Welcome to the Soccer Tavern, where we’re discussing the history, culture, and philosophy of the beautiful game. My name is Dave and in this video, we’re discussing where the word “soccer” comes from. Pull up a seat and let’s start the discussion.
Most cultures around the world know the game of soccer by the term football So, to understand where the term soccer comes from, we actually need to start with understanding where the term football comes from.
Most people assume that the sport is called football because the game is played mainly with the ball at your feet. This seems like a logical explanation, but the truth, is actually a bit different
Hundreds of years ago in Britain, where the sport of soccer originated, the aristocracy & upper classes played sports mainly on horseback and/or in the water.
Sports played by the lower classes were mainly on foot and therefore many of these games were referred to as football. This also helps explain why sports like American football, Gaelic football, and Australian rules football are named football even though they’re played predominantly with the players’ hands.
This explains why the word football actually has nothing to do with the players mainly using their feet to kick the ball during the match.
Now that we understand where the word football comes from, we can start understanding where the word soccer comes from.
For those that haven’t seen our ‘Origins of Soccer’ video, you first should watch that out here:
In the ‘Origins of Soccer’ video, we talk about the sport’s creation story and the fact that rugby and soccer both evolved from the same game played throughout hundreds of years in Britain. In the late 1800s, the two sports split and widely accepted rules for each game were written.
The issue is both sports still used the term football to refer to their sport. To differentiate between the sports, Rugby adopted the name ‘Rugby Football’ in honor of the town where its rules were written. And soccer adopted the name ‘Association Football’ in honor of the Football Association, the organization who established the rules of soccer.
Rugby Football and Association Football are each mouthfuls to say and it was fashionable at the time to shorten words and add an ‘er on the end. So Rugby football was often referred to as rugger. And since people didn’t want to call Association football “Asser” for obvious reasons, they chose to shorten the second part of the word, which became soccer.
So, despite the popular belief that soccer is an American word, the term actually comes from Britain.
As soccer began to spread throughout the formal & informal British empire, most countries adopted the name of football for the sport. In some countries where they already had another sport referred to as football, the name of soccer was more widely used. This explains why the United States took to the term soccer for the sport because we already had a popular sport called American football.
Most interestingly, in Britain before WWII, soccer was a recognized term, but wasn’t widely used. Only after the end of WWII, did the word soccer actually became more widely used in Britain. The likely explanation for this is that American troops stationed in Britain called the sport soccer and there became a fascination with American culture after the war. So, soccer basically became the cool word for the sport for a few decades
But by the 1980s, for some reason the British started rebelling against the term soccer as the sport gained popularity in the United States. Since then, it’s been taboo in Britain to call the sport soccer even though the term is actually British.
So, there you have it. That’s the history of the term soccer.
Whether you call the sport soccer, football, or something else, I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something.
Thanks for stopping by The Soccer Tavern and we’ll be back with another video soon.
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