Personally, as someone who loves his football, I'd say WAR is a much bigger way of 'managing crowds', wouldn't you?

Or you could look at things the correct way. Just as dogs like chasing balls in parks (maybe trying to burst the thing), so do kids. Kids grow up and the game got refined. Bigger and bigger stadia were built. Great competitions were devised. It's an extremely popular sport for a good reason. People love playing the game / loved playing the game / wish they had the talent to have played the game to a certain standard.

The game was hardly devised to enable public disorder to be moved from one place to a preferred location now, was it?

You heard the one about the war that started over a game of football? (El Salvador & Honduras)