So what is this soccer/fooball question all about? I used to think that soccer is the American term for European football and football in American English means American football. However, Richard Quest of CNN is (very) British and he uses the word soccer when he is talking about the football so I’m a bit confused. Could you please clarify this issue?
Thank you very much.
Andreana
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FIFA has pretty authoritatively determined that soccer is really football; Japan has recently bowed the knee and followed suit, as has Australia, and the word soccer is on its way out, I am afraid. I much preferred it, because there are three footballs at the moment: soccer (football), American football (which the Americans shorten to football), and rugby football.
Thank goodness I am not interested in watching any of them.
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Ah. yes-- Canadian football. Right you are, Jamie.
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Football is the official name for soccer. Soccer comes from association football. Only in the USA and canada do they say soccer.
The global name for football is of course football. The global name for american football is gridiron. Gridiron is a code of handball and not football.
Football is a sport where players control the ball with their feet and only football does this.
Football has been played for many centuries but had no official rules.
The british created rules for football in 1848. After that many codes of handball arose including rugger and gridiron, none of which are codes of football.
There is only one football, american football is known globally as gridiron.
There are in fact many codes of handball.
Aussie rules, gaelic rules, grdiron, rugby union [rugger], rugby league.
All of these sports use their hands and a ball. They come from an ancient british sport called handball that was banned in the 13th century by edward III.
There is one code of football, played by beckham, ronaldinho etc etc and it is the most popular sport on earth by some way.
The fourth is Canadian football, which doesn’t have the same number of players or quite the same rules as American football.
The word soccer can’t be on its way out in North America, because losing that word will cause too much confusion.
The sources I found say that the British codified the soccer rules in the late 1860s, which is almost the same time the rules for American football were codified.
Evidently, two different games called “football” were officially established at essentially the same time. There are at least two footballs.
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Or ‘feetball’
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Even in French and Spanish the usual term is ‘football’. Spaniards spell it ‘fútbol’, pushing its translated equivalent ‘balompié’ into the background.
This spelling is a good example of an adapted anglicism, like ‘güisqui’ (can you guess what it is?), ‘mítin’, ‘líder’, ‘gol’ or ‘suéter’.
"In 1848 Mr. H. de Winton and Mr. J.C. Thring, two football players from Cambridge University called a meeting with representatives from the major public schools, a 7hr 55min meeting produced the first formal set of rules for the game of association football. "
Football came from football which was a game played all over the world using the feet. In some places it was called “kickball”.
Rugby came from handball, gridiron came from rugby union, rugby league, gaelic rules and aussie rules came from rugby union also.
Gridiron is a code of rugby or rugger but has nothing to do with football.
I am guessing americans tried to invent their own sport that would usurp football as the americans at that stage hated everything english. They have clearly failed, which is probably why americans have made a sport out of hating football.
Check out soccersucks.com, americans have even set up websites to attack football.
Kickball is a type of baseball using a soccer ball and the feet instead of a bat. American children all know how to play it.
Who made up the name “gridiron” to indicate American football? It’s kind of stupid to take the name of the field design and use it to refer to the entire game. Americans sometimes use it to refer to the sport sort of metaphorically, but it’s not the name of the sport. It would be like calling soccer “chalk lines”.
That’s a pretty weird guess. In the early 19th century there was an American game in which players tried to move a ball past a line by kicking or batting it. This was the origin of American football. It wasn’t started as a self-conscious attempt to reject some British game or other, and the American game predates the establishment of the Cambridge rules for soccer.
I doubt that anybody’s making a sport out of hating soccer, since it’s played in so many schools and there are so many local leagues. However, a lot of Americans who play soccer as children don’t care to follow it when they reach adulthood. My own nephew had soccer as his main sport all through childhood, and he coached children’s soccer when he was older, but as an adult he pays no attention to the sport and prefers to watch basketball or American football.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Americans simply don’t care about and don’t pay attention to soccer. But as a person who probably makes a sport out of hating Americans, you’d see it a little differently.
When I was in high school I wanted to play soccer, but there were no teams for boys. It was considered a girls’ game where I lived.
I looked at that site, and it appears to contain no derogatory information other than its name.
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No, you did not mess up, Conchita. I deleted it as a hint that this ‘discussion’ was coming to an end. No further argument is required here and we can consider the topic closed. The topic of ‘football’ vs ‘soccer’ has been covered.
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