By that logic Rugby is just a variant of soccer.
it only sits seperate as rl administration is historically dumb and didn’t keep it under its management. Though seeing how it’s thrived an$ how sht rl management is that’s probably no bad thing
Rugby was codified before soccer and both developed largely independently from mob football and the various public school games.
The Webb Ellis story is a myth, that comes from a single source that recorded it 6 years after Ellis' death, and the story doesn't add up. Ellis wasn't a pupil at Rugby at the time the event supposedly occurred, and codified rugby takes rules from multiple school's games where it was legal to handle the ball.
The term football predates both codes and actually drives from games played on foot as opposed to games played on horseback, and not games played with the feet. Many, probably even most, mob football games were played carrying the ball and not with your feet as well.
In other words Rugby isn't a variant of soccer and soccer isn't a variant of Rugby, both were conglomerates of multiple public school games, that each developed independently with influence from local mob football games, with the purpose of creating sets of rules that could be used for interschool competition and to create organisations for the general public (largely the alumni of the schools at the time) to hold competitions outside of the schools.
