In a story I've been reading here on BCTS, I noticed one of the characters mentioned both soccer about as frequently as football. This got me to wondering, do British folk use both terms about as frequently, or is that something just this author did. I'd always assumed football would be used, since that's what I usually saw in other stories, but I realize I could be very mistaken in that assumption. If there's anyone out there who'd be willing to clear things up for me, I'd much appreciate it! :)
Football & Soccer
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it varies
with social class, age and the historic sports dynamics of the area
and all of those have drifted multiple ways back and forth
for certain places (Rugby) Union is "Football" while (Rugby) League & Association are the ones given specific names, there's some places that all three are referred to by specific names
and its inconsistent enough (other than at Rugby School itself) that it can't really use the distinctions to reliably infer anything about a character with them
it sometimes gets used for clarification but some people will look at you funny and accused of using an "americanism"
and in writing where it is *known* there'll a lot of not british readers, Soccer gets used simply to avoid the confusion that "football" might otherwise cause (and curse all the colonial footballs for not having distinct and uniquely termed governing bodies that might be used to differentiate them instead of allusions to nationality)
basically, there are no rules and no consistency and it's easier to just ignore it and stick to calling Association Football "Soccer"
Football, footie, soccer and other stuff
The short answer is that it is complicated.
Football is used far, far more than soccer here. I think I've only ever used it to differentiate it from American Football in conversations with an American. American Football, the sport where ironically the ball is hardly ever kicked. Oxymorons of the world unite!
Football... the one with the spherical ball.
Rugby Union Football(15 players per side), Rugby League(13 players per side) and the Antipodean variants use an oval ball.
Soccer is sometimes used in the UK but it is rare by comparison to the use of Football/footie.
just my $0.02 worth.
Samantha
Spherical ball
Just to make it a bit more complicated there is another "football" where a spherical ball is moved by carrying, bouncing, kicking, hand-passing, and soloing (dropping the ball and then toe-kicking the ball upward into the hands).
i.e. Gaelic football
Round balls
and there's Australian Rules Football as well - similar to Gaelic football, but my Australian relatives tell me it's even faster.
Speaker
Australian Rules
Aussie Rules still uses an elliptical ball but it has more rounded ends than the ball used for Rugby (Union or League). It is big in the southern state of Victoria and spread into South Australia. It then migrated further afield when some of the Melbourne teams relocated to other state capital cities.
football
I presume you aren't British
Football or as the Americans call it soccer is exactly that they use they're feet or sometimes their heads to move the ball up and down the field
What they call Football in the USA is similar in a lot of ways to what we call Rugby Football or just Rugby but without all the armour and time outs
Hope that helps
Thank you!
I really appreciate everyone's feedback. I hadn't even considered how rugby would figure into the mix. I'm guessing the author of the story I was reading was trying to make things clearer.
Footballs
What's called American football was invented in Canada! Prior to a Rugby game between Toronto and Harvard, the teams couldn't agree on what the rules were, exactly, so they sort of made up a new game. :) Rugby was the thing commonly called football in North America at the time.
The newly invented game developed on its own, spreading and mutating from university to university until it finally got codified in the late 19th century. Though the Canadian and American versions are slightly different, both are still called football on this side of the pond. The version with helmets and armor came to be because of several tragic deaths on the playing fields among prominent (rich) American families. President Theodore Roosevelt promised to ban the sport if schools did not make it safer.
Meanwhile, various forms of football continued to be played in schools and playing fields outside of universities, and even some of the big prestigious schools kept playing English football of one code or another. Soccer (Association rules) never disappeared and eventually played a part in the invention of basketball (started as winterized soccer played in a gymnasium), kickball (bastard child of baseball and soccer) and speedball (sandlot Rugby played with a soccer ball). There's also 'feetsball' which is just kids kicking a soccer ball around and making up their own rules to argue about. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Feetsball
"There's also 'feetsball' which is just kids kicking a soccer ball around and making up their own rules to argue about. :)"
You mean Calvinball?
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
More than anyone needs to know...
The word "soccer" is a British invention that British people stopped using only about 40 years ago. The word "soccer" comes from the use of the term "association football" in Britain and goes back 200 years.
In the early 1800s, a bunch of British universities took "football" — a medieval game — and started playing their own versions of it, all under different rules. To standardize things across the country, these games were categorized under different organizations with different names.
One variant of the game you played with your hands became "rugby football." Another variant came to be known as "association football" after the Football Association formed to promote the game in 1863, 15 years after the rules were made at Cambridge. "Rugby football" became "rugger" for short. "Association football" became "soccer."
Brits still used "soccer" regularly for a huge chunk of the 20th century. Between 1960 and 1980, "soccer" and "football" were "almost interchangeable" in Britain. Since 1980 the usage of the word 'soccer' has declined in British publications. This decline seems to be a reaction against its increased usage in the US (to distinguish it from American football). British people stopped saying "soccer" because of its American connotations.
Sammy
As a Brit
I still use both terms to describe Association football, and both occur in my stories, especially Bike where the girls play football regularly and have one who is of international class.It might be that it's an age-related thing and my vintage means I'm still using language I grew up with in the 50s and 60s. I think most people understand my mixed use of both terms so I'm not too worried about it.
It's baseball that always makes me smile, another British invention which many Americans refuse to accept because it's a relatively minor sport over here, being a poor runner up to cricket, which is, as far as I know, hardly played in America or Canada. Don't know why, it's a great game once you understand what is going on.
Angharad
Cricket vs Baseball
America played as much or more cricket as baseball until the creation of professional leagues after the civil war. Because spectators sit closer to the action in baseball, the owners of stadiums and fields preferred promoting baseball over cricket because Americans got more excited over the game and bought more beer. Also, a baseball game lasted about 3 hours, so working men (mostly office workers in the cities) could take an afternoon off and see a complete game. In the summer, it was possible to have 6 or 8 games a week.
In the weeks when the home team was out of town, you could rent your stadium to one of the Negro League teams for a reduced rate and play another 6 to 10 games. (The Negro Leagues played more double headers.) There were no Negro Cricket Leagues.
Cricket was and is, in America, mostly played at traditonal universities, but it is still played and every major city has a few teams. They just don't advertise. Detroit and Philadelphia have amateur leagues.
There's a youth cricket league here in Southern California and I drove past one of their games being played in Temecula last month.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
The first international cricket match was between
The first international cricket match was between
Canada and the USA !
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_cricket_team_in_the...
To stir things up
I'd like to point out that many of the best cricket players are Americans, though not from the United States of America.
Another
Another one of your twist endings?
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
And then there's ...
Calvinball . It can use any equipment from any/all of the above, and can be played anywhere. It's a shame it hasn't shown up in any stories :).
Oh yeah!
I'd love to see a calvinball story here in BCTS! Maybe it could start of with Susie wanting to join in a game, and end with her, Calvin, and Hobbes havin' a tea party? :)
My favorite
Of all made up game, my favorite is Squamish. Squamish appeared in Mad Magazine in the early 1960s. There are 7 teams in each game, and it's played on a 6 sided field 20 yards on a side. There are 13 people on a team. 4 have shepherd's crooks, 5 have ropes with grappling hook and the remainder have nothing. A Squamish is a 2000 pound, irregular shaped piece of broken concrete placed in the center of the field. The object of the came is to move the Squamish over your side of the field. You may have noticed that there are 7 teams and only 6 sides to the field. The 7th team is charged with keeping the Squamish on the field. The game continues without timeouts or substitutions until either the Squamish is moved across one of the sides of the field making that team the winner or all teams have less than 4 plays still able to compete, making the 7th team the winner.
A detailed history of the game (sanitized) can be found at "The Secret History of Squamish"
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Squamish
Squamish, along with its sister game Rugosish, was invented by H P Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island. The current international champions of Squamish are Innsmouth Aquatic, with their legendary forward line of Marsh, Gilman, Pickman, Carter and Nyarlathotep.
Football
In the whole of the world apart from North America means an eleven-a-side kicking game using rules formulated by the Football Association. I live in the UK, and worked in France for nine years, and I met nobody from either country that used the word 'soccer' as a default term. It's a bit like the very odd USA date format, that nobody else uses, not even the people who issue USA passports. I have met many Americans who have missed their flight or found a holiday booking wrong because of that odd month-day-year thing.
"But it says here I have a ticket for today! September sixth!"
"No. That date was June ninth"
Ask your southern neighbours in Mexico what football is. It is a sport far, far more popular than American football, even though it bores me to death. The Football World Cup even outdraws the Olympics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_World_Cup
I tend to follow the definition of football as "90 minutes wasted watching 22 millionaires in their underpants kick a bag of pigfart round a field".
Sports
Growing up in the UK the boys at our school played soccer or rugby through the winter and the girls played hockey.
In the summer the boys played cricket or did athletics and the girls played netball or rounders.
The correct term for soccer is Association Football and the game is played to Association Football rules (hence football is more widely used) and there are 2 forms of rugby in the UK. Rugby League was a professional game started by a breakaway group from the Rugby Union.
Of course netball is played by men as Basketball and rounders as Baseball and of course women do the same. They play soccer, cricket and rugby too.
I use both soccer and football in conversation since to me in the UK both mean the same thing.
There are several forms of cricket from a 5 day international matches of 2 innings per side to 20 overs of 6 balls per side.
Playing sport brought me a lot of social contact and chance to be out in the fresh air. Pity the body gets weaker as we get older.
I once took 2 American football fanatics from Tennessee to an International Rugby League game between Great Britain and New Zealand and they were amazed at the physicality and the speed of the game. No protection and no time outs.
I've been to a professional ice hockey game in the USA and regret never attending an American Football or Baseball game. I could never get as excited about Basketball I'm afraid.
Any sport was of interest to me growing up and still is.
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