  As the most popular sport around the globe, the game of football has recently
intrigued much research interest to explore and distill useful and appealing
information from the sport. Network science and graph-centric methods have been
previously applied to study the importance of football players and teams. In
this paper, for the first time we study the macroscopic evolution of the
football society from a complex network point of view. Football game records
within a time window of over a century were collected and expressed in a graph
format, where participant teams are represented by graph nodes and the games
between them are the graph edges. We carry out community detection and temporal
analysis to reveal the dynamic features and the community structures embedded
within the football network, offering the evidence of a continuously expanding
football society. Spatio-temporal analysis is also implemented to unveil the
temporal states that represent distinct development stages in the football
history. Our analysis suggests that the evolution of the game receives
considerable impact not only from major sport events, but also from multiple
social and political incidents. The game of football and its evolution reflect
significant historical transitions and turning points, and can provide a novel
perspective for the study of the worldwide globalization process.
