Table football is 2,000 years old: the Chinese game that got there first

Ask who invented table football and you will get one of four names: Peter Adolph, Alejandro Finisterre, Harold Thornton, Geraldo Décourt. All four are real, all four are documented, and the earliest of them is from 1921.

They were all beaten to it by roughly two thousand years.

First, the game they were imitating

Before there was a tabletop version, there was cuju — a Chinese ball game whose name means roughly to kick a ball with the foot. It is not an obscure footnote: FIFA cites cuju as the earliest form of a kicking game for which documentary evidence exists, drawing on a military manual from the Han dynasty.

The paper trail is genuinely old. Cuju appears in the Zhan Guo Ce, the Strategies of the Warring States, describing the state of Qi. Sima Qian describes it in the Records of the Grand Historian, in the biography of Su Qin. A Chinese military text from the third or second century BC lists it as exercise for soldiers.

So: an organised, documented football-like game, played in China centuries before the common era.

And then someone put it on a table

This is the part that should be in every history of our game and is in none of them. The game is called 彈棋 — tanqi, which translates roughly as flick chess.

It is attributed to Liu Xiang, in the reign of Emperor Cheng of the Western Han. And here is the detail that matters: tanqi was created in imitation of cuju. The board was made of stone and reproduced a cuju pitch. Players flicked pieces across it with a finger.

Read that again with a modern eye. A flat playing surface marked out like a football pitch. Small pieces. A finger. That is the exact specification of Subbuteo, arrived at in China roughly nineteen centuries before Peter Adolph filed his patent.

It was not a curiosity — it was a court obsession

Tanqi was played, written about and argued over for something like a thousand years.

• Cao Pi, emperor of Wei, was famously good at it and wrote the 彈棋賦, an ode to the game. An emperor wrote poetry about a flicking game.
• The pieces multiplied as the game got more serious: six per player at first, eight by the Three Kingdoms period, twelve by the Tang.
• Liu Zongyuan wrote the 彈棋序, a preface to it.
• And the poets piled in — Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Li He, Wang Ya, Wei Yingwu all left poems about it.

It is hard to overstate how strange this looks from here. Imagine a version of Subbuteo taken seriously enough that the best poets of the age wrote verse about it, for four hundred years.

How it died

After the Song dynasty, tanqi faded — pushed aside by xiangqi, Chinese chess, which is still one of the most played board games on earth.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the same thing that happens to every flicking game eventually: a game of pure calculation arrives, looks more serious, and the game of touch gets filed under children. It happened to tanqi against xiangqi. It nearly happened to Subbuteo against video games.

Traces survived anyway. The 克朗棋 board popular in mainland China in the 1980s is considered a descendant, and the Tibetan game jiren is played by flicking with the hand. In Korea the same idea is alive right now: 알까기 (alkkagi), where two players flick go stones at each other trying to knock them off the board — five or seven stones each, last one standing wins.

The button coincidence

Now put the modern inventors back in the picture, because one detail links them across continents.

When Peter Adolph (1916–1994), an RAF veteran, filed his outline patent in August 1946 and put the first sets on sale in March 1947, those first Assembly Outfits contained wire goals with paper nets, a cellulose acetate ball, cardboard figures — and bases made from buttons, weighed down with lead washers. You marked the pitch in chalk on an army blanket.

Meanwhile in Brazil, since the 1930s, Geraldo Décourt had been building a whole sport out of shirt buttons.

Two men, two continents, no contact, the same answer: the cheapest round flat object in any house is a button. And two thousand years earlier, someone in China had reached the same conclusion with carved stone.

📌 A footnote that says a lot about how things get named: Adolph wanted to call his game Hobby, after the hobby falcon. He could not get the trademark. So he used the bird’s Latin name instead — *Falco subbuteo*. The most famous tabletop football game in the world is named after a bird of prey because of a trademark problem.

Sources

Everything above is sourced. The Chinese material in particular is thin in English, so here is where each piece comes from:

• Cuju — FIFA citing it as the earliest documented kicking game, the Zhan Guo Ce mention and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian.
• Alkkagi — the Korean flicking game still played today, and the reference to its Chinese variant tanqi.
• Subbuteo — Peter Adolph, the August 1946 patent, the March 1947 sets and the button bases with lead washers.
• Table football — Thornton’s GB 205,991 and Finisterre’s 1937 patent.

⚠️ On tanqi specifically: the detailed account — Liu Xiang, the cuju-shaped stone board, the rise from six to twelve pieces, Cao Pi’s ode and the poets — comes from Chinese-language sources on the game’s history. English references are much poorer, which is precisely why it is worth writing about.

If you read Chinese and can improve this, please write to me.

So who invented table football?

The honest answer has three layers, and most articles only give you the last one.

• As an idea — flicking pieces across a marked surface to imitate football — China, around two thousand years ago, with tanqi.
• As a mechanism — the rods, the figures, the patent — Europe between the wars: Harold Thornton filed GB 205,991 in 1921 (published 1 November 1923), and Alejandro Finisterre patented his version in 1937.
• As the games we actually play — the 1920s to the 1940s, five countries at once: Tipp-Kick, futebol de botão, chapas, Subbuteo, sectorball. We told that whole story separately.

None of them copied the Chinese. Nobody in Stuttgart or São Paulo in 1930 had read about tanqi. That is precisely what makes it interesting: the idea is obvious enough that humans keep re-inventing it whenever they have a flat surface, something round, and a spare finger.

Which is still true

Toy Soccer Cup is the same idea again, with a screen instead of a stone slab: aim, judge the force, accept that the miss was yours. Free, in the browser, against the computer or two people on one device.

If you want the version with felt and real pieces instead, here is how the modern game is actually played, and where the pitch sizes come from.