The great debate: soccer or football?

So is it soccer or football? 

Either is fine, actually. But before you accuse us of playing it safe, hear us out first. 

Both soccer and football are used to refer to the same sport. We call that sport ‘the beautiful game.’ The one where players kick a round, patterned ball around and across a large grass field to score goals.

If you want to get all technical and precise about it, then the right term is actually football. It can also be soccer. Yes, they are both correct. The same country—England—even coined the two terms.

Still confused? Here is a brief history lesson:

The beautiful game is said to have originated in England way back in 1863. That year, a so-called “Football Association” formalized the game by writing down a set of rules for it. This game would go on to become England’s most popular sport at that time and was called “association football.”It was also right around that time when another game was taking shape in England—rugby football. It also involved kicking a ball, but the players were allowed to carry it and run with it. Ergo, there were two sports known as football back then: association football and rugby football.

Students at the University of Oxford tried to distinguish the two sports. They called rugby football “rugger” and association football “asoccer”—a play on the second syllable of the word “association.” The term asoccer was eventually shortened to “soccer” but it never really caught on. Neither did rugger. Over time, rugby football would be known simply as “rugby” while soccer was called “football” (leaving off “association” completely).

Coincidentally, a sport similar to rugby was taking shape in the U.S. at around the same time. This sport was gridiron football (think National Football League, or the NFL). Gridiron football ultimately became one of America’s most popular sports, and fans and players alike soon took to calling it simply as “football”—dropping “gridiron” entirely.

Here is where things get even more interesting.

By the early 1900s, the British people used football and soccer interchangeably. The Americans, on the other hand, began referring to the beautiful game as soccer to distinguish it from football, the gridiron version. When the British found out, they began to somewhat despise the term soccer because of its association to the Americans. Over time, soccer became sort of an exile word in British English, paving the way for football to be used almost exclusively when referring to the beautiful game.

As the beautiful game grew in popularity worldwide, so did the name football. In the U.S., though, football is still associated more with gridiron football. The same is true in Canada, Australia, and all other countries where American or rugby football is popular. In these countries, soccer continues to be used to refer to the beautiful game in order to distinguish it from its distant cousin.

So, either term works just fine. But most of the world seems to be using football—except maybe Americans, Canadians, and Australians (and some Americanized Pinoys).