Q: With just about everyone else on the planet engulfed in that quadrennial celebration of "football" known as the World Cup, why do we in the United States insist on calling it "soccer?"
A: The United States, after all, does have a special knack for ticking off the
British.
There was that whole Revolutionary War deal. We drive on the right side of the road, not the left. We eschew tea in favor of coffee.
And we call it soccer, a figurative kick in the shin to our "football"-obsessed pals in jolly old England.
As with the whole taxation-without-representation thing, though, the British have only themselves to blame for our reliance on the word "soccer."
The term sprang up more than a century ago as a slang term in Britain for "association football," the formal name for what we know as soccer. The "association" was to differentiate it from other types of football, such as rugby, which is technically known as "rugby football."
British football fans took the "soc" from association and turned it into "soccer."
(Why they didn't honor the pronunciation of "association" and call it "sosher" is apparently the topic of another "Explain it to me.")
Americans, meanwhile, developed a love for another form of football — the touchdown-scoring, quarterback-sacking, first-down-scrambling kind that grew out of "rugby football." Thus, that became the football-of-record in this country, while soccer became the go-to name for … well, soccer.
The United States, it also should be noted, isn't the only country that doesn't use football when talking about soccer.
Denizens of Australia and New Zealand also call it soccer. Those countries are also officially part of the British Commonwealth — they still sing "God Save the Queen" and everything — so if they use it, maybe the British shouldn't be so annoyed by us.
There are other countries that spurn both soccer and football. In Italy, as soccer/football mad a country as you're likely to find, they call it "calcio" (pronounced "cahl-choh," according to the presumably trustworthy website
http://www.italiansrus.com). Calcio doesn't translate to either football or soccer; it's a variant of the Italian verb for "to kick."
We have to give soccer — or, um, "association football" — the edge in at least one area: It really is the most popular sport on the planet.
While American football fans like to think the
Super Bowl is the most watched program on TV, it pales against the World Cup.
About 100 million people watch the Super Bowl each year. FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, says nearly 608 million watched the last World Cup final in 2006 between France and Italy.
On the other hand, you have to give American soccer this: Our national team's goalie is clearly way better than England's.
— Brian Callaway, The Morning Call
