"Soccer" ---Blame it on the Brits!

After mentioning the Superbowl yesterday in class, a rapid fire inquisition followed about why we call gridiron football "football", and European football "soccer".

So, after a brief sojourn into the wonderful world of Google, I found out a rather interesting tidbit of information that will FOREVER come in handy while living abroad when some football fan sneers at my use of the word soccer.

It's not some weird, Americans are better than the rest of the world so we have a different name situation.

Soccer is actually a British term for the game.

One of the wonderful sources I found...

"In fact, in the early days of the sport among the upper echelons of British society, the proper term for the sport was “Soccer”.  Not only that, but the sport being referred to as “Soccer” preceded the first recorded instance of it being called by the singular word “Football” by about 18 years.  This happening when it became more popular with the middle and lower class. When that happened, the term “Football” gradually began dominating over “Soccer” and the then official name “Association Football”."

There's actually some rather long and boring explanations about how languages translate the words soccer and football and use them differently to categorize and identify different athletic events.  However, the most important thing you learn from this today is that soccer is a British term.

Here's a British man actually trying to reclaim the British-ness of the term.  If you didn't know before now, modern soccer originated in Great Britain and spread to other countries.