Soccer, or football, has been around for centuries with roots stretching back over 2,000 years, but it wasn’t until 1863 that the English Football Association (the FA) confirmed the sport’s full name, Association Football, when they laid down the first rules of the game.
Ebenezer Morley spearheaded the idea “that football should have a set of rules in the same way the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) had for cricket”… unifying the game under a consistent set of rules and regulations.
The addition of the word association was to avoid confusion with other popular forms of football played at the time, particularly rugby football.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of rugby (rugby football) and ‘associer’ (association football).
“The latter term was further shortened to ‘soccer’ (sometimes spelled ‘socker’), and the name quickly spread beyond campus.”
By the time association football and its round ball crossed the Atlantic, American Football was already the popular game that claimed the name football.
Unlike association football, American football is a game played mostly with hands and uses an oval ball.
Fast forward to 1974 and the United States Soccer Football Association (USSFA) – the sport’s governing body in the US – distanced itself from the word soccer by changing its name to the United States Soccer Federation, commonly referred to as the USSF (US Soccer) . .
By the 1980s, the term football was becoming less and less favored by the British as the word to describe the global sport and today is rarely used in the United Kingdom as well as for much of the world.
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