only 2 games played. Great Britain won the final against France, and Belgium "won" the bronze medal as losers.

24. Soccer laws can change.

New technology and suggestions to improve the game are sometimes applied to modify the existing laws of soccer. A few examples of this is the use of goal-line technology to determine whether or not the ball has crossed the line, and the VAR ( video assistant referee), a team of additional referees watching a video of the game who can ask the referee on the pitch to revise his decision by rewatching a play during the game.
Referee rewatching play / SounderBruce / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

25. Who is the best player in soccer history?

We didn't want to include this because it's not a fact. But in our opinion, Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona is the best player in soccer history. And we're not the only ones who think so. His magical feet will be remembered by everybody who saw him play, forever.
A familiar sight during a Barcelona game / Source

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25 Great Facts About Soccer History | The Ultimate List

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The basics of soccer are known by most people. There are 2 teams of 11 players who try to score more goals than their opponent. In this post, we'll dig a little deeper and present you with some fun and interesting facts about soccer history that you probably didn't know yet.

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As G. K. Chesterton remarked, 'I left fairy stories lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.' Angela Carter, who reinvented the fairy tale in her collection The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories

, observed that a fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar. The best fairy tales are timeless and yet forever modern, tapping into deeply held and widely shared emotions and moral attitudes. The following constitutes not an exhaustive list of the definitive fairy tales, but rather our attempt to pick the top ten greatest fairy stories. As ever, we welcome your suggestions in the comments for any notable omissions. The best anthology of classic fairy tales, because it contains both the stories and very informative scholarly introductions to them, is still The Classic Fairy Tales .

'Puss in Boots'. A classic example of the fairy tale featuring 'the animal as helper', 'Puss in Boots' entered the canon of classic fairy tales when Charles Perrault included it in his 1697 collection of fairy stories, although like many of the greatest fairy tales, an earlier version can be found in the 1634 Pentamerone, a collection of oral folk tales compiled by Giambattista Basile. In the Perrault telling of this classic fairy tale, the booted cat shows his plucky and enterprising spirit and helps his poor hapless master to climb the social ladder. But his scheming involves some questionable behaviour and trickery...

'Rumpelstiltskin'. As we've revealed elsewhere, although this tale is closely associated with the Brothers Grimm and their retelling from the early nineteenth century, the basic story of 'Rumpelstiltskin' actually dates back around 4,000 years. A tale involving a greedy king, a negligent father, and a mysterious child-hungry dwarf, 'Rumpelstiltskin' is an odd but enduring fairy tale that may have its roots in fears over bad harvests - or, as we discuss in the post linked to above, a host of other plausible influences.

'Rapunzel'. This is another stalwart in the Grimm fairy tale catalogue, although the tale can be traced back to the sixteenth century in its earliest version. 'Rapunzel' (derived from the word 'rampion', a kind of lettuce) contains many classic fairy-tale features: the damsel in distress, the wicked stepmother figure, the handsome prince. But the Grimms' earliest version was anything but a children's story, and even the sanitised retelling hints at the story's 'adult' content. Nevertheless, this is a classic, and the image of the golden-haired Rapunzel letting down her hair from the tower in which she is imprisoned is familiar to pretty much everyone.

'The Frog Prince'. A short and reasonably straightforward tale, 'The Frog Prince' really became popular in the nineteenth century with the Brothers Grimm and then with various Victorian retellings in Britain, although there are precursors to the frog prince tale found in much earlier, medieval literature, such as in Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath's Tale', which shares some of its central features. This tale - about a princess who accepts help from a frog in return for her hand in marriage - also shares some similarities with 'Rumpelstiltskin', in that in both stories a girl receives help from a hideous assistant who then demands something in return. But in this story, there's definitely a pleasant twist in the tale...

'The Snow Queen'. This fairy tale is slightly unusual on this list in that, rather than being based on pre-existing oral or written narratives, it was an original story by Hans Christian Andersen in 1844. The inspiration for the film Frozen, 'The Snow Queen' tells of two children, a boy and a girl, who find themselves caught up in a battle of good and evil - featuring a broken mirror that distorts what it reflects. The mirror represents unhealthy cynicism which destroys youthful innocence. What is perhaps most noteworthy about this fairy tale - even more so than in Andersen's other major fairy tales - is that (spoiler alert) the evil character at the centre of the story, namely the Snow Queen herself, doesn't get her comeuppance at the end of the tale. We have analysed this story here.

'Sleeping Beauty'. 'Sleeping Beauty' is, depending on which version of the story you read, called Sleeping Beauty, Talia, Little Briar Rose, Rosamond, or Aurora. This is because, like many other classic fairy tales, the tale of Sleeping Beauty exists in numerous versions, each of which is subtly - or, in some cases, quite strikingly - different from the others. Yet the central plot details remain the same: a king is protective of his beautiful daughter, the princess. Hearing a prophecy that she will die when she is pricked by a splinter, the king bans flax and spinning equipment from his palace, so as to protect his daughter from such a fate. And yet the prophecy is destined to be fulfilled, leading to the death of the beautiful heroine...

'Cinderella'. The earliest appearance of the Cinderella story in print was in 1634 in the Pentamerone. Here Cinderella is called Cenerentola. In 1697, the French writer Charles Perrault published the story of Cendrillon, a variation on the story. Perrault added several details now intrinsically associated with the story - notably the pumpkin, the fairy godmother, and the glass slipper - to Basile's version, which already featured the wicked stepmother and the evil stepsisters. But in fact the story is even older than these seventeenth-century versions: 'Ye Xian' or 'Yeh-Shen' is a Chinese variant of the Cinderella story that dates from the ninth century.

'Snow-White'. The fairy tale of Snow White is a classic that contains many of the genre's most recognisable features: the wicked stepmother; a love interest in the form of the prince; the patterning of three; the woodland setting; the generous helpers (the huntsman, the dwarfs); and the happy ending. The story of 'Snow-White' was first made popular in printed literature by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century: the tale of 'Schneewittchen' appears in their volumes of classic fairy tales. In the Grimms' version, and indeed all nineteenth- century retellings of the Snow White story, the seven dwarfs don't have names. But nor was the 1937 Disney film the first version to give them individual names. That happened in a 1912 Broadway play, which called the dwarfs Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee. The Disney film then came up with the names with which we forever associate the seven dwarfs

'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. It was the UK Poet Laureate Robert Southey (who held the post from 1813 until 1843) who first put the fairy tale of the three bears into print in English. However, Southey's version had an old woman rather than a golden-haired girl as the story's anti-heroine (well, she's hardly a heroine, is she?). This more familiar version, of course, has Goldilocks as the juvenile delinquent who breaks into a humble ursine dwelling in order to indulge her penchant for fussiness over meal temperatures and fidgeting about in other people's beds.

'Little Red Riding Hood'. This is one of the most famous and best-loved fairy tales of all. But what, exactly, is its moral? Don't talk to strange men (or wolves) when out on your own? This question is made even harder to answer by the fact that 'Little Red Riding Hood' exists in two versions - in one, the red-hooded protagonist is gobbled up by the wolf, but in the other, she is spared (or cut out of its belly and given a reprieve). Whatever its ultimate meaning, this remains a stalwart of fairy tale collections and has been popular ever since Charles Perrault's telling in the 1690s.

Continue to explore the world of children's literature with these ten classic Victorian fairy tales, these classic children's poems, and these fun facts about children's books.
Our new book, Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape , is out now, published by John Murray. More about the book can be found here. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. Image (top): Johnny Gruelle illustration of Rapunzel from Project Gutenberg (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons. Image (bottom): Goldilocks runs from the Three Bears (1912), via Wikimedia Commons.

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10 of the Best Fairy Tales Everyone Should Read

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The greatest fairy stories - selected by Dr Oliver Tearle As G. K. Chesterton remarked, 'I left fairy stories lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.' Angela Carter, who reinvented the fairy tale in her collection The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories, observed that a...

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The BEST Aruba Tours and Things to Do in 2023 - FREE Cancellation | GetYourGuide

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Find the top-rated and best-reviewed tours and activities in Aruba for 2023. From prices and availability to skip-the-line options and mobile tickets, get all the information you need to make the most of your trip to Aruba.

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PREMIUM DIAMOND PAINTING KIT CROSS STITCH MEETS PAINT BY NUMBERS! LET'S CREATE YOUR DIAMOND PAINTING MASTERPIECE! YOU DEFINITELY DON'T WANT TO MISS OUT ON: Creative Crafting - Fun and enjoyable for craft lovers of all ages! Amusement - Let the stress melt away as you paint with diamonds!

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Dog Breeds A-Z Find a Breed Alphabetically

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Find a breed alphabetically. Dog breeds a to z with pictures, A total of 373 dog breeds.