With North America hosting the FIFA Men’s World Cup this summer, the debate on the name of the sport, football or soccer, is bound to be mentioned. This article looks at the history of both terms and tries to pin down the appropriate term for the sport.
Internet comment sections are often battlegrounds between diehard English football fans and dedicated USA soccer fans. The debate over the name of the sport they both love is incredibly divisive, with some North American fans of the sport feeling pressure to use the term football instead of soccer. With the USA and Canada being two of the three hosts of the FIFA Men’s World Cup this summer, it is likely the debate will be reignited once more. However, which term is the ‘correct’ term, and should football fans be correcting soccer fans?
Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter once said ‘football is as old as the world.’12 Whilst this statement is a slight exaggeration, it is true that various forms of ball sports which could be deemed ‘football’ have been played across the globe for millenia. However the modern reditions of football can directly trace themselves back to the game played in medieval Europe, specifically the versions of football played in medieval Britain.
The earliest reliable mentions of the term football come from the fourteenth century, where the sport is referred to directly in a Royal Edict. In 1314, Edward II banned foot ball from being played in London, as England was about to go to war with Scotland and the King was concerned football in the city could lead to riots and violence3. Whilst his son Edward III was a very different monarch4, he too banned football. In Edward III’s case, he dictated that men must take up bow and arrow practice rather than play football on feast days5. The football referred to in these edicts was very different to modern forms of the game. The rules were rather lose and varied across Britain6, however the overall aim of the game was for two opposing groups to tussle over a ball. The groups did not have to have the same number of players nor was there an upper or lower limit to the amount of players. The aim of the game was to get the ball, which was often an inflated animal bladder, to a landmark such as a predetermined house or church. It was not uncommon for the playing area to be several miles nor was it uncommon for the game to be banned for periods of time or on certain dates. Historian, and host of the popular history podcast Not Just the Tudors, Suzannah Lipscomb notes that between 1314 and 1650 the game was banned on average every fifteen years7.
Medieval, or folk, football was played primarily by the labouring poor8 and had a reputation for violence. It was not uncommon for large games to result in death, nor was it uncommon for players to be charged with murder following a death9. The violent and rough nature of the sport attracted a slightly unlikely group: public school boys and university students. Whilst taking part in football games often backfired on educated young men, with reports of a group of University of Cambridge students being beaten with sticks when they attended a game in 1579 in the village of Chesterton10, their love of the game, and their love of violence, resulted in the introduction of football to public schools across Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The introduction of football to public schools resulted in the development of a more streamlined game, and eventually the codification of the various football games. Most public schools developed their own set of rules, most notably those at Rugby School, but generally all schools allowed passing the ball with the hands as well as kicking the ball. Differences lay primarily with scoring systems and the practice of hacking11. The spread of Muscular Christianity, as well as the publication of Tom Brown’s School Days in 1857, led to the popularisation of football within the adult middle and upper classes, resulting in the founding of football clubs such as Blackheath, Liverpool12 and Sheffield. The desire for a formalised set of rules came about during the mid-nineteenth century. A set of formal rules would both allow for easier formalised contests amongst adults, whilst also curbing some of the violence of the game. The Eton version of the game, the Eton Field Game, had been banned from 1827 to 1836 due to excessive violence13, whilst the practice of hacking in particular had caused the game be talked about negatively in newspapers. In London, a group of representatives from the city’s footballing clubs gathered in 1863 to form the Football Association. The Football Association’s initial goal was to create a single set of rules which could be used in competition. Many of the clubs that attended this meeting were in favour of handling the ball, such as Blackheath; however the organisation stalled over the inclusion of hacking14. Finally, in 1871, the Football Association published their rulebook. The publication of the FA’s rules led to the formation of the Rugby Football Union, which adopted a more streamlined version of the game played at Rugby School and initially included hacking, which had been banned by the FA. Despite the loss of the Rugby-aligned clubs, such as Blackheath, Richmond and Harlequins, the Football Association gained the clubs aligned to the Sheffield Football Association15. The Sheffield Football Association included clubs from across South Yorkshire, and their rulebook predated the FA’s, having been published in 1858.
The codification of football, and the split caused by the tactic of hacking, led to the confusing problem: which football was football? Clubs across Britain, as well as those being set up across the globe, used the term football regardless of code. For example, modern rugby union giants Leicester Tigers are officially registered with the RFU as Leicester Football Club despite being formed nine years after the Rugby-Association split. For most people, football referred to the preferred version of the sport where they lived, with rugby being the preeminent code for most of the nineteenth century. However, a differentiator was needed, especially for the burgeoning sports journalism industry. Rugby football was simply and easily shortened to just rugby, however association football was slightly harder to shorten comfortably. Over time, and with influence from University of Oxford students who had the habit of adding ‘er’ to the end of words, association was shortened to assoc, before settling on soccer in the 1890s, with the Daily Telegraph celebrating the innovation in 189916.
The coinage of the word soccer happened to coincide with the popularisation and spread of the game in many parts of the world. In particular, the term was primarily adopted in English-speaking nations where another footballing code was more popular. With gridiron football more popular in the USA and Canada, soccer became the pre-eminent term in English-speaking North America. Interestingly, French-speaking Quebec adopted the term le soccer, despite France adopting football or foot. Despite soccer being the pre-eminent term in North America during the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for teams to add the suffix FC to their name, whilst the original name of the governing body, USA Soccer, was the United States Football Association17. Similarly, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa all adopted the term soccer due to there being a more predominant code of football in those countries18
Soccer officially took over as Britain’s preferred footballing code following the First World War, having been engaged in a turf war with rugby from the 1880s19. Whilst football, or footy, began to become the common term for association football, soccer was still a well-used and well-understood term. Newspapers often referred to the sport as soccer through the mid to late twentieth century, especially when referring to clubs from Wales or the North of England, where rugby codes were popular. Perhaps the last bastions of the use of the term soccer in the UK are the popular TV show Soccer AM (1994-2023), the annual charity football match Soccer Aid (2006-present) and the Sky Sports News programme Soccer Saturdays (1992-present), which fills the gap left by the FA’s 3 pm broadcasting blackout.
Soccer remains the predominant term in many parts of the world, including the USA, however many of these fans feel pressure to refer to the sport as football due to the predominance of the term. With the often volatile nature of the internet, this pressure can often result in arguments and abuse. Some British, and European, football fans will claim that football is the only correct term.
The development of language means that acceptable usage of terms changes over time. For many, football refers to association football and nothing else. To others, it refers to one of the other footballing codes or the family of codes generally. There is nothing wrong with referring to association football as just football, nor is there anything wrong with referring to the sport as soccer. For clarity purposes, The Rugby History Project generally refers to the sport as association football or soccer, as whilst football could refer to any of the footballing codes, soccer can only refer to association football.
Everything is football except football, which is soccer.
I hope you have all enjoyed this post. I know it is slightly different to my usual work, I recently lost my Grandad, who happened to be a huge West Ham fan. So I guess this one’s for him.
If you would like more regular updates, please check out my Facebook, Twitter, and/or Bluesky. I am also running a giveaway on my Instagram in honour of the upcoming TRHP birthday, if you wish to check that out. Website followers gain an extra entry to the giveaway too! You can also catch me podding with WRRAP or with Women’s Rugby Treehouse somewhat regularly this summer.
An audio version of this post is also available in all good podcasting locations, and video versions are now available on YouTube and Spotify. As always, references are below.
-Hattie
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- Blatter, 2004 in David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin, 2007), pp. 3. ↩︎
- Not the worst thing he’s ever done. ↩︎
- Suzannah Lipscomb, “Football and the Tudors,” Spotify (History Hit, November 21, 2022)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/46rOvwxJQ2IkKmyawNuTm0?si=pLEBGhA6Ssay8g70Olj1cg. ↩︎ - Edward II was forced to abdicate in 1327, historians widely regard him as a failure. His son, Edward III, reigned for fifty years and was broadly successful politically… Although he did believe he was capable of healing via the royal touch. ↩︎
- Lipscomb, “Football and the Tudors.” ↩︎
- As did the name, with the name knappen being used in West Wales for example. ↩︎
- Lipscomb, “Football and the Tudors.” ↩︎
- Peasants, or the precurser to the working class, who made up roughly 80-90% of the population. ↩︎
- Lipscomb, “Football and the Tudors.” ↩︎
- Lipscomb, “Football and the Tudors.” ↩︎
- Kicking an opposing player in the shin. ↩︎
- Now Liverpool St Helens F.C. ↩︎
- Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, pp. 25. ↩︎
- Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, pp. 131. ↩︎
- Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, pp. 132. ↩︎
- Similarly rugby was nicknamed ‘rugger’ by some, although rugby was always more predominant. ↩︎
- “Timeline” <https://www.ussoccer.com/history/timeline> ↩︎
- Gaelic, Aussie Rules and Rugby respectively. ↩︎
- Tony Collins, Who Framed William Webb Ellis: (…And Other Puzzles in Rugby History) (Scratching Shed Publishing, 2022), pp. 16. ↩︎
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