Of the 45 nationalFIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) affiliates in which English is an official or primary language, 43 use football in their organisations' official names, while Canada and the United States use soccer. In those two countries, other codes of football are dominant, and soccer is the prevailing term for association football. In 2005, Australia's association football governing body changed its name from soccer to football to align with the general international usage of the term.[1] In 2006, New Zealand decided to follow suit.[2]
There are also many other languages where the common term for association football is phonetically similar to the English term football. (See Names for association football.)
Some of the many different codes of football
Etymology
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" at Newcastle, County Down, Northern Ireland, being charged with accidentally stabbing a player named William Bernard.[4] Another reference to a football game comes in 1321 at Shouldham, Norfolk, England: "during the game at ball as he kicked the ball, a lay friend of his... ran against him and wounded himself".[3]
A French card circa 1750, depicting "Foot Ball"
Although the popularly believed etymology of the word football, or "foot ball", originated in reference to the action of a foot kicking a ball, this may be a false etymology. An alternative explanation has it that the word originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe, which were played on foot.[5] These sports were usually played by peasants, as opposed to the horse-riding sports more often enjoyed by aristocrats. In some cases, the word has been applied to games which involved carrying a ball and specifically banned kicking. For example, the English writer William Hone, writing in 1825 or 1826, quotes the social commentator Sir Frederick Morton Eden, regarding a game– which Hone refers to as "Foot-Ball"– played in the parish of Scone, Perthshire:
The game was this: he who at any time got the ball into his hands, run [sic] with it till overtaken by one of the opposite part; and then, if he could shake himself loose from those on the opposite side who seized him, he run on; if not, he threw the ball from him, unless it was wrested from him by the other party, but no person was allowed to kick it.[6] [Emphasis added.]
Conversely, in 1363, King Edward III of England issued a proclamation banning "...handball, football, or hockey; coursing and cock-fighting, or other such idle games",[7] suggesting that "football" may have been differentiated from games that involved other parts of the body.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the written use of the word "football" (as "foteballe"), referring to the game, to 1409. The first recorded use of the word to refer to the ball was in 1486, and the first use as a verb in 1599.
The word "soccer" originated as an Oxford "-er" slang abbreviation of "association", and is credited to late nineteenth century English footballer, Charles Wreford-Brown.[8] It has been speculated that both this story and the William Webb Ellis rugby story are apocryphal, however this appears to be a revision of history as the English term "soccer" fell out of favor while England differentiated their language from America's (where the term soccer had become widely used) English in the 20th century due to growing American popularity.[9] "Socker" with a k appeared in print at least as early as 1889.[10]The New York Times, published in 1905: "It was a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use 'er' at the end of many words, such as foot-er, sport-er, and as Association did not take an 'er' easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as Soccer."[11] There is also the sometimes-heard variation, "soccer football".[12]
Within Australia the term "football" is ambiguous and can mean up to four different codes of football in Australian English, depending on the context, geographical location and cultural factors; this includes soccer, Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union.[13] In the states of Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania the slang term footy is also used in an unofficial context, while in these states the two rugby football codes are called rugby. There is a different situation in New South Wales, Queensland and ACT, where rugby union or rugby league are most popular, and football can refer to those codes.[14] Australia-wide, soccer is commonly used to describe association football, with this usage going back more than a century,[15] with football gaining traction amongst soccer followers since Soccer Australia was renamed Football Federation Australia in 2005.[16]
Canada
In Canada, football refers to Canadian football or American football, often differentiated as either "CFL" (from the Canadian Football League) or "NFL" (from the US National Football League). Because of the similarity between the games, many people in both countries do not consider the two styles of gridiron football separate sports per se, but rather different codes of the same sport which has a shared origin in the Harvard vs McGill game played in 1874 credited with the creation of this sport.[17][18] If a Canadian were to say, "My brother plays football in the States", it would be clear from context that American football is meant.[19]Canadian French usage parallels English usage, with le football usually referring to Canadian or American football, and le soccer referring to association football. When there is ambiguity, le football canadien or le football américain is used.[20]
Rugby union football in Canada is almost always referred to simply as "rugby".
Caribbean
In most of the English-speakingCaribbean, "football" and "soccer" are both used to refer to association football, but use of the word "football" is far more common. The exception is the Bahamas, where the term "football" is used exclusively (while not actually in the Caribbean, usage in Bermuda follows that of the Bahamas). The nickname of the Trinidad and Tobago team, "The Soca Warriors", refers to a style of music, not the word soccer.
New Zealand Football is the governing body for Association football in the country.[26] The term can also be used to refer to rugby league or union, better-known as simply rugby.[27] The slang term footy generally only means either of the two codes of rugby football, while rugby league is traditionally known as rugby league or just league. Usage of the term soccer has gone through a period of transition in recent times as the federation changed its name to New Zealand Football from New Zealand Soccer and the nickname of its women's team to Football Ferns from SWANZ.[28][29]
South Africa
In South Africa, the word football generally refers to Association football. However, Association football is commonly known as soccer despite this.[30] The domestic first division is the Premier Soccer League and both in conversation and the media (see e.g. The Sowetan or Independent Online), the term "soccer" is used. The stadium used for the final of the 2010 FIFA World Cup was known as Soccer City. Despite this, the country's national association is called the South African Football Association and "football" is mostly used in official contexts.
Rugby union is another popular football code in South Africa, but it is commonly known as just rugby as rugby league has a smaller presence in the country.[31][32]
United Kingdom
An example of the word soccer used in London in August 2006
The general use of football in the United Kingdom tends to refer to the most popular code of football in the country, which in the cases of England and Scotland is association football. However the term soccer is understood by most as an alternative name for association football.[33][34] The word soccer was a recognised way of referring to association football in the UK until around the 1970s, when it began to be perceived incorrectly as an Americanism.[35]
For fans who are more interested in other codes of football, within their sporting community, the use of the word football may refer to their own code. However even within such sporting communities an unqualified mention of football would usually be a reference to association football.[36] In its heartlands, rugby league is referred to as either football or just league.[36]
Fans of Gaelic football in Northern Ireland may use football for the sport (see above).[37] Outside the nationalist community in Northern Ireland, Gaelic football is usually known by its full name.[citation needed]
American football is usually known by that name or gridiron,[38] a name made familiar to a wider British audience by Channel 4, when it showed American football on Sunday evenings in the period 1982–1992.[39]
United States
An American football
In the United States, the word football almost exclusively refers to the sport of American football.[40][41] This is due to the history of American Football originating from versions of rugby football and association football. As in Canada, football is used inclusively of Canadian football[42] with American and Canadian football generally seen as two variants of the same sport.[42] The term "gridiron football" is sometimes used to refer to both games together.[43]
The sport of association football is commonly called "soccer" in the United States. The word "soccer" derives from "association" – as in The Football Association – in contrast to "rugger", or rugby football. It is English in origin, and caught on in the United States to distinguish the game from the locally better known American football; it also became predominant in other countries where another sport is known as football, such as Australia with Australian rules football. The term was in use in Britain throughout the early 20th century and became especially prominent in the decades after World War II, but by the 1980s British fans had begun avoiding the term, largely because it was erroneously seen as an Americanism.[44] Conversely, by the early 2000s American soccer clubs from grassroots youth leagues to professional franchises began regularly incorporating the abbreviation "F.C." for "football club" in team or club names in homage to British practice, the only widespread use of the term "football" for the sport in the U.S.; the abbreviation "S.C." for "soccer club" is also used but less common.
Both rugby union and rugby league are generally known as rugby. Union is the more commonly played variant in the United States. Rugby league, Gaelic football, and Aussie rules have very small, albeit growing, numbers of adherents.
This commonality is reflected in the auxiliary languages Esperanto and Interlingua, which utilise futbalo and football, respectively.
These loanwords bear little or no resemblance to the native words for "foot" and "ball". By contrast, some languages have calques of "football": their speakers use equivalent terms that combine their words for "foot" and "ball". An example is the Greek ποδόσφαιρο (podósfero), the Chinese 足球 (zú qíu), or the Estonian jalgpall.
In German, "Football" is a loanword for American football, while the German word Fußball, a calque of "football" (Fuß = "foot", Ball = "ball"), means association football. The same goes for Dutchvoetbal (voet = "foot", bal = "ball"), Swedishfotboll (fot = "foot", boll = "ball"), and so on– the words for "foot" and "ball" are very similar in all the Germanic languages. Only two Germanic languages do not use "football" or a calque thereof as their primary word for association football:
Icelandic — knattspyrna (knatt- = ball- and spyrna = kicking) is one of the two most common terms; this reflects a tendency to create indigenous words for foreign concepts. However, the calque fótbolti is at least equally common.
The Celtic languages also generally refer to association football with calques of "football" — an example is the Welshpêl-droed. However, Irish, which like Afrikaans is native to a country where "soccer" is the most common English term for the sport, uses sacar.
See also
Look up football in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
↑ Soccer to become football in Australia (SMH.com.au. 17 December 2004) "ASA chairman Frank Lowy said the symbolic move would bring Australia into line with the vast majority of other countries which call the sport football".
↑ Derek Baker (England in the Later Middle Ages). 1995. Boydell & Brewer. p. 187. ISBN978-0-85115-648-4
↑ Ekblom, Björn (1994). Handbook of sports medicine and science. Football (soccer). Wiley-Blackwell. p.1. ISBN9780632033287. Ekblom mentions that while he was up at Oxford, Charles Wreford-Brown was asked at breakfast if he was playing rugger "No" he replied "I'm playing soccer" (Granville, 1969, p. 29). Ekblom opinions that like the William Webb Ellis rugby story it is most likely apocryphal.
↑ "Football Prospects in the West of England". Western Daily Press. 16 September 1889. p.7. Retrieved 8 December 2024. Those who play under the "Socker" (Association) rules in the North of England, the Midlands, and Scotland take no heed of the warmness of the weather.
↑ Baker, William Joseph (1988). Sports in the Western world (revised, illustrated, reprinted.). University of Illinois Press. p.119. ISBN0-252-06042-3.
↑ Ekblom, Björn (1994). Handbook of sports medicine and science. Football (soccer). Wiley-Blackwell. p.1. ISBN9780632033287. "Although not so widely used as the term 'football,' in England the term 'soccer' is widely understood. It is not so widely understood in continental Europe or Central and Southern America"
↑ Oxford English Dictionary:Soccer "The game of football as played under Association rules." and Rugger "Slang or colloquial alteration of RUGBY (in the sense of 'Rugby football'). Freq. attrib. rugger-tackle"
1 2 Tony Collins. Football, rugby or rugger?, BBC sound recording with written transcript, and a comment in prose by Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive.
Steve Boughey Soccer: Alan Shearer in town this week, AucklandHerald on Sunday, 3 October 2006. This article shows how soccer is used for association football in New Zealand and Australia and how Alan Shearer, a former captain of the English association football team, uses the term soccer to avoid confusion while visiting Australia and New Zealand.
Related Research Articles
Most forms of football have a move known as a tackle. The primary purposes of tackling are to dispossess an opponent of the ball, to stop the player from gaining ground towards goal or to stop them from carrying out what they intend.
Rugby football is the collective name for the team sports of rugby union or rugby league.
Rugby league football, commonly known as rugby league in English-speaking countries and rugby XIII in non-Anglophone Europe and South America, and referred to colloquially as football, footy, rugby, or league in its heartlands, is a full-contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular field measuring 68 m (74 yd) wide and 112–122 m (122–133 yd) long with H-shaped posts at both ends. It is one of the two major codes of rugby football, the other being rugby union. It originated in 1895 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England, as the result of a split from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) over the issue of payments to players. The rules of the game governed by the new Northern Rugby Football Union progressively changed from those of the RFU with the specific aim of producing a faster and more entertaining game to appeal to spectators, on whose income the new organisation and its members depended.
Gaelic football, commonly known as simply Gaelic, GAA or football, is an Irish team sport. A form of football, it is played between two teams of 15 players on a rectangular grass pitch. The objective of the sport is to score by kicking or punching the ball into the other team's goal or between two upright posts above the goal and over a crossbar 2.5 metres above the ground.
In sport, a goal may refer to either an instance of scoring, or to the physical structure or area where an attacking team must send the ball or puck in order to score points. The structure of a goal varies from sport to sport, and one is placed at or near each end of the playing field for each team to defend. Sports which feature goal scoring are also commonly known as invasion games.
Indoor soccer or arena soccer is a five-a-side or six-a-side version of minifootball, derived from association football and adapted to be played in walled hardcourt indoor arena. Indoor soccer, as it is most often known in the United States and Canada, was originally developed in these two countries as a way to play soccer during the winter months, when snow would make outdoor play difficult. In those countries, gymnasiums are adapted for indoor soccer play. In other countries the game is played in either indoor or outdoor arenas surrounded by walls, and is referred to by different names.
Gridiron football, also known as North American football, or in North America as simply football, is a family of football team sports primarily played in the United States and Canada. American football, which uses 11 players, is the form played in the United States and the best known form of gridiron football worldwide, while Canadian football, which uses 12 players, predominates in Canada. Other derivative varieties include arena football, flag football and amateur games such as touch and street football. Football is played at professional, collegiate, high school, semi-professional, and amateur levels.
There are many terms used to describe association football, the sport most commonly referred to in the English-speaking world as "football" or "soccer".
The history of rugby union follows from various football games long before the 19th century, but it was not until the middle of that century that the rules were formulated and codified. The code of football later known as rugby union can be traced to three events: the first set of written rules in 1845, the Blackheath Club's decision to leave the Football Association in 1863 and the formation of the Rugby Football Union in 1871. The code was originally known simply as "rugby football". It was not until a schism in 1895, over the payment of players, which resulted in the formation of the separate code of rugby league, that the name "rugby union" was used to differentiate the original rugby code. For most of its history, rugby was a strictly amateur football code, and the sport's administrators frequently imposed bans and restrictions on players who they viewed as professional. It was not until 1995 that rugby union was declared an "open" game, and thus professionalism was sanctioned by the code's governing body, World Rugby—then known as the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB).
Football is a family of sports that involve kicking with the foot or carrying in the hands a ball to score points.
Touch rugby refers to games derived from rugby league in which players do not tackle each other but instead touch their opponents using their hands on any part of the body, clothing, or the ball.
The oldest football clubs trace their origins to the mid-19th century, a period when football evolved from being a casual pastime to an organised mainstream sport.
The history of association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, stretches back to at least medieval times. FIFA cites Cuju in ancient China is the earliest form of a kicking game for which there is scientific evidence, a military manual from the Han dynasty, and it closely resembles modern association football. Similar games were played in ancient Japan, Greece, and Rome. The first written evidence of a football match came in England in about 1170.
Australian rules football and Gaelic football are codes of football, from Australia and Ireland respectively, which have similar styles and features of play. Notably both are dominated by kicking from the hand and hand passing as well as rules requiring the ball is bounced by a player running in possession, both have a differentiated scoring system, with higher and lower points values for different scoring shots, both have no offside rule, and both allow more physical contact and players on the field than other football codes - 15 in gaelic football, 18 in Australian Rules.
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football generally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly called football include association football ; Australian rules football; Gaelic football; gridiron football ; International rules football; rugby league football; and rugby union football. These various forms of football share, to varying degrees, common origins and are known as "football codes".
A comparison of Canadian football and rugby league football can be made because of their shared origins, resulting in similarities and shared concepts in terms of scoring and advancing the ball. Aside from American football, rugby league is the sport most similar to Canadian football. Both sports involve the concept of a limited number of 'downs'/'tackles', and in both sports scoring 'touchdowns'/'tries' takes a clear precedence over goal-kicking.
The sport of Australian rules football has been called by a number of different names throughout its history. Since 1905, with the formation of the Australasian Football Council, the game has been called "Australian football". The name has been codified by the AFL Commission, as the game's name in the "Laws of Australian football". Historically, the sport has been referred to as "Victorian rules", the "Victorian game", "Australasian rules", the "Australian game" and "Australian national football", "national football", the "bouncing game" and, derisively, "aerial ping pong" as well as several other names. Today, the common names for the sport are "Australian Football" and "Australian rules football" and it is referred to as "football", "footy", "Aussie rules" or sometimes as "AFL".
A comparison of Gaelic football and rugby union is possible because of certain similarities between the codes, as well as the numerous dissimilarities.
Comparison of association football (football/soccer) and rugby union is possible because of the games' similarities and shared origins.
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