Separated by a Common Language: football and soccer

I’m very pleased to present a guest blog by one of my students at the University of Sussex. The author, Elize Holyoake, recently completed our English in the United States module and will be entering her third year in the BA English Language and Linguistics in the autumn. I’m grateful to her for researching and writing this post!

Every four years since its inauguration in 1930, the FIFA World Cup has brought together teams from all over the world to share the love of one sport. Since this year it was hosted by North American countries Canada, Mexico, and the USA, it is time to call into question a linguistic competition within this competition: is the beloved game soccer or football?

British and American fans have long debated the name of the game played by two teams with a round ball that's kicked or headed across a field. Fans back their own naming preference with as much enthusiasm as they have for their national teams. Reddit user EdHamden on r/soccer has created colo(u)red world map (relying on information from Wikipedia), with a key indicating which term is preferred:

A colour-coded world map. There is a colour key in the bottom, where pink is labelled as ‘literal translations and variations of football', blue is ‘variations of soccer' and green is ‘other etymologies'. Most of the map, such as Africa, Europe, Mexico and South America are pink. North America, Oceania, South Africa, and Ireland are blue. Islands in East Asia, like the Philippines, are green.

(via r/soccer, Reddit 2017)

Here, we can see that the US prefers soccer, whereas the UK has football, which is also the globally popular choice. However, both have the same meaning, and both have been circulating since the late 1800s. Some of the OED’s first cited uses of football were from Essex and India:

I.2.b.
1863–
Chiefly British. The game governed by the rules of the Football Association and played with a round ball between two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field having goalposts at either end, the object being to score the most goals by kicking or heading the ball into the opposing team's goal. Cf. soccer n.
With the exception of Ireland (see note at I.2e), the usual term in most of the rest of the English-speaking world is soccer. In New Zealand and South Africa use of both football and soccer is common.
1863
Football.—A meeting of the Captains of Clubs has been held at Freemasons' Tavern for promoting the adoption of a general code of rules.
Essex Standard 4 November
1890
A game of football, under the Association rules, was played on the Cooperage ground yesterday afternoon.
Times of India 10 October 3/2
1927
The principal games for inter-school contests are football in the autumn and winter and cricket in the spring and summer.
H. J. Savage, Games & Sports in Brit. Schools & Universities iii. 56
1995
The popularity of football eventually developed a momentum of its own.
T. Mason, Passion of People? viii. 120
2014
It is possible to quibble whether the sport should be referred to in Australia as football or soccer—the latter to differentiate it from Australian football.
Age (Melbourne) (Nexis) 13 August 63

For soccer, the first citation is for a 1885 game at Oxford written about in the Oldhallian:

Originally colloquial.
1885–
The game of football as played under the rules of the Football Association; cf. football n. I.2b.
Recorded earliest in soccer game n.
Football is the more usual term in Britain and Ireland, except in cases where it is necessary to distinguish soccer from other forms of football.
1885
This was pre-eminently the most important ‘Socker’ game played in Oxford this term.
Oldhallian December 171
1890
Were he to be asked what was his most pleasant recollection of Oxford life, [the average man] would reply, if he belonged to the later development, ‘footer’, or ‘socker’, or ‘the togger’.
Longman's Magazine July 325
1894
The rival attractions of ‘rugger’ and ‘socker’.
Westminster Gazette 11 January 7/1
1924
However any sane person could prefer soccer to cricket the good little Horace totally failed to comprehend.
H. de Sélincourt, Cricket Match iv. 83
1935
No one more thoroughly qualified to write the history of ‘soccer’..can be imagined.
Punch 24 April 476/2
1971
All you need to play soccer is a ball, a field and players.
L. Koppett, New York Times Guide to Spectator Sports xii. 193
2001
A game of soccer in the snow with both sexes and several generations joining in.
Observer 15 July (Review section) 9/5

Why have two different words for the same definition? The why of the divide is found in another side of historical context: social class in England.

As mentioned in the OED definition, English sporting communities in the late 1800s coined soccer. In particular, this was specific to university students from the upper classes (such as those attending Oxford) who played under the new “Association Football” rules.

A June 2026 BBC article notes that that wealthy students at the time had “a habit of shortening words and adding ‘-er’ to the end” to make slang terms. For example: breakfast becomes brekker, rugby became rugger. The soc in soccer comes from association in association football plus that -er suffix. On his blog Scottish Sport History, sports historian Andy Mitchell states that soccer and rugger were coined at the same time. The Britannica encyclop(a)edia site indicates that students first contracted association football down to assoccer or asoccer before finally reaching soccer or socker.

Over time, preferences for the two terms for the sport have changed, especially in the UK. I used Google Ngram Viewer to analy{s/z}e the various names for soccer/football in British English books to see if they have died out or maintained popularity. The spelling of assoccer gave no results. We can also see that football is the more popular option to refer to the game, with soccer not growing as much since its first use. (Football, of course, can refer to other games as well, but in BrE it most usually refers to soccer.)

A Google Ngrams Viewer plotted result of the words football, asoccer, soccer and association football in British English between the years eighteen fifty and twenty twenty-two. On the plot, asoccer does not show up. The plot line for football is blue, and starts rising from 1850, growing rising in the 1990s and staying high in 2022. The line for soccer is red, starting at zero in 1800 until around 1940, only growing a little bit over the decades. The line for association football is green and has not risen at all compared to the other two words.

The word soccer also left the UK, becoming popular in other countries, including the US. Referring back to our introductory map, these soccer-saying nations include Australia and South Africa. This curious use of soccer in these anglophone countries may be because of the prior existence of other sports called football in those places. North America, notably, has its first intercollegiate "foot-ball" game (using rugby-like rules) in November 1869, sixteen years before the word soccer came to be. This game was an intercollegiate competition between Princeton and Rutgers universities.

But this version of football does not match the type that was (and is to this day) played in the UK. American football allows the ball to be held while/whilst running with it and full-body tackling to gain possession. None of this is allowed in its British English counterpart without at least a red card or match suspension! The games are even scored differently.

For Brits to understand what Americans (or Australians or South Africans) mean by football, we need something extra. I know this myself as a born-and-bred Brit. If someone were to talk to me about the US version of football, they would have to specify which kind they were talking about with some form of pre-modification. This usually means adding a noun to further describe the meaning. For the US game, this would be American before football so that I do not assume they’re talking about the UK version, which comes as a given to me.

modifiers of "football" Gaelic gaelic football League Premier League football rugby rugby football Scottish of Scottish football • usually in: W_misc ? non-League non-League football play play football Division Second Division football league league football English English football Premier Premier League football team first team football first-team of first-team football

A Word Sketch from the Sketch Engine tool shows words that pre-modify the word football in the British National Corpus. The top five words are Gaelic, League, rugby, Scottish, and non-League, all distinguishing non-soccer kinds of football from the usual BrE meaning of football.

This kind of pre-modification is more particular to British English than American English because American English has soccer to help distinguish, whereas British English requires the American before football to be able to communicate the difference between the two. This also works out in the UK for Gaelic football, which, similar to the US version, comes with its own set of distinguishable rules from the BrE football.

So, blowing the final whistle on the deliberation between soccer and football, both are equally as valid as one another as description of “the beautiful game”, dependent on which nation you are in. In the US, if the ball cannot be held, its soccer only, and if it can be, it is football. In the UK, football is king; if the ball is held, you’re referencing American football or another sport entirely: rugby.