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⚽️🏈 Why Do Americans Call It Soccer? Blame England. Americans get a lot of grief for calling it soccer. It is, the argument goes, a typically obtuse piece of American exceptionalism, a nation so convinced of its own importance that it renamed the world’s most popular sport just to be difficult. The rest of the world calls it football. The Americans call it something that sounds like a position in a law firm. How very them. Except it isn’t them. Not originally, anyway. The word soccer comes from Association Football, the formal name given to the game when the Football Association was founded in England in 1863. A few decades later, schoolboys at Rugby School and then Oxford, with that particular genius the English have for mangling perfectly good words, took “Assoc,” short for Association, and bolted on the suffix “-er,” a standard piece of Victorian public school slang used to make anything sound more cheerful. Rugby football became “rugger.” Association football became “soccer.” The English invented the word. They used it cheerfully for decades. It appeared in British newspapers and formal writing well into the twentieth century without anyone apparently clutching their pearls about it. There is a lovely wrinkle here, too. “Soccer” was largely the word of the upper class, while the working and middle classes preferred “football.” So when the upper class began losing its grip on British society from the 1960s onward, “soccer” went down with it, quietly dropped the way you abandon a phrase once it becomes unfashionable, and then pretend you never said it at all. By the time America was building its own professional leagues, “soccer” had become entirely natural there, partly to distinguish the sport from American football, which had arrived earlier and planted its flag on the word “football” with the confidence of someone who got there first and has no intention of moving. So the next time someone sneers that Americans can’t even name the sport correctly, you can point out that Americans are faithfully preserving a word the English coined, used for generations, then quietly abandoned and somehow turned into evidence of foreign stupidity. Which, when you think about it, is a very English thing to do. Stay connected, Follow @Gandalv

Microinteracti1's tweet photo. ⚽️🏈 Why Do Americans Call It Soccer? Blame England.

Americans get a lot of grief for calling it soccer. It is, the argument goes, a typically obtuse piece of American exceptionalism, a nation so convinced of its own importance that it renamed the world’s most popular sport just to be difficult. The rest of the world calls it football. The Americans call it something that sounds like a position in a law firm. How very them.

Except it isn’t them. Not originally, anyway.

The word soccer comes from Association Football, the formal name given to the game when the Football Association was founded in England in 1863. A few decades later, schoolboys at Rugby School and then Oxford, with that particular genius the English have for mangling perfectly good words, took “Assoc,” short for Association, and bolted on the suffix “-er,” a standard piece of Victorian public school slang used to make anything sound more cheerful. Rugby football became “rugger.” Association football became “soccer.”

The English invented the word. They used it cheerfully for decades. It appeared in British newspapers and formal writing well into the twentieth century without anyone apparently clutching their pearls about it.

There is a lovely wrinkle here, too. “Soccer” was largely the word of the upper class, while the working and middle classes preferred “football.” So when the upper class began losing its grip on British society from the 1960s onward, “soccer” went down with it, quietly dropped the way you abandon a phrase once it becomes unfashionable, and then pretend you never said it at all.

By the time America was building its own professional leagues, “soccer” had become entirely natural there, partly to distinguish the sport from American football, which had arrived earlier and planted its flag on the word “football” with the confidence of someone who got there first and has no intention of moving.

So the next time someone sneers that Americans can’t even name the sport correctly, you can point out that Americans are faithfully preserving a word the English coined, used for generations, then quietly abandoned and somehow turned into evidence of foreign stupidity.

Which, when you think about it, is a very English thing to do.

Stay connected,
Follow @Gandalv

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