Soccer vs Football; now this is a subject for some furious debate. Why do people from the US calls this sport Soccer while most of the world knows it simply as Football? The answer is simple and it has to do a lot with the British. To answer can be found if we look back at the sport’s history.
Up until the 1800’s, Great Britain was full of different unregulated sports which were all called generically “Football”. Every town or village in the country was playing a variation of the sport in one form or another, all with different rules or style of play, depending on where they were played. Rugby for example, or games similar to it, were also called football at that time.
Anyway, in 1863 a standardized form of the sport was developed nationwide, being officially called “Association Football”. This name soon changed (unofficially) however and got a suffix at the end; common practice in England at the time. By combining the word “association” with the suffix “-er”, we get the name “soccer”. This is how the official sport was called all across the country. After it became more widespread through Britain and more and more people were playing it, especially those in lower classes, the name changed back to the original “Football” people were used to.
This was a bit too late for the US however, as the name “soccer” already crossed the Atlantic and caught on over there. Moreover, the Americans already had a sport of their own called Football and made no sense changing them. This American football is in fact a combination of rules and styles of game between the two British sports of Soccer and Rugby.
