Why do Americans call it soccer?
Soccer sounds like the most American word in sport. In fact England coined it, used it for a century, and only later decided it sounded too American.
Every few years the World Cup comes around, and with it the same small argument: is the game called football or soccer? The usual assumption is that football is the proper old name and soccer is a brash American invention. It is a good story. It is also almost exactly backwards. Soccer is an English word, coined in England, by the sort of people who wore college scarves.
The great football split
In the middle of the nineteenth century, “football” was not one game but a dozen, each town and school playing by its own rules. In 1863 a group in London founded the Football Association to write a single code everyone could share. Not everyone agreed, and the schools that preferred a rougher, carry-the-ball game went their own way as rugby football.
That left two respectable cousins that needed telling apart: Rugby football and Association football. Both names were a mouthful, and students being students, neither survived intact.
A piece of Oxford slang
At Oxford in the 1880s there was a passing fashion for taking an ordinary word, chopping it down, and tacking -er on the end. Breakfast became brekker. The Radcliffe Camera library became the Radder. Rugby football, by the same trick, became rugger.
And association football? They reached into the middle of the word, pulled out the soc, and added the fashionable ending. Assoc became soccer. Football itself even had a version of the joke: for a while the game was footer. Of the two, soccer was the one that stuck.
So it was never American
Here is the part that surprises people, and it is exactly the small jolt that turns chasing word origins into a habit. For most of the twentieth century, the British said soccer quite happily, right alongside football. It crossed to the United States, where it was useful for telling the game apart from American football, and it settled in.
Then something quietly funny happened. As Americans embraced soccer, the British began to feel the word was theirs, that is, American, and cooled on it. By the end of the century soccer sounded like an import to the very country that had made it up. An economist, Stefan Szymanski, traced this whole loop and found that Britain talked itself out of a word it had invented, purely because the wrong people liked it.
The player who supposedly said it first
There is a favourite legend that a young Oxford footballer named Charles Wreford-Brown was asked if he fancied a game of rugger and replied, “No, soccer,” and so named the sport. It is a lovely story, and like most lovely stories about word origins, it is probably too neat to be true. The word was already drifting around student slang; no single clever reply conjured it.
So the next time the football-or-soccer argument starts up over the World Cup, you can end it in one sentence. Both words are English, both are old, and the one that sounds American was invented by undergraduates in Oxford who thought association was simply too long to say.
This is the kind of story The Monthly Lemma is made of: one everyday word, followed all the way back to where it really came from, and posted to your door once a month. One word, and the whole world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.