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I could answer this one myself and say that we’re never going to know. It was probably some kid in deepest, darkest Africa. It’s possibly been with us as long as we’ve played all kinds of games, well before the notion of playing with a possum (foot) ball was in anyway articulated or expressed.
However, looking through Wikipedia, one might get the impression that no-one has a clue about where the idea came from.
It doesn’t even really make clear whether the idea of the goal predates the codification of sport, even though common sense would seem to suggest that it only entered the English lexicon after the codification of Association Rules Football.
Usually folk history is well outside of the sphere of critical analysis, as though the answer were too easy (or too hard) to be worth thinking about. I don’t know.
But what was it about the concept of a ghoal (and has pretty much stayed largely intact since the 1860s/70s) which was said to be so universal that it was the most self-evident way of deciding a ‘football’ match?
For example, cricket in the first codified rules of 1728 defines (or at least inferences) the notion of winning a match through the scoring of runs.
In one sense, this is a kind of goal, but it has nothing to do with a special geographical space where different rules apply, unless you count the boundary ‘rope’ as a specific geographical space.
But automatic runs for a boundary were certainly not an eighteenth century innovation.
Most other sports do use the term goal: a football goal (times six as there are six major football codes), Basketball goal, Netball goal, (Ice, Roller) hockey goal, and so on.
I think the greater issue here though is whether these many sports tap into the one concept of a goal (in an anthropological way) or are there as many articulations of a goal as there are in the football codes which gave rise to the terminology?
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