Football (soccer)
Football, also called soccer and
referred to colloquially as footie, is the most popular
team sport[?] in the world in both number of spectators and number of
active participants. The international governing body of football is the
Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).
In many countries particularly in
South America and
Europe, football is more than just a game: it is a way of life. Millions
of people play for amateur clubs or regularly go to a stadium to follow
their home team and avidly watch the game on television.
The name Association football was first used when the
sport was codified by
the Football Association at the
Freemason's Tavern,
London on
October 25,
1863 to distinguish it from the numerous versions of football that were
around at the time. The word soccer is a colloquial
abbreviation of 'Association' and first appeared in the 1880s. The word is
sometimes credited to a student at Oxford called
Charles Wreford Brown. He is said to have often referred to breakfast as
'brekkers' and
rugby football as 'rugger' etc. He went on to play for the
English national side and became vice-president of the Football
Association. The term 'Association football' is rarely used today, though
some clubs still use Association Football Club ("AFC") in their
names .
In the late
19th century the word 'soccer' tended to be used by the upper-class
elite, whilst the majority of ordinary working people used the word
football. The sport was exported by expatriate Britons to much of the rest
of the world and many of these nations adopted the common
English term into their own language. Accordingly, it became Fußball
in
German, voetbal in
Dutch, fotball in
Scandinavian languages, futebol in
Portuguese, and fútbol in
Spanish. In
France the word remained unchanged as le football (but is often
shortened to le foot), although in
Quebec the word is le soccer. In
Italy, a ceremonial
Florentine court ritual known as
o calcio storico[?] ("kickball in costume") bore enough similarly
to the imported game for the word calcio to be accepted instead.
Today the word 'soccer' is predominantly used by English speaking-nations
that have evolved their own native codes of
football:
However, this was not always the case. Indeed, the first Association
football team formed outside of England was the
Oneida Football Club[?] of
Boston, Massachusetts,
USA. Early leagues in the US mostly called themselves football
leagues, including the American League of Professional Football,
National Association Football League and the Southern New
England Football League.
The governing body of the sport in the US did not drop the word "football"
from its name until 1974, and did not have the word "soccer" in its
name until 1945. What is now the
United States Soccer Federation (USSF) was originally the US
Football Association, and was formed in 1912 by the merger of the
American Football Association and the American Amateur Football
Association. In 1945 the word "soccer" was added to the
official name of the organization and the word football was kept, resulting
in the name of "US Soccer Football Association".
The USSFA later dropped the word "football", replacing it with
another word beginning with "F" to become what it is today, the USSF
or US Soccer Federation. Similarly in Australia the early governing
bodies used the term 'British Football' (i.e. the Southern British
Football Association in
New South Wales, the Anglo-Australian Football Association in
Victoria and the British Football Associations of
Queensland,
South Australia and
Tasmania.
In countries that didn't develop a rival sport with a claim to the name
football the word 'soccer' was very rarely used. Today the growing use of
the word may well owe much to the cultural dominance of the USA, which is
shaping language and definitions well beyond its borders. However football
remains by far the most common word used worldwide to describe the sport.
