Football has been included in every Olympiad except 1896 and 1932 as a men's competition sport. Women's football was added to the official program in 1996.
Football was not on the program at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, as international Football was in its infancy at the time. However, some sources claim that an unofficial Football tournament was organized during the first competition, in which an Athens XI lost to a team representing Smyrna (Izmir), then part of the Ottoman Empire. Smyrna went on to be undefeated 15–0 by a team from Denmark. However, it is in fact unclear whether any competition took place at all; the Olympic historian Bill Mallon has written: "Supposedly a match between a Greek club and a Danish club took place. No such 1896 source supports this and we think this is an error which has been perpetuated in multiple texts. No such match occurred".
Tournaments were played at the 1900 and 1904 games and the Intercalated Games of 1906, but these were contested by various clubs and scratch teams. Although the IOC considers the 1900 and 1904 tournaments to be official Olympic events, they are not recognized by FIFA; neither recognizes the Intercalated Games today. In 1906 teams from Great Britain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France were withdrawn from an unofficial competition and left Denmark, Smyrna one Armenian, two Frenchmen and eight Britons, Athens and Thessaloniki Music Club to compete. Denmark won the final against Athens 9–0.
With Henri Delaunay's proposal in 1929 to initiate a professional World Championship of football hence the launch of the World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, Football was dropped from the1932 Los Angeles Games in an attempt to promote the growing sport of American Football in the United States, but it promptly returned at the 1936 Berlin Games. The German organizers were intent on the return of the game to the Olympic movement since it guaranteed vital income into the organization’s coffers. In any event, it proved to be a considerable success; the German national side was defeated by Norway in a second round match that was attended by Adolf Hitler. As professionalism spread around the world, the gap in quality between the two tournaments widened. The countries that benefited most were the Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe, where the top athletes were state sponsored while retaining their status as amateurs. Between 1948 and 1980, 23 out of 27 Olympic medals were won by Eastern European countries, with only Sweden gold in 1948 and bronze in 1952, Denmark silver in 1960) and Japan bronze in 1968 breaking their dominance. The last Communist nation to win the gold was the Soviet Union, in 1988.
Football is an important sport of Olympic Games.
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