It is the world’s most popular sport and yet there is still debate over what it should actually be called.<\/p>\n
Is it football or soccer?<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump<\/a> waded into the topic while at the Club World Cup final<\/a> in New Jersey last Sunday. He joked that he could pass an executive order to bring the United States in line with much of the rest of the world and ensure that from now on Americans refer to it as football.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I could do that,\u201d he said with a smile during an interview with host broadcaster DAZN.<\/p>\n It was a light-hearted comment, but at a time when the U.S. is playing an increasingly significant role in soccer the question of why Americans continue to call it by a different name to the one by which it is most commonly known has been raised again.<\/p>\n \u201cThey call it football, we call it soccer. I’m not sure that change could be made very easily,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n Soccer keeps growing in the U.S. and so does its influence on the sport. It is co-hosting the men’s World Cup<\/a> with Canada and Mexico next year \u2014 the third year in a row that it stages a major tournament after the 2024 Copa America and this summer’s Club World Cup.<\/p>\n Other factors are keeping soccer more often in the U.S. consciousness — and perhaps they will make saying \u201dfootball” more commonplace in a tough sporting landscape.<\/p>\n One of the greatest players of all time, Lionel Messi<\/a>, plays for MLS team Inter Miami; the popularity of the Premier League and Champions League is booming; and the documentary series \u201cWelcome to Wrexham\u201d<\/a> about a low-level Welsh club co-owned by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds<\/a> and Rob McElhenney<\/a>, has attracted new eyeballs.<\/p>\n Don’t blame Americans for calling it soccer<\/p>\n Despite \u201csoccer\u201d being widely associated with the U.S., it is commonly accepted that the word was actually coined in Britain, perhaps as far back as the 1880s.<\/p>\n The exact date when it was first used is not known, but it is believed \u201csoccer\u201d was derived from \u201cassociation football,\u201d which was the first official name of the sport. <\/p>\n The charity English Heritage says the nickname may have first been used by pupils at the iconic Harrow School to \u201cdistinguish the new association game from their older pursuit, known as \u2018footer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Numerous versions of football began to flourish, often involving handling a ball more than kicking it. One example dating back to the 1600s and still played today in England is Royal Shrovetide. Rugby is another example.<\/p>\n The English Football Association was created in 1863 and drew up codified rules for associated football to set it apart from other versions being played elsewhere in Britain and, from there, soccer as we know it was born.<\/p>\n Dr. Stefan Szymanski, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, wrote the book \u201cIt\u2019s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa)\u201d and explored the origins of the name. In a lecture to the American University of Beirut in 2019 he said soccer was \u201cvery clearly a word of English\/British origin.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd bear in mind that the name \u2018association football\u2019 doesn\u2019t really appear until the 1870s,” he said, \u201cso it appears really very early on in the history of the game and the word ‘soccer’ has been used over and over again since it was coined at the end of the 19th century.\u201d<\/p>\n Soccer was a commonly used term in Britain<\/p>\n \u201cSoccer\u201d is not a commonly used term in Britain these days but that has not always been the case.<\/p>\n It was the title of a popular Saturday morning television show, \u201cSoccer AM,\u201d which ran from 1994 to 2023 on the Premier League’s host broadcaster Sky Sports. <\/p>\n England great and 1966 World Cup winner Bobby Charlton ran popular schools for decades, titled \u201cBobby Charlton’s Soccer School.\u201d<\/p>\n And Matt Busby \u2014 Manchester United’s iconic manager who won the 1968 European Cup \u2014 titled his autobiography, which was published in 1974, \u201cSoccer at the Top, My Life in Football.”<\/p>\n That book title suggests the terms \u201csoccer\u201d and \u201cfootball\u201d were interchangeable in British culture at that time. <\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSunday\u2019s FIFA Club World Club Final was an awkward outing for President Donald Trump.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Perhaps the word \u2018soccer\u2019 isn’t the real problem<\/p>\n Szymanski suggested the problem some people have with \u201csoccer\u201d isn’t the word at all. But rather that it is specifically used in America.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s when Americans use this word that we get the outpourings of distress and horror, and one of the most popular thoughts that people throw at this is to say that American football is not really football,\u201d he said in his lecture.<\/p>\n He argued that given the overwhelming popularity of the NFL in the U.S. it makes perfect sense to differentiate between soccer and its own version of football.<\/p>\n Not just Americans call it soccer<\/p>\n The use of the word \u201csoccer\u201d is a bit more confused in other countries.<\/p>\n Australia, which has its own Australian rules football along with both rugby codes, commonly uses the term and its national men’s team are known as the Socceroos. It’s soccer federation, however, is called Football Australia.<\/p>\n It’s a similar situation in Ireland, where Gaelic football is popular. The term \u201csoccer\u201d is used but the national soccer team is still governed by a body called the Football Association of Ireland.<\/p>\n Canada, like the U.S. simply calls it soccer, which clearly distinguishes it from the NFL and Canadian Football League.<\/p>\n The Associated Press stylebook says soccer is the preferred term in the U.S. but notes that \u201caround the world the sport is referred to as football.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe 2026 FIFA World Cup will kick-off on June 11. These are some of the numbers and dates you need to remember.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is the world’s most popular sport and yet there is still debate over what it should actually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[10031,49,978,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-270028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-soccer","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-us","11":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114870076350674826","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}