Why is it called soccer in America? Explaining the English roots of the American word for the world's game

It's the argument that tears the Anglophone world apart. There is so much uniting us all but how can we possibly see that until this most divisive of beefs has been squashed? How can I, a Brit, and you, based on our analytics likely a reader for America, ever see eye to eye if we cannot agree on what to call the world's greatest sport? Football or soccer. It can only be one.

Or can it?

To really understand why everyone on my side of the Atlantic is so angry about this, we must first do some etymological investigation. Indiana Jones but with dictionaries. We know where football comes from, that all makes sense. There's a football. There's a ball. Apply one to the other and you have your sport.

Soccer though, what's that all about? Well like all the best stories -- Brideshead Revisited, Harry Potter, The Inbetweeners -- the story of soccer is the story of the English education system. We will, however, have to come back to that after a potted tour through the social history of this sceptred isle from which I write. Now, some formative version of what we would come to know as football/soccer/futbol has been played in the country for centuries. 

If instead you'd like to explore the origins of soccer in America, "The Billion Dollar Goal" tells the story of U.S. soccer's long road to relevance, culminating in the iconic 1989 strike that ended a 40-year World Cup drought and changed the sport in America, not to mention how the game came to be called soccer in America. Stream "The Billion Dollar Goal" now on Paramount+

In 1314 King Edward II banned the playing of football "as there is great noise in the city, caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils might arise which God forbid". There's a man who had a vision of Argentina suffer-balling their way to the World Cup final 700 years later. Football is referenced twice in the works of Shakespeare. In King Lear the Earl of Kent refers to Oswald (steward to Lear's daughter Goneril) as a "base football player", an insult that you can still find on X, the everything app, to this day. 

North of the border Scotland's Football Act of 1424 states "the king forbiddis that na man play at the fut ball under the payne of [four pence] to the lorde of the lande". That's $24.14 in today's money, making this perhaps football's first pay-to-play scandal. 

You can still see the remnants of a formative football in events such as the Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football match in Derbyshire, a county in the heart of England. Played every year since 1667, it bears some of the hallmarks of the game that so entrances us in 2026. There are two goals, but they are three miles apart. The game is split into halves, each of which last eight hours. The ball isn't passed or kicked, but moves in something that looks like either a rugby union scrum or a punch-up outside a Yate's wine lodge on a Friday night. Interestingly, this latter facet of the game remains and has been the preferred tactics for ball progression at Manchester United in much of the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era.

If the above can be considered football: a pre-history, then the game as we know it emerges in the public schools and factories of 19th-century Britain, where clubs looked to get some shared rules nailed down. In Yorkshire the team of Sheffield F.C. would codify their own game in the Sheffield Rules, 11 years after representatives from some of England's grandest schools had agreed their own guidelines in Cambridge. Finally, in 1863, at the Freemasons' Tavern on Long Acre in Covent Garden, London, the first meeting of the Football Association codified the game, with the Cambridge Rules as their guiding star. Association football was born.

Meanwhile, in the Midlands, William Webb Ellis had had a (perhaps apocryphal) revelation that rather than kicking the ball backwards, as the rules state, he could pick it up and run with it. From there came the football of Rugby School, or rugby as it would go on to be known (to this day, the governing bodies of the sport in England and Ireland remain rugby football unions). Of course, the powers that be at the FA could not allow this. They went one way, the rugby boys the other.

Following association football and rugby football, with a few tweaks, come Australian rules football, Gaelic football and, of course, the vastly inferior American football.

You might have spotted the problem here. That's a lot of footballs. How to distinguish between them? As ever, Oxford University has the answer. Among its many gifts to the world is the Oxford "-er," a suffix that is applied to bring an air of diffidence to conversation. Think cuppers for inter-college sporting events or Bodders for the university's main library. To this day, it endures. Bengers, they used to call me. Well, that and some other unprintable things.