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Is it Soccer or Football? Experts Explain the History of the Two Sports
As the U.S. Men's and Women's soccer teams prepare for the Summer Olympics in Paris, a history lesson about association football and gridiron football.
Brits may hate the term “soccer” being kicked around by Americans to refer to their beloved football — but they’re the ones who coined the word in the first place.
And though football means something very different on this side of the Atlantic, the origins of “America’s sport” can be traced back to England, too.
With an international audience preparing to cheer on their national men's and women's soccer (or football) teams on the big stage of the upcoming Paris Summer Games, here’s a look at how those sports, and what fans call them, evolved the way they did.
How England kicked off both types of football
Variations of the game that would become known as soccer, in some countries at least, can be traced back thousands of years, with similar kicking games being played in ancient China and ancient Greece. Modern football, though, took its biggest step forward 150 years ago.
“If you go back in England and Scotland into the Middle Ages every town and village had their own version of a game where you had two teams and you had to get a ball from one location to another to win — it could be the town square, it could be the river, there were all sorts of ways to do this,” Stefan Szymanski, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, told NBC Insider.
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“Sometimes you used your feet, sometimes you used your hands, sometimes you used violence,” added Szymanski, who co-wrote the books Soccernomics with Simon Kupper and It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa) with Silke-Maria Weineck. “People died. It was chaotic."
So, in 1863, eleven London teams banded together and codified a set of rules for what came to be dubbed, “association football” after the organizing association that presided over it.
The only problem is that the upper-class players of prestigious British universities, Oxford and Cambridge, preferred a different set of rules. A more complicated and physically grueling one in which players could use both their hands and their feet to advance a ball. One which would soon become known as “rugby football.”
“Rugby is considered a rough game played by gentlemen, and football is a gentle game played by ruffians,” said Andrei Markovits, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a soccer historian.
In that vacuum, association football became a hit with the working class at the end of the 19th Century. Popular enough to support the development of professional clubs and leagues across Europe.
It also led to new terminology thanks to the British penchant for shortening words.
“In England at this point, you have association football and rugby football,” explained Szymanski. “And they’re both a mouthful, so if you go down to the pub and you’re talking to your friends and ask, ‘Which version, do you play association football or do you play rugby football?’ That’s a bit much after five pints. It’s much easier to have a shorter version.
“Back in those times, upper middle class British students had a whole thing of contracting words for slang and adding an ‘er’ to the end,” Szymanski continued. “So, rugby association became ‘rugger,’ Breakfast? Call it, ‘brekker.’
“The problem was how do you shorten ‘association football’ in a similar way? They came up with the word, ‘Soccer.’”
It stuck.
“In every country in which the term Football denotes a different code from the Association game, as in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, the word 'soccer' is used for much of what the world, though not all of it, calls by the name of 'football' or 'futebol' or 'fussball' or any of the many variations of it,” said Markovits.
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How did gridiron football become America's favorite sport?
Across the pond, the popularity of both association football and rugby football started catching the attention of the Ivy League students that held their counterparts at Oxford and Cambridge. In that era, the rules were constantly changing between schools and between games.
The first major intercollegiate game of football, a version closer to soccer than rugby, was played between students of Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. Harvard — considered by many, including the students who attended, as the preeminent university in the country — didn’t take to the association football rules.
“Harvard actually refuses to play this game of association football and by virtue of the university’s enormous prestige, it actually impedes soccer’s existence in America,” said Markovits.
Instead, the prestige of the institution helped elevate rugby, or the constantly shifting American version of it. Many sport historians consider the 1874 exhibition games between Harvard and McGill, Canada’s own top university, as the first modern football games.
In the same way that baseball would eventually eclipse cricket, the British-spawned sport that inspired it, an intrinsically American version of rugby would also come to dominate in the United States.
This version of football would become known as either American football or gridiron football nicknamed after the distinctive cooking griddle-like layout of the field with its yard markings.
A Yale graduate named Walter Camp would pioneer rule changes in the 1880s that moved American football to be closer the version that’s played today. The addition of the forward pass in 1906 further helped the popularity of the sport to take off running. Today, 41 percent of Americans consider football their favorite sport.
Why do foreigners hate the word Soccer so much?
In researching his book on the terminology of the game, Szymanski found that the word "soccer" was used interchangeably with “football” in Britain right up until the 1970s.
The 1973 autobiography of legendary Manchester United manager, Sir Alexander Matthew Busby, was even titled Soccer at the Top: My Life in Football.
What likely set the backlash to the word among Busby’s countrymen was the establishment of the North American Soccer League in the United States in that decade. The fledgling league had a nasty habit of poaching some of the most popular British players, including George Best and Bobby Moore. (Not to mention Pele, the best player in the world at the time.)
“It’s about then that the British start saying, ‘Hang on, why do you call this soccer, it’s football?’,” explained Szymanski.
At the Olympics, there's no debate as to which sport is dominant.
Association football has been a major Olympic sport since 1900, while the American upstart version has never caught on outside of a one-game demonstration at the 1932 Summer Games. That will change — sort of — when a tamer variation, flag football, is introduced as an Olympic sport at the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.
