It\u2019s not exactly a real war, settling which can get anyone a peace prize. But US President joked he would try. <\/p>\n
As the Club World Cup wound up, DAZN reporter Emily Austin on Sunday (13 July) following Trump\u2019s presence on the pitch after Chelsea\u2019s win at the MetLife stadium, drew Trump into a discussion over difference between the British (football) and American (soccer) terms for the popular game.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThey call it football, we call it soccer. I\u2019m not sure if that change can be made very easily,\u201d Trump told her first up. After Ms Austin wondered if he could issue an executive order instead so only the word football is used, the US president guffawed and replied: \u201cI think we could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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USA has a few slightly more urgent matters to attend to, so \u2018soccer\u2019 might yet survive. But it drew attention to the serendipitous route the words have taken \u2013 always influenced by the presence of a more popular rival sport.<\/p>\n
Encyclopedia Britannica notes that the term \u201csoccer\u201d originated in England as a slang abbreviation of \u201cassociation football.\u201d After the formation of the Football Association in late 1800s, the rules of football, were slotted in stone by \u201cAssociation Football.\u201d However, not the most interesting variety of kicking the ball with the foot, it faced jostles from other football codes, like rugby. That\u2019s when Oxford University students coined the term \u201csoccer\u201d as a casual, shortened version, using the \u201csoc\u201d from \u201cassociation\u201d and adding the \u201c-er\u201d suffix common in Oxford campus slang. <\/p>\n
So, soccer set itself apart from rugger.<\/p>\n
Britannica writes, \u201cAlthough football-type games have been around for centuries, the sport we know today is often said to have begun in 1863, when England\u2019s newly formed Football Association wrote down a set of rules. At the time, it was the most widely played game of its kind in the country, but it wasn\u2019t the only one. Rugby football, named after an English boarding school, was a rebellious variation that allowed players to carry and run with the ball to advance it toward the goal.\u201d So, the football of Pirlo, Canavaro, Gigi Buffon, Big Brazilian Ronaldo, Gatusso, del Piero, Gerrard, Raul Gonzalez Blanco, Miroslav Klose and the great Juan Roman Riquelme was called by the Football Association\u2019s as association football.<\/p>\n
Britannica further mentions that linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of \u201crugger\u201d (rugby football) and \u201cassoccer\u201d (association football). \u201cThe latter term was further shortened to \u201csoccer\u201d (sometimes spelled \u201csocker\u201d), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, \u201csoccer\u201d never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Onto the United States where the womens team salvages ineptness of the men, and actually wins World Cups.<\/p>\n
Another sport, Britannica says, emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. \u201cBefore long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word.\u201d So Anerican football came into being.<\/p>\n
Cornered by yet another mire popular sport, American association-football players defiantly adopted soccer to refer to their sport. \u201cThe United States Football Association, which had formed in the 1910s as the official organizing body of American soccer, changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945, and it later dispensed with the \u201cFootball\u201d altogether. No longer just a nickname, soccer had stuck,\u201d Britannica writes.<\/p>\n
Football, of the Buffon kinds, also faced competition from gridiron football in Canada, Gaelic football in Ireland and Australian rules football (which is derived from rugby). \u201cIn places where football can be ambiguous, soccer is usefully precise,\u201d Britannica writes. <\/p>\n
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Thus was sulkingly born soccer. Which might need a presidential decree to lose its British slang name in the lead up to next year\u2019s World Cup. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The real issues facing football in US however are quality of playing turf, humid hot temperatures and American general disinterest. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s not exactly a real war, settling which can get anyone a peace prize. But US President joked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45337,45335,45336,45326,45319,45330,45334,45332,78,45311,45309,45312,45314,7,45327,45324,45321,45329,49,48,45318,45323,45333,45322,45310,45328,45317,45315,45313,45331,45316,45325,45320],"class_list":{"0":"post-216921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-history-of-association-football-vs-rugby","9":"tag-origin-of-soccer-oxford-university","10":"tag-why-is-american-football-called-football","11":"tag-american-football-vs-soccer-history","12":"tag-association-football-etymology","13":"tag-britannica-soccer-origin","14":"tag-chelsea-win","15":"tag-club-world-cup-metlife-stadium-trump","16":"tag-donald-trump","17":"tag-donald-trump-on-football","18":"tag-donald-trump-on-relabelling-soccer-to-football","19":"tag-donald-trump-on-soccer","20":"tag-emily-austin-trump-football-soccer","21":"tag-football","22":"tag-global-terms-for-football","23":"tag-gridiron-football-origin","24":"tag-history-of-soccer-vs-football","25":"tag-impact-of-rival-sports-on-terminology","26":"tag-ncaa","27":"tag-ncaa-football","28":"tag-origin-of-the-word-soccer","29":"tag-oxford-university-slang-soccer","30":"tag-peace-prize","31":"tag-rugby-vs-association-football-naming","32":"tag-soccer-vs-football","33":"tag-sports-naming-conventions-history","34":"tag-trump-soccer-executive-order","35":"tag-trump-club-world-cup-chelsea-football","36":"tag-trump-soccer-football-executive-order","37":"tag-united-states-soccer-football-association-history","38":"tag-us-president-football-vs-soccer-joke","39":"tag-us-soccer-popularity-issues","40":"tag-why-do-americans-call-it-soccer"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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