What happened to "soccer"?

[DISRAELI]

I don’t mean the sport. I mean the word itself. Why did the native British word “soccer” go into exile, wandering through the other countries of the world, and getting mocked as an alien when it returned to its home shores?
 
I think it comes down to the British class system. As usual.
 
English football as a village game goes back to the Middle Ages. They could be casual kick-abouts. They could be mob games between rival villages, sometimes taking place on festival days. Both sides might be trying to force the ball into the centre of the opposing village. Presumably on those occasions the aggressive chanting and the crowd violence were combined with the ball-kicking, instead of being carefully segregated as in the modern game, In one of the scenes of “King Lear”, the Fool trips up Goneril’s steward and calls him a “base football player”. Strictly speaking, of course, the Fool is the one who was being base, and he should have been sent off the pitch.
 
In due course, the sport was taken up by the public schools. When the Duke of Wellington observed that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton, he was referring to the way that the manoeuvres of large numbers of boys on the football field were effectively training them for managing large numbers of men on the battle-field. Incidentally, it may be as well to remind Americans that “public schools” in the British sense are designed for the elite; it means the exact opposite of “public school” in the American sense.
 
The official story of the origin of the “Rugby football” variant is that one William Webb Ellis, a pupil at that school, decided to take the ball in his hands and run with it, “with a fine disregard for the rules of the game as they existed at the time”.
 
In Victorian times, the forms of the game were consolidated into two main versions. The round-ball, feet-only version was organised by the Football Association. This quickly became a professional game, played and watched mainly by the working-class. The main alternative was the ball-handling, oval ball game organised by the Rugby Union, which made a point of being strictly “amateur” and thus keeping out the working-class, who could not afford to spend time on the game if they were not going to get paid.
 
There was also the complication of the Rugby League, played by professionals and splitting away from the Rugby Union on that very issue. They were not just working-class, but also northerners, which put them even further beyond the pale. The class difference between Rugby football and Association football is not rigid, but it’s there.
 
Now one of the slang habits of the upper class at the time (and it may still persist) was abbreviating words and adding the suffix “-er”. For example, if they were thinking of having champagne for breakfast and going to watch a rugby game at Twickenham, this might come out as “We’ll have champers for brekker, and then go down to Twickers for the rugger.” Once we know about that habit, it’s easy to recognise that “Association football” was turned into “soccer” on exactly the same principle.
 
One of the implications; not only was the word “soccer” upper-class in origin, but the higher classes, familiar with the rugby version, were the only people who really needed a distinct word for the alternative. The working class were only interested in the round-ball version of football, so they were more likely to call that game “football”, pure and simple.
 
But of course the nations of Europe and Latin America and Asia who imported the round-ball game did not know about or care about these social distinctions, so they would call it “socero” or “fotebol” or similar with complete indifference.
 
My old children’s encyclopaedia (Odhams, 1957) still carefully distinguishes between Association Football and Rugby Football. Then the Sixties happened.
 
During the Fifties, the upper classes of England were still dominating the cultural world, however much they might have lost over the years in economic and political power. They were the celebrities in the gossip columns. The accent frequently labelled as “cut-glass”, for some reason, (the accent which Americans think of as quintessentially British) was the standard voice of the B.B.C..  Then came the dramatic revolution of the Sixties and the national culture became working-class culture, for practical purposes. That is the real significance of the Beatles. Possibly as a result, the word “soccer” suffered a very working-class fate; it got made redundant.
 
Now any public discussion of “football” meant the round-ball game, especially after a certain afternoon in 1966 (“Hurst is running up the field. He’s got- Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over! It is now!”) And if the round-ball game has the word “football” assigned to it, what need of any other word? Why would anyone need to be more specific and add “Association”?
 
So the word “soccer” tearfully packed its bags and took passage in the Mayflower, to find refuge in the United States and support from its cousins in the rest of the world.

[kdog]

I always thought it was called football through out the world other then the US. You would be surprised that it has gained more interest here and they are building stadiums to host them . 

 https://www.loucity.com/lynnfamilystadium/

[DISRAELI]

I always thought it was called football through out the world other then the US. You would be surprised that it has gained more interest here and they are building stadiums to host them . 

 https://www.loucity.com/lynnfamilystadium/

I was fairly sure that I had seen foreign names for the game apparently rooted in "soccer", but I can't at the moment prove it by offering examples.

P.S. One site tells me that the French use both, so perhaps that's what I noticed. An alternative theory put forward on ATS is that British boys stopped saying "soccer" when the Americans started using it. Perhaps the French picked up "soccer" from the Americans. I'm don't know what the Academie Francaise recommends. "Boule du pied", probably.

[FlyingClayDisk]

It's all because of cellular phones, texting and french fries stuck between the seats.

Personally, I blame it all on Chrysler Motors and Lee Iaccoca!  It was the beginning of the great downfall of society in general.

Now, right about now you're likely wondering..."WTF is this dude talking about???" ...right?  Well...

It all happened so fast, and all at once; America failed to take notice.  First that cigar-smokin' Lee Iaccoca dude invented the Gawdforsaken mini-van in about 1983 or so.  And not long afterwards Motorola introduced the cell phone.  Texting followed shortly after that.  It didn't take long before that orange mushroom cloud on the horizon signaled the birth of the inevitable conclusion, the birth of the diabolical "Soccer-Mom" and the nuclear family complete with 2.3 children, all bouncing off the ceiling from their sugar-high of a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets and French, erm, American Fries which could slide down into the black hole recesses between the seats.

Suddenly, the same people who made their kids wear helmets on their bikes, and riding the bus too dangerous, also made sports like FOOTball socially unacceptable.  But just eliminating it from people's vocabulary wasn't enough.  No, football had to not only be eradicated, but also replaced with something else, "football" of a different kind...soccer.

And there you have it.

[DISRAELI]

It's all because of cellular phones, texting and french fries stuck between the seats.

Personally, I blame it all on Chrysler Motors and Lee Iaccoca!  It was the beginning of the great downfall of society in general.

Now, right about now you're likely wondering..."WTF is this dude talking about???" ...right?  Well...

It all happened so fast, and all at once; America failed to take notice.  First that cigar-smokin' Lee Iaccoca dude invented the Gawdforsaken mini-van in about 1983 or so.  And not long afterwards Motorola introduced the cell phone.  Texting followed shortly after that.  It didn't take long before that orange mushroom cloud on the horizon signaled the birth of the inevitable conclusion, the birth of the diabolical "Soccer-Mom" and the nuclear family complete with 2.3 children, all bouncing off the ceiling from their sugar-high of a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets and French, erm, American Fries which could slide down into the black hole recesses between the seats.

Suddenly, the same people who made their kids wear helmets on their bikes, and riding the bus too dangerous, also made sports like FOOTball socially unacceptable.  But just eliminating it from people's vocabulary wasn't enough.  No, football had to not only be eradicated, but also replaced with something else, "football" of a different kind...soccer.

And there you have it.

I'm still trying to work out the logic here. I think you are saying that the soccer-mom phenomenon made non-soccer unacceptable, so that it got replaced by soccer. Why didn't the soccer-mom make soccer unacceptable?
And in the words of a question asked regularly at soccer stadiums; "Who ate all the pies?"

[FlyingClayDisk]

It's all because of cellular phones, texting and french fries stuck between the seats.

Personally, I blame it all on Chrysler Motors and Lee Iaccoca!  It was the beginning of the great downfall of society in general.

Now, right about now you're likely wondering..."WTF is this dude talking about???" ...right?  Well...

It all happened so fast, and all at once; America failed to take notice.  First that cigar-smokin' Lee Iaccoca dude invented the Gawdforsaken mini-van in about 1983 or so.  And not long afterwards Motorola introduced the cell phone.  Texting followed shortly after that.  It didn't take long before that orange mushroom cloud on the horizon signaled the birth of the inevitable conclusion, the birth of the diabolical "Soccer-Mom" and the nuclear family complete with 2.3 children, all bouncing off the ceiling from their sugar-high of a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets and French, erm, American Fries which could slide down into the black hole recesses between the seats.

Suddenly, the same people who made their kids wear helmets on their bikes, and riding the bus too dangerous, also made sports like FOOTball socially unacceptable.  But just eliminating it from people's vocabulary wasn't enough.  No, football had to not only be eradicated, but also replaced with something else, "football" of a different kind...soccer.

And there you have it.

I'm still trying to work out the logic here. I think you are saying that the soccer-mom phenomenon made non-soccer unacceptable, so that it got replaced by soccer. Why didn't the soccer-mom make soccer unacceptable?
And in the words of a question asked regularly at soccer stadiums; "Who ate all the pies?"

Ed Zachary!  No idea what happened to all the pies, but the reason Soccer-Mom made non-soccer unacceptable was because Captain Spock (or somebody) texted them that traditional 'football' was too "violent", and their sissy-boy children should be playing soccer instead, but the term "Soccer" sounded too much like "Sock Her" (which is probably exactly what should have happened to the original Soccer-mom), and so soccer got rebranded as football in the US.  This, despite the fact, 'soccer' had been called 'football' in Europe and South America for ages before Soccer-mom shat all over everything.  But then again, Soccer-Mom was never really very intellectual anyway, so she just went with it because the ends justify the means.

[DISRAELI]

It's all because of cellular phones, texting and french fries stuck between the seats.

Personally, I blame it all on Chrysler Motors and Lee Iaccoca!  It was the beginning of the great downfall of society in general.

Now, right about now you're likely wondering..."WTF is this dude talking about???" ...right?  Well...

It all happened so fast, and all at once; America failed to take notice.  First that cigar-smokin' Lee Iaccoca dude invented the Gawdforsaken mini-van in about 1983 or so.  And not long afterwards Motorola introduced the cell phone.  Texting followed shortly after that.  It didn't take long before that orange mushroom cloud on the horizon signaled the birth of the inevitable conclusion, the birth of the diabolical "Soccer-Mom" and the nuclear family complete with 2.3 children, all bouncing off the ceiling from their sugar-high of a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets and French, erm, American Fries which could slide down into the black hole recesses between the seats.

Suddenly, the same people who made their kids wear helmets on their bikes, and riding the bus too dangerous, also made sports like FOOTball socially unacceptable.  But just eliminating it from people's vocabulary wasn't enough.  No, football had to not only be eradicated, but also replaced with something else, "football" of a different kind...soccer.

And there you have it.

I'm still trying to work out the logic here. I think you are saying that the soccer-mom phenomenon made non-soccer unacceptable, so that it got replaced by soccer. Why didn't the soccer-mom make soccer unacceptable?
And in the words of a question asked regularly at soccer stadiums; "Who ate all the pies?"

Ed Zachary!  No idea what happened to all the pies, but the reason Soccer-Mom made non-soccer unacceptable was because Captain Spock (or somebody) texted them that traditional 'football' was too "violent", and their sissy-boy children should be playing soccer instead, but the term "Soccer" sounded too much like "Sock Her" (which is probably exactly what should have happened to the original Soccer-mom), and so soccer got rebranded as football in the US.  This, despite the fact, 'soccer' had been called 'football' in Europe and South America for ages before Soccer-mom shat all over everything.  But then again, Soccer-Mom was never really very intellectual anyway, so she just went with it because the ends justify the means.

Incidentally, the standard answer to the question is "YOU ate all the pies!"

[Freeborn]

I don’t mean the sport. I mean the word itself. Why did the native British word “soccer” go into exile, wandering through the other countries of the world, and getting mocked as an alien when it returned to its home shores?
 
I think it comes down to the British class system. As usual.
 
English football as a village game goes back to the Middle Ages. They could be casual kick-abouts. They could be mob games between rival villages, sometimes taking place on festival days. Both sides might be trying to force the ball into the centre of the opposing village. Presumably on those occasions the aggressive chanting and the crowd violence were combined with the ball-kicking, instead of being carefully segregated as in the modern game, In one of the scenes of “King Lear”, the Fool trips up Goneril’s steward and calls him a “base football player”. Strictly speaking, of course, the Fool is the one who was being base, and he should have been sent off the pitch.
 
In due course, the sport was taken up by the public schools. When the Duke of Wellington observed that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton, he was referring to the way that the manoeuvres of large numbers of boys on the football field were effectively training them for managing large numbers of men on the battle-field. Incidentally, it may be as well to remind Americans that “public schools” in the British sense are designed for the elite; it means the exact opposite of “public school” in the American sense.
 
The official story of the origin of the “Rugby football” variant is that one William Webb Ellis, a pupil at that school, decided to take the ball in his hands and run with it, “with a fine disregard for the rules of the game as they existed at the time”.
 
In Victorian times, the forms of the game were consolidated into two main versions. The round-ball, feet-only version was organised by the Football Association. This quickly became a professional game, played and watched mainly by the working-class. The main alternative was the ball-handling, oval ball game organised by the Rugby Union, which made a point of being strictly “amateur” and thus keeping out the working-class, who could not afford to spend time on the game if they were not going to get paid.
 
There was also the complication of the Rugby League, played by professionals and splitting away from the Rugby Union on that very issue. They were not just working-class, but also northerners, which put them even further beyond the pale. The class difference between Rugby football and Association football is not rigid, but it’s there.
 
Now one of the slang habits of the upper class at the time (and it may still persist) was abbreviating words and adding the suffix “-er”. For example, if they were thinking of having champagne for breakfast and going to watch a rugby game at Twickenham, this might come out as “We’ll have champers for brekker, and then go down to Twickers for the rugger.” Once we know about that habit, it’s easy to recognise that “Association football” was turned into “soccer” on exactly the same principle.
 
One of the implications; not only was the word “soccer” upper-class in origin, but the higher classes, familiar with the rugby version, were the only people who really needed a distinct word for the alternative. The working class were only interested in the round-ball version of football, so they were more likely to call that game “football”, pure and simple.
 
But of course the nations of Europe and Latin America and Asia who imported the round-ball game did not know about or care about these social distinctions, so they would call it “socero” or “fotebol” or similar with complete indifference.
 
My old children’s encyclopaedia (Odhams, 1957) still carefully distinguishes between Association Football and Rugby Football. Then the Sixties happened.
 
During the Fifties, the upper classes of England were still dominating the cultural world, however much they might have lost over the years in economic and political power. They were the celebrities in the gossip columns. The accent frequently labelled as “cut-glass”, for some reason, (the accent which Americans think of as quintessentially British) was the standard voice of the B.B.C..  Then came the dramatic revolution of the Sixties and the national culture became working-class culture, for practical purposes. That is the real significance of the Beatles. Possibly as a result, the word “soccer” suffered a very working-class fate; it got made redundant.
 
Now any public discussion of “football” meant the round-ball game, especially after a certain afternoon in 1966 (“Hurst is running up the field. He’s got- Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over! It is now!”) And if the round-ball game has the word “football” assigned to it, what need of any other word? Why would anyone need to be more specific and add “Association”?
 
So the word “soccer” tearfully packed its bags and took passage in the Mayflower, to find refuge in the United States and support from its cousins in the rest of the world.

Call it whatever you want but football/soccer today is nothing but a parody of the sport I grew up playing and loving.

I try to watch re-runs of The Big Match on Sky Sports whenever I can.
It was hosted by Brain Moore and shows games mainly from the 70's and 80's - fantastic matches.
So much better than the clinical, sanitised thing we endure today.
Sure we get the odd good match and everyone waxes lyrically about how technical superb it is....but its so bloody boring.
Give me the blood n guts affairs from the old Baseball Ground etc over the tippy tappy boring shite we get today.

Tomorrows match between Man City and Liverpool is being hyped up, what's the chances of both sides cancelling each other out and it being a bore fest?

Against Modern Football.

Its always been football or footy up here....never soccer.
But great OP nonetheless.

P.S. Did I just sound like a miserable auld fart there?

[DISRAELI]

I don’t mean the sport. I mean the word itself. Why did the native British word “soccer” go into exile, wandering through the other countries of the world, and getting mocked as an alien when it returned to its home shores?
 
I think it comes down to the British class system. As usual.
 
English football as a village game goes back to the Middle Ages. They could be casual kick-abouts. They could be mob games between rival villages, sometimes taking place on festival days. Both sides might be trying to force the ball into the centre of the opposing village. Presumably on those occasions the aggressive chanting and the crowd violence were combined with the ball-kicking, instead of being carefully segregated as in the modern game, In one of the scenes of “King Lear”, the Fool trips up Goneril’s steward and calls him a “base football player”. Strictly speaking, of course, the Fool is the one who was being base, and he should have been sent off the pitch.
 
In due course, the sport was taken up by the public schools. When the Duke of Wellington observed that the battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton, he was referring to the way that the manoeuvres of large numbers of boys on the football field were effectively training them for managing large numbers of men on the battle-field. Incidentally, it may be as well to remind Americans that “public schools” in the British sense are designed for the elite; it means the exact opposite of “public school” in the American sense.
 
The official story of the origin of the “Rugby football” variant is that one William Webb Ellis, a pupil at that school, decided to take the ball in his hands and run with it, “with a fine disregard for the rules of the game as they existed at the time”.
 
In Victorian times, the forms of the game were consolidated into two main versions. The round-ball, feet-only version was organised by the Football Association. This quickly became a professional game, played and watched mainly by the working-class. The main alternative was the ball-handling, oval ball game organised by the Rugby Union, which made a point of being strictly “amateur” and thus keeping out the working-class, who could not afford to spend time on the game if they were not going to get paid.
 
There was also the complication of the Rugby League, played by professionals and splitting away from the Rugby Union on that very issue. They were not just working-class, but also northerners, which put them even further beyond the pale. The class difference between Rugby football and Association football is not rigid, but it’s there.
 
Now one of the slang habits of the upper class at the time (and it may still persist) was abbreviating words and adding the suffix “-er”. For example, if they were thinking of having champagne for breakfast and going to watch a rugby game at Twickenham, this might come out as “We’ll have champers for brekker, and then go down to Twickers for the rugger.” Once we know about that habit, it’s easy to recognise that “Association football” was turned into “soccer” on exactly the same principle.
 
One of the implications; not only was the word “soccer” upper-class in origin, but the higher classes, familiar with the rugby version, were the only people who really needed a distinct word for the alternative. The working class were only interested in the round-ball version of football, so they were more likely to call that game “football”, pure and simple.
 
But of course the nations of Europe and Latin America and Asia who imported the round-ball game did not know about or care about these social distinctions, so they would call it “socero” or “fotebol” or similar with complete indifference.
 
My old children’s encyclopaedia (Odhams, 1957) still carefully distinguishes between Association Football and Rugby Football. Then the Sixties happened.
 
During the Fifties, the upper classes of England were still dominating the cultural world, however much they might have lost over the years in economic and political power. They were the celebrities in the gossip columns. The accent frequently labelled as “cut-glass”, for some reason, (the accent which Americans think of as quintessentially British) was the standard voice of the B.B.C..  Then came the dramatic revolution of the Sixties and the national culture became working-class culture, for practical purposes. That is the real significance of the Beatles. Possibly as a result, the word “soccer” suffered a very working-class fate; it got made redundant.
 
Now any public discussion of “football” meant the round-ball game, especially after a certain afternoon in 1966 (“Hurst is running up the field. He’s got- Some people are on the pitch, they think it’s all over! It is now!”) And if the round-ball game has the word “football” assigned to it, what need of any other word? Why would anyone need to be more specific and add “Association”?
 
So the word “soccer” tearfully packed its bags and took passage in the Mayflower, to find refuge in the United States and support from its cousins in the rest of the world.

Call it whatever you want but football/soccer today is nothing but a parody of the sport I grew up playing and loving.

I try to watch re-runs of The Big Match on Sky Sports whenever I can.
It was hosted by Brain Moore and shows games mainly from the 70's and 80's - fantastic matches.
So much better than the clinical, sanitised thing we endure today.
Sure we get the odd good match and everyone waxes lyrically about how technical superb it is....but its so bloody boring.
Give me the blood n guts affairs from the old Baseball Ground etc over the tippy tappy boring shite we get today.

Tomorrows match between Man City and Liverpool is being hyped up, what's the chances of both sides cancelling each other out and it being a bore fest?

Against Modern Football.

Its always been football or footy up here....never soccer.
But great OP nonetheless.

P.S. Did I just sound like a miserable auld fart there?

Since you're supporting my theory that "soccer" was not used by ordinary people, you can sound how you like.

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Soccer/Football Etymology

Across the pond, here in the states the cancel culture clowns have pretty much destroyed all the American pro sports where it's all a joke of corporate greed.

[DISRAELI]

Soccer/Football Etymology

Across the pond, here in the states the cancel culture clowns have pretty much destroyed all the American pro sports where it's all a joke of corporate greed.

Thank you. I wonder if the etymologies on that site are coming from the OED. More useful than most online dictionaries, anyway.

P.S. I've just checked their extensive list of sources, and I see it even includes Johnson as well as the OED

[SleepyGuitar]

I suspect most other countries use the terms interchangeably nowadays. Although we mostly use the term soccer for our local leagues and football when discussing the European leagues. 

Our main league is the PSL (premier soccer league) but they seem to be trying to be fancy and rebrand as football :)

“The South African Premier Division, officially referred to as the DStv Premiership for sponsorship reasons, is a South African men's professional football league and the highest division of South African football league system”