Just about every sport has some sort of governing body and/or historical organization. You can try searching the web with Google for these groups - check the list of results for not just the large, clickable page title, but the source of the page (usually smaller and above that linked text.
For example:
- I searched Google for the terms "football history" (without the quotation marks).
- The first result I got was titled "Football History," and the information about that title indicated that the page came from the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
* The hall of fame has a .com extension on their website. Librarians (and others) used to say that .com websites were business sites, and therefore possibly not as trustworthy as .edu (education) or .org (organization) websites. However, this is not always true, and the final judgement as to whether or not a site can be trusted lies with YOU.
- The next result, from Football history, at https://www.footballhistory.org, is titled "The history of football (soccer)." I just learned something - I need to limit my results to AMERICAN football!
- I wonder what will happen if I search Google for the "history of American football"?
