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Why You Should Keep Saying Soccer
Real life, Twitter, TV, articles… this keeps coming up. I want to be clear. The game they are playing at odd hours on the corpses of immigrant workers far off in the desert is called soccer. No “in America” or “by Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, the Irish, Pakistanis, South Africans, Nigerians… et al.” clarification needed. The game is Association Football, shortened by weird Oxford students who add -er to the end of everything to Soccer Football and later just Soccer. The game falls under the same identifying umbrella as Rugby Football, Gaelic Football, American Football, Australian Rule Football, and Hockey (field for certain – I’m not sure about ice.)
No sane person has a problem with anyone calling the game football in a context that makes it clear which of the many games you are referring to that are encompassed by the word. The British can say football all they want, knowing that those around them understand what is being referenced is the type of football known as Association Football, just as I casually use the word football to refer to the American Football type in which Alabama just beat Alabama Polytechnical Institute 49 to 27. I do have a problem when some East End denizen thousands of miles away gets a bee in his trunk or a local hipster with a crisp on his shoulder and a copy of Proust sitting on his night table that he’s started six times gets high and mighty because I or someone else is more specific than he wants to be.
Twitter is fun. In a recent exchange, there were those who said that American Football isn’t football at all since the players rarely kick the ball. Per that horde, it should be called some variation of Handsy-Eggball-with-Pads. They also claimed that soccer should be called football because “Duh!” and then offered something along these lines that were shared by a British tweeter: “It’s rather aptly named since it’s a game predominantly played with feet, in contrast to American football, which is predominantly carried around in the arms of players wearing giant shoulder pads.” The shape of the ball has nothing to do with the name of the game. Neither does the part of the body used to handle or make contact with the ball. We have British accounts of late 18th and early 19th century games called football where it was Illegal to contact the ball with the foot.
The Brits need to know that the reason there is a class of games referred to as football is because those games are not played on horses. Duh!
It’s that simple. The aristocracy formed the horsey set, and they played at jousting and polo and probably all manner of other activities. The poor people didn’t have that option. I don’t know that it was taboo for the wealthy to play non-equestrian sports, but the sense I got from reading is that these sports you had to play on your own two feet were looked down on. That’s it. Ruggers and Gaelic and Hockey (maybe the first, as it’s pretty much polo without the animal) are all sports played on one’s feet. Again, in context, calling a game football works since I already suspect which set of rules is meant but literally saying that a game is called football is akin to saying that a game is called horseless sport. (If I’m being literal, I’ll concede that since horses are measured in hands and hands are used to measure horses, football is a game without using hands. I’ll give them that.)
There you are. Enjoy the World Cup, and while you’re at it, ask a British person why they still call Rugby “Rugby.” Oh! Also be sure and mention that Bobby Charlton of the 1966 English World Cup winning team, their national hero who slew the dragon and waits under a great green hill to rise again when England is in greatest peril, titled his 1964 book My Soccer Life (He bowed to peer pressure in 2009 when he released My Life in Football.)
Published in General
I was a big fan of professional baseball, football, and basketball when I was young. That diminished as I aged and the games themselves were changed, sometimes drastically.
Never was a fan of soccer. Has it changed much over the years?
Nah–players still flop onto the ground and roll around like they’re near death, and goals are as rare as hens’ teeth.
But I still enjoy watching for some reason.
Didn’t Americans insist on tie-breakers when professional leagues were formed here?
No, college football had been well established before instituting tie-breakers.
I have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
The Bee even had more to say:
https://babylonbee.com/news/10-ways-to-make-soccer-watchable
At least the women rip their jerseys off after a win . . .
I think it was on an episode of Sports Night that one of the guys suggested the best way to improve Soccer is to make the goal smaller and get rid of the goalie.
I just had a thought. What else is played on ones’ feet, and hence is also “football?”
Croquet.
(also Cricket.)
And running.
USA over Iran 1-0. USA advances in the World Cup.
I meant in terms of feet and the ball, to justify the name “football.”
In “American football” the foot is rarely in contact with the ball. In that sense, “Soccer” deserves the name “football” more than “American football” does.
Justin, I feel that way about all sports (except perhaps boxing, which I used to enjoy watching). What makes me an enthusiast about particular sports — basketball and soccer, specifically — is watching my kids play or, now that they’re grown, watching my young cousins. I try not to miss their games, but have never watched a complete professional game of anything on television and probably never will.
I like the kids playing soccer, they don’t do much in the way of flops.
I wish I had less interest in watching sports. I’m a little like this, except with watching sports:
One of my favorite passages from Twain. So, yeah, I’ll watch pretty much any sport any time I have a chance. And yeah, I’m not right.
I enjoyed Tom Sawyer quite a lot as a kid. Never made it through Huckleberry Fin or almost anything else of his (including the Frog book you quoted). I think I might have read The Innocents Abroad. That’s it.
Not a huge fiction reader, but love Huckleberry Finn and The Celebrated Jumping Frog. Not sure I can explain why, but I seem to connect with Twain’s sense of humor.
I’m not sure the natives of Alpha Qatari say it that way either.
I played soccer into my thirties- including a brief period in the US. This overlapped with my introduction to baseball in my twenties. I am a Mets fan every bit as much as I am a Leeds United fan. Both games can be exhilarating on a good day and painfully boring on a bad one. If one has an appreciation of good defence, then low scoring games can be intense and intriguing. Same goes for rugby, which I also played and follow passionately, and field hockey which – thanks to my daughters- is my principle obsession. NFL and Gaelic Football leaves me cold, but hurling is arguably the best of them all (players can kick the ball, but nobody calls it football).
Yabbut too late.
Feeling magnanimous though, I’ve decided they may keep the term “footie”.
Amateurs. In fairness flopping around like dying fish instead of behaving like a dignified human being probably requires considerable training.
There’s a story that a Soccer manager once showed his team of highly-paid professionals video of a hurling game and told his players that they should try to be as fit as the hurlers – all of whom were amateurs!
It should be said that the greatest sportsman of all time is a soccer player- Lionel Messi.
I have a twelve year old cousin who assures me that this is indeed the case.
Lacrosse players watch that video and think, “real men don’t need a goal that large.”
Or even Shirling?
And basketball players say . . .
Ah, Ricochet seems significantly less hostile than the first comments on a Peter Robinson post years ago.
I just love it. I played youth league soccer from age 7, its first year in our town, up to the amateur league level at age 37, and a few more years indoors. Somewhere in there I became a high school head coach as well. The relentlessness, the quick decisions, the physicality, the surprises, shutting down opposing strikers, winning, but, most of all, it’s the team thing.
The bond always snuck up on me. You don’t realize you miss teammates until it’s all done. Soccer isn’t exclusive in that by any means, but it pays out a bit better in a game that is in constant motion.
I played the other sports, too, including defensive end (“Contain! Contain!” was the coaches refrain). Loved pickup basketball on the playgrounds up to college i.m’s. Doesn’t take much to get me on a court or field for anything. Tomorrow I get to enjoy pickleball doubles against students who signed up to play the teachers. Time for a lesson in humility…whether for them or us I cannot say.
Isn’t it still true that young people have more frequent and more serious injuries playing soccer than football?
Chris,
I was never athletic, and we homeschooled our six children and they weren’t athletic either. But when I decided, as a single father after my wife passed away, to put the three younger ones into a small Catholic middle- and high-school, they immediately gravitated to sports — and I think it was the best aspect of their high school educations. They loved sports, played everything (and excelled at much of it), and athletics formed a huge part of their social lives and their activities.
It completely changed my appreciation for high-school sports, and I’m glad they had the opportunity to experience it.
H.