Why ‘Soccer’ Is British, Not American – And Why Americans Should Keep Using It

Americans get a lot of flak for calling the World Cup game "soccer." Jabs come for a variety of reasons. A nearly forgotten charge implied arrogance: how dare we abrogate the name “football” for our domestic favorite when there are so many other games—rugby, Australian rules, soccer, Gaelic—under the umbrella. That one never landed. We call ourselves Americans at Mexican and Canadian expense, so we aren’t about to get the vapors over a ball game. Now the world calls soccer “football” so that one’s more or less forgotten.

An odd new front paints “soccer,” our preferred term, as an Americanism; as an abomination spread by Yanks and maintained despite an otherwise global conformation to “football.” The claim that everybody else is down with “football” is specious, but put that aside. This one doesn’t land either. We’re the only ones measuring by an inch, arbitrarily defined as roughly the length of three barley grains, rather than using the scientific metric measurements, which arbitrarily define a meter as one ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the midway point of the planet we happen to be on, which only coincidentally approximates the comfortable yard. But put that aside, too. “Soccer” was the preferred English term until pretty recently.

The shift came mid-1970s, smack in the worst of crumbling empire malaise and right before their Thatcher pick-me-up. There wasn’t a whole lot of cultural confidence over there. England was a mess. John moved to New York, Paul to Scotland, and Ringo split time between London and LA. Only George, the quiet one, remained reliably in England. Like George, the English found themselves suddenly not on top of the world. Best blend in and keep their collective head down, avoid making waves, and if the continent says football, do what’s needed to fit in.

To be clear, “soccer” is an English invention, both game and word. Bobby Charlton, who slew a dragon for Manchester United and was the hero of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning “side,” titled his first memoir My Soccer Life and nobody batted an eye. This wasn’t a Sorcerer’s Stone concession to the American audience. There wasn’t My Football Life on one side of the Atlantic and Soccer on the other. As I’m writing, there’s a first edition copy of Pelham Books London release in decent condition available for £25 on eBay.

For all the scholastic magistry and Evelyn Waugh mystique Oxford University has amassed since Henry II hinted that University of Paris expats should come home, goofy students are goofy students the world over. For reasons that have nothing to do with being poncy, faddish aspiring scholars went through a phase in the late 1800s where they dropped a final syllable and tacked on an “-er” in its place. The trend turned Rugby Football into “ruggers.” There’s a colonial remnant of the fashion floating around college campuses in the US. If you’ve ever called a keg party a “kegger,” you’re among the afflicted and part of the great link tying scion Lords chasing a second with Iowa State marketing majors playing beer pong at the Sigma Nu house.

English public school sports clubs got together and codified a set of football rules for competition. That set of rules came to be known as Association Football until the Oxford kids got hold, shortened “Association” to “socc” and did the “-er” trick. There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that an Oxford student and captain of the English national team, Charles Wreford-Brown (whose Wikipedia page features a starch collared photograph of the man suited for the cover of a box of licorice cough drops), coined the word. I’ve read that some early pronunciations hilariously kept association’s sibilance and said it as “sosser.” I like to think a Latin teaching tradition put a stop to that.

Any assault on American usage of “soccer” has to reckon with Americans’ use of “football.” The word already means something here, so that meaning has to be ridiculed and stripped to make way if the colonizing English are going to have us fall in line. The thrust of the attack is that in our football, the foot barely makes contact with the ball. “More like handball!” or some such refrain. That kinda works on Americans because our class divisions were never institutionalized in a sumptuary tradition. We’re not on the lookout for that kind of thing. I don’t know why the British buy it.

Before ruffly collars made the scene, the rich and landed jousted and played something akin to polo. If you couldn’t afford to join the horsey set, you played your games on foot. We came to call sports you play on horseback “equestrian.” We came to call sports you play on foot “football.” So goes the tradition. There are exceptions — rich people played running games too, and no one calls tennis football — but the general meaning was formed, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with what body part strikes a ball. It’s about locomotion. Proto-sociologist Frederick Morton Eden (famed author of 1797’s 700-page smash hit The State of the Poor) wrote in the 1820s about a chaotic Perthshire game pitting married men against bachelors. He observed tackling, running with the ball, and throwing the ball to one another. The goal was to “hang” the ball, which meant putting it through a hoop. The one rule he specified was that “no person was allowed to kick it.” They called the game football. That’s because they played on foot.

There’s no etymology written by anyone without chip grease on their drunken fingers putting “soccer”’s origins anywhere beyond the Pale, though efforts at banishing the word are underway right at the line. Ireland’s governing soccer body is called the Football Association of Ireland, but Gaelic football is more popular. “Soccer” was and, though dwindling, is the common term for… soccer on the Emerald Isle. Australia changed its governing body’s name, swapping “soccer” for “football,” in 2005. New Zealand followed suit in 2006. That’s officialdom. The people are recalcitrant. The march toward “football” is underway, but where is the English outrage at all the other nations that do or mostly do as we do? Why aren’t they mad at Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, or Japan? Why is it just this game? They don’t get mad when I say “trunk” instead of “boot.” Steve Martin pointed out that the damned French have a different word for everything. Why aren’t the British getting arrested for tweeting mean things about the French?

British folks and Americans familiar with mustache wax get upset because we call the Brits’ favored football variant “soccer.” But that was their way right up until the end of the Apollo program. Our way has always been to call our most popular domestic football variant by the umbrella term “football” and to hell with all the rest in the category. We carry on the British tradition of referring to Association Football as Soccer. We keep the flame that they have abandoned in favor of the American way. It’s cultural appropriation: calling your most popular domestic football variant by the categorical term instead of by its specific name is our thing. “Soccer” is British. It’s “Football” that’s the Americanism.