Why football is called 'soccer' in the US and Canada
Why is football called 'soccer' in the US and Canada?11 minutes ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleMargarita RodríguezBBC News MundoGetty ImagesFootball is life for millions of fans around the world, but in two of...
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Key developments are emerging from the global stage. Why is football called 'soccer' in the US and Canada? 11 minutes ago Share Save Add as preferred on GoogleMargarita RodríguezBBC News MundoGetty ImagesFootball is life for millions of fans around the world, but in two of the co-host nations of the 2026 World Cup, they tend to call it by a different name. In the US and Canada, it's known as soccer.
And does that word annoy other football-loving nations? "When I was a child in England, the word 'soccer' was perfectly acceptable," Stefan Szymanski says. The emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, says the debate around "football" versus "soccer" struck him as strange.
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"I started asking my friends: 'Do you remember? Maybe it's a false memory. Was it ever a problem?
' I began talking to people about it. And the consensus was that in the 1970s there didn't seem to be any issue with that word. "Szymanski's interest turned into research.
He explains that, in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport. "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said. The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby. "There were two games: one called rugby football, at that time, and the other called association football," says Szymanski. Brekker, rugger, soccerAmong wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.
"So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'. "Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger. "So how did the word "soccer" emerge?
There is a theory, Szymanski says - though he cautions that "no-one is entirely sure". It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer". "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford.
The story has become one of the most prominent items on the global agenda.
