Origin of the term ’soccer’.
From where did the term soccer originate? I was puzzling this at a bar in the UK recently while watching a match on the telly, wondering why the rest of the world referred to this game as “football”, while we Americans referred to it as “soccer”. Logically, the rest of the world is right; in American football, the foot only connects with the ball for punts, kickoffs, and extra points — for most of the game, it’s carried or passed, both involving the hand, not the foot. Was the term “soccer” an American creation? How did we get to this name? As it turns out, it’s not an American term, but to understand it, you have to learn a little bit of soccer’s history.
Soccer traces its origins to Roman times in the first century AD. For the most part, it did not involve carrying the ball, hence the rather appropriate name. That split happened at Rugby School in England, where carrying the ball, as opposed to kicking it, came into vogue in the 1800’s, giving rise to the game of rugby. This same century saw the creation of the Football Association, the ruling body for English football. Rugby and soccer went their separate ways, with football under FA rules being called properly “Association Football”.
From here, you have to understand British abbreviations. They would often drop the end of a word, ending it with an -er, e.g. “rugger” for rugby. Hence, Association Football would get shortened to “asoccer football”, eventually being dropped to just “soccer”. In UK media, the term “soccer” is frequently used to refer to the sport, apparently. It’s just in common parlance that it’s not. (Americans would later bring rugby and soccer to Yale and modify the rules, giving birth to modern American football, hence its rather inauspicious name.)
So the term “soccer” isn’t wrong, per se. In fact, it’s of English origin, created around the same time as the game itself, though it is slang. The term has just fallen out of general use outside of the US. If you want to keep from getting beat up at rowdy UK bars, though, you’d do well to refer to soccer as football. Even calling it by its proper name, ‘association football’, might get you an odd word or two. When in Rome, do as Romans do, right?
