‘Soccer’ Is Not a Word That Americans Coined- Here’s the True Story of How Football Became Soccer

We will never be able to settle several feuds. There are many famous comparisons fans would love to make, but the biggest feud is in trend again. It is about an old question: is it soccer or football? Every country calls it the sport of football except the NA. We are sticking to soccer, mainly because we have our sport we call football. The weird thing is, it isn’t played using a ball and athletes hardly use their feet. That is the main reason the troll war is raging between the NA and European fan bases. However, the UK has more to do with the term than they would like. The UK, like every other country, calls it football. However, it seems they came up with the term NA adopted for the sport.

The recent soccer world cup has again put fuel to the fire of continents. Twitter is full of trolls, debates, and sometimes straight-up word wars. It doesn’t seem like NA will be able to go back on the name now because the biggest sports league in the country, NFL, will have strong opinions about it.

How did football become soccer?

According to Uri Friedman from the Atlantic, Britain might have made the word soccer for the sport in the late 1800s. He said that Britain coined the term and used it to refer to Association football. For some time, England used the terms ‘Soccer’ and ‘Football’ interchangeably. Eventually going back and sticking with the term football.

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In the US, however, they stuck with soccer, as they wanted the term to not collide with the sport they had called Gridiron football. One of the recent adverts of the edible company Frito Lay portrayed this debate beautifully. They raised the debate and soon an MLS marketing expert joined the battle. He dug up the news reports from an English newspaper where they had used the term soccer.

Kyle Sheldon got ‘the Evidence’

The MLS marketing expert Kyle Sheldon dug up the articles from 1950 where the English newspapers covered England’s defeat against the USA in the soccer world cup. The article headline read, “….. Worst Ever by an English Soccer Side“.

The newspaper used the words interchangeably throughout the article. So the trolling got no merit, as they were still using ‘Soccer’ till at least 1950.

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