Why does American football is named “football” and football is named “soccer” in America ?
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It’s “always” been “soccer” in English-speaking world outside of Britain—and for many people within Britain, too. The British stopped using the term relatively recently, possibly because it became perceived as an Americanism.
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The term “football” was applied to a countless number of medieval ball games played on foot (hence *foot* + *ball*). As with other professional sports, these games had very localized or ad hoc rules that were not codified until the 19th century. Notably, in the UK, the Football Association was founded in 1863 and the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871, which became the two major types of football played in England.
According to the OED, “soccer” as a colloquial name for association football and “rugger” as a nickname for rugby are attested first from 1885 and 1889 respectively:
>1885 *Oldhallian* Dec. 171 This was pre-eminently the most important ‘Socker’ game played in Oxford this term.
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>1889 *Boy’s Own Paper* 6 Apr. 431/3 In Varsity patois Rugby is yclept ‘Rugger’, while Association has for its synonym ‘Socker’.
As the latter citation suggests, these were primarily nicknames used among the upper classes.
By the 1880s, however, a game called “football” had already evolved elsewhere in the English-speaking world, so when these new games were imported from England, they were known by different names. “Rugby” is distinct enough, but perhaps “association” was too ambiguous, and “soccer” became the name of the game in Australia, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, and the U.S. Some people in New Zealand refer to rugby league as “football” as well.
Two University of Michigan professors, Silke-Maria Weineck and Stefan Szymanski. wrote a whole book on the terminology fight in 2018, *It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa)*. They point out that the term “soccer” was commonly used in the British press until about 1980—around the time that the game was becoming newly popular in the U.S. Essentially, the term “soccer,” invented at Oxford, became coded as an Americanism, and then no self-respecting Brit would want to use it.
If you look at the [Google NGram of “soccer”](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=soccer%3Aeng_gb_2019%2Csoccer%3Aeng_us_2019&year_start=1970&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3) in the British and American corpora over the last 50 years, the divergence comes later than the book, but it is clear and very sharp—”soccer” was in roughly equal use in UK- and US-published books in 1970, but it is a distinctively American term by 2019.
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