By ADMIN FC Al Jazeera looks into the origins and history of the debate around the name of the ‘beautiful game’.
In the 2022 World Cup anthem “Tokoh Taka”, US rapper Nicki Minaj proclaims: “Some say football, some say soccer.”
While many fans around the world find the term “soccer” strange, if not objectionable, that’s what Americans – as well as Canadians, South Africans and some Australians and Irish – call the sport.
As the US team took on England in their second match in Qatar, the familiar football-versus-soccer debate was reigniting off the pitch.
Ahead of the US-England game on Friday, posts and memes stressing that “it’s not soccer” flooded social media, and a video shared by the publication Sports Illustrated showed US fans chanting, “It’s called soccer”.
Here, Al Jazeera looks at the origins of the discrepancy in what the two English-speaking countries call the sport.
It may sound counterintuitive, but the term “soccer” was not originally American. Like the modern sport itself, the name originated in Great Britain.
As authors Silke-Maria Weineck and Stefan Szymanski explain in their book, It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa), the formal name of the sport is “association football”. British university students in the late 19th century nicknamed it “soccer”, a twist on the second syllable of “association”.