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:
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(via r/soccer, Reddit 2017) |
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.
Originally colloquial.
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 claims that students first contracted association football down to assoccer or asoccer before finally reaching soccer or socker. [Ed: see Ben Zimmer's further research in comments below, though!]
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.)
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.
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 include Gaelic and rugby, which distinguish non-soccer kinds of football from the usual BrE meaning of football. (Ed: League might occur in phrases like Premier League football, i.e. soccer, or in Rugby League football, i.e. not-soccer.)
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.
Related posts
Name-clipping (2006): see the comments for more on social class
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