Why “Soccer”?

To any self-respecting Englishman, our national game is FOOTBALL, not ‘soccer’ as the Americans call it. That game that the Americans call Football (and which I find so boring) developed from the English game of Rugby and that’s a whole new story….

The almost certainly apocryphal story goes that one William Webb Ellis, a pupil of Rugby School, growing bored with playing football, picked up the ball during a game, ran with it and put the ball down over the goal-line, asking the master if that counted as a goal, to which the master replied “No, but it was a jolly good try.” Hence the scoring of a touchdown in the game of rugby to this day being called a ‘Try’.

Whether the story is true or no, certainly the game of Rugby was developed at that school, and the game still bears the name, itself having split into Rugby Union and Rugby League with differing rules.

However, to get back to the point of this article, in the 1860s, attempts were made to draw up a standard set of rules for football and an official body was formed – The Football Association (F.A.). Gradually as the popularity of Rugby grew, football was referred to as “Association Football” and Rugby as “Rugby Football”. The English tend to add the letters ‘er’ to names, and pastimes, hence Rugby was referred to as “Rugger” and football became “Assoccer” from the shortening of Association Football. But ‘Assoccer’ soon became just ‘soccer’.

The Americans used that name to differentiate it from their own yawn-making game.