Today I found out the origin of the word “soccer”. For all you out there who love to complain when Americans, and certain others, call “Football”, “Soccer”, you should know that it was the British that invented the word and it was also one of the first names of what we now primarily know of as “Football”.
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”.
In the 1860s, as in most of history with records as far back as 1004 B.C., there were quite a lot of “football” sports in existence being played popularly throughout the world and of course, England. Many of these sports had similar rules and eventually, on October 26th, 1863, a group of teams in England decided to get together and create a standard set of rules which would be used at all their matches. They formed the rules for “Association Football”, with the “Association” distinguishing it from the many other types of football sports in existence in England, such as “Rugby Football”.
Now British school boys of the day liked to nickname everything, which is still somewhat common. They also liked to add the ending “er” to these nicknames. Thus Rugby was, at that time, popularly called “Rugger”. Association Football was then much better known as “Assoccer”, which quickly just became “Soccer” and sometimes “Soccer Football”.
The inventor of the nickname is said to be Charles Wredford Brown, who was an Oxford student around the time of Association Football’s inception. Legend has it, in 1863 shortly after the creation of Association Football, Wredford-Brown had some friends who asked him if he’d come play a game of “Rugger”, to which he replied he preferred “Soccer”. The name caught on from there.
In the beginning, the newly standardized Rugby and Soccer were football sports for “gentlemen”, primarily being played by the upper echelons of society. However, these two forms of football gradually spread to the masses, particularly Soccer as Rugby didn’t really catch on too well with the lower classes. This resulted in the name switching from “Soccer” and “Association Football”, to just “Football”; with the first documented case of the sport being called by the singular term “Football” coming in 1881, 18 years after it was first called simply “Soccer” or officially “Association Football”.
This game then gradually spread throughout the world under the lower class name of “Football”, rather than “Soccer” as the “gentlemen” called it. The problem was though, that a lot of other countries of the world already had popular sports of their own they called “Football”, such as the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name a few. In these countries, the name “Soccer” was and, in some, still is preferred for this reason.
Bonus Facts:
- Just as intriguing, for those who like to lambaste American Football being called such when the ball interacts primarily with hands, most of the earliest forms of Football were named thus, not because you kicked a ball with your foot, but because they were played on foot. Peasants played most of their sports on foot; aristocrats played most of theirs on horseback. Thus, games played on foot were called “football”, whether they had anything to do with kicking a ball or not. Indeed, many of the earliest forms of football involved carrying balls in an attempt to get across goal lines passed some opposing team or individual players.
- Soccer balls were originally painted with the now classic black and white checkered look in order to make them more visible on black and white TV during the 1970 FIFA World Cup. Naturally, people wanted to buy balls that looked like those that the professionals used on TV and thus everybody bought the black and white checkered soccer ball instead of the previous traditional solid color ball.
- In the United States, early on the word “Football” was incorporated in the name for Soccer. The first name of the league was the “United States Soccer Football Association”. This lasted about 30 years before it was shortened to simply the “United States Soccer Federation” in 1975.
- “Rugby” was also once known as “Football” and originally had almost the same set of rules as Soccer, though over time increasingly diverged. The name “Rugby” comes from Rugby School in England. Legend has it, during a Football match at that school, William Webb Ellis picked up the ball in his hands and ran with it over the goal line. It didn’t count as an official goal, as you weren’t supposed to use your hands; but the referee remarked, it was a “jolly good ‘try’”, which, according to legend, is where that particular Rugby scoring term comes from. The official Rugby Union was then formed in 1871 with a split in 1893 forming the Rugby League.
- Rugby never caught on with the lower class as Soccer did. Thus, the famous British saying, “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by ruffians and Rugby is a ruffian’s game played by gentlemen.”
- The earliest known record of a Soccer-like sport was in 1004 B.C. in Japan. There are also many references to Soccer-like sports in 50 B.C. China, even being played between teams from China and Japan.
- The Romans also played several types of Football games, including some that resembled Soccer. One of which was also included in the Roman Olympic Games. This particular version, in the Olympic Games, featured 27 men a side. The game was so rough that 2/3 of the players had to be hospitalized after the game.
- The last genuine leather soccer ball used in the World Cup was the Adidas Tango Espana, used in the 1982 World Cup. Shortly thereafter, in 1986, the first fully synthetic World Cup soccer ball was used.
- The designers of the Adidas Teamgeist, used in the 2006 World Cup, claim that ball was the roundest ever made for a sport.
- During King Edward’s reign (1307-1327), he had laws passed against the playing of football sports. Anyone caught playing any form of football would be imprisoned, “For as much as there is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls, from which many evils may arise…”
- He wasn’t the only British monarch that hated football. Queen Elizabeth the First “had football players jailed for a week, with follow-up church penance”. King Henry IV and Henry VIII also passed laws against football sports.
- American Football was originally known in England as “Start-Stop Rugby with Padding”… Catchy.
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USA should spend less time with NFL bs and get their REAL football team in shape for the next world cup. maybe if we ever won, everyone would forget about NFL and revert the name back to what the rest of the world calls it
that will NEVER happen. the US loves its football as in NFL football at both the college and professional level. i love both football (feet) and football (american) but nobody will ever forget about the NFL its part of our countries pastime. and no, the consideration of the Americans ever winning the world cup is a joke and we all know it
I think the problem is your 2nd paragraph is poorly constructed and it’s therefore difficult for readers to understand your intent. I think you meant it to be an introductory paragraph (perhaps with your science background you are used to writing an abstract, which would be unnecessary in an article?) The language choice of “not only that” is strange considering you haven’t proven your first claim yet with research/proof. Also, I believe you have misused a verb tense with “this happening” otherwise it is an incomplete sentence. And then you start then next sentence in similar fashion “When that happened” but your use of “that” as a pronoun is confusing because your previous sentence was such a mess. I found I had to reread this second paragraph a few times to understand what you were trying to convey. I think you could have done away with the entire paragraph, since you never did explain which “upper echelons properly” called it soccer, you merely explained the nickname’s origin at Oxford by way of legend. And then you wouldn’t have repeated such vocabulary twice in a short article.
@susie regarding your post, this is why no one likes you
I LOVE Suzie – this world would be a better place with more like her.
* the, not *then. apologies
@Daven For some people, it wouldn’t matter if it was written in stone, a thousand years ago, on display for everyone to see, if people don’t like the idea, there’re not going to accept it. There is nothing you can say or write to change that.
@nmkvn Why spend less time with a real team that brings in a revenue of over 11 billion and more time with a wanna-be team that brings in a tenth of that? Just because you think the NFL is bs doesn’t mean the rest of the country should. The NFL is the #1 sport where Soccer ranks #5 in this country (or somewhere around there in revenue) It may be #1 in the world. Its just not #1 here. No big deal.
And Susie, please, this isnt English 111. go critique somewhere else.
the dude who speaks of the sport it to bius cause american football didnt come until 1895 so america didnt have a sport called foot ball they copied rugby and football and made ruthb
Fun article. One thing about your facts at the end though. 1307-1327 was the reign of King Edward II, not King Edward I as the wording intimates. The first Edward was focused more on making laws that would draw revenue than laws that would limit people’s leisure activities.
An early reference to a ball game that was probably football comes from 1280 at Ulgham, Northumberland, England: “Henry… while playing at ball.. ran against David”.[3] Football was played in Ireland in 1308, with a documented reference to John McCrocan, a spectator at a “football game”
I just imagine that American Football, Soccer and Rugby are like 3 brothers, son of the same sport, “Mister Football” (that’s actually true, they are variations of the same sport). Some people may call Association Football by it’s nickname, “Soccer”, and some people call it by his family name, “Football”. Just like we do with people.
So I suggest the people start calling American Football as “Mericcer”.
This is a lot of misinformation. Did you actually even read your sources? If anyone actually looked at the link in your sources for the etymology of soccer, they will see that the word was originally socca, a university slang for assoc. as in association… as in FOOTBALL association. The word became soccer in 1895.
@Addie: Did you even read my article? From your comment, I’d guess not.
@imre, Americans do call the sport “football.” As the article itself describes football is the genus of sport, and soccer is the slang for the specific type of football. Even here in America we have different types of football, such as Arena Football, etc. American gridiron football just happens to be the dominant form of football in the States, thus it gets the generic term applied to it. In most of the rest of the world, football describes the dominant type of football played there, which happens to be association football in most places, but in some places it could be gridiron football, or even Gaelic football. Whatever the dominant sport of the area is, it gets called football generically.
But in the states in Major League Soccer, the teams have names such as Seattle Sounders Football Club, Football Club of Dallas, Toronto Football Club, etc. But because it’s not the dominant football here, people use the slang soccer to distinguish the sport.
@Steven: Well said.
The term football does predate soccer. Before the rules of the game were codified, “mob games” use to be played involving whole towns sometimes, while the rules were not the same as football, this game evolved into the football we know today.
I could really care less about Americans winning or not winning the world cup. Soccer isn’t even the most watched sport in the USA…the NFL is. If Soccer were, THEN I might care about us winning a world cup. But since it’s not, I could care less.
Besides, when you are going to talk about worldwide sports, all that really matters are the Olympics…and we have, what, over 2500 medals total? That’s over 2 times as many medals as the 2nd place country (Russia) has won. If we really wanted to put together a good soccer team, we obviously have the athletes to do so if more Americans watched the sport.