World Cup Soccer

I was getting online to check my fantasy baseball team, and the lead story was by Martin Rogers of Yahoo sports. It was a column on the etymology of the word soccer. Some of you may think that Americans call it soccer to distinguish it from American Football and that the term soccer is an American invention.

On the contrary. According to Rogers’ article:

To trace the origin of “soccer” we must go all the way back to 1863, and a meeting of gentlemen at a London pub, who congregated with the purpose of standardizing the rules of “football,” which was in its infant years as an organized sport but was growing rapidly in popularity.

Those assembled became the founding members of the Football Association (which still oversees the game in England to this day). And they decided to call their code Association Football, to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

A quirk of British culture is the permanent need to familiarize names by shortening them. [Clive Toye, the founder of the North American Soccer League, explained] “They took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer. So there you are."

So the term is English. My online resource, etymonline.com, adds that in 1889 it was spelled socca, in 1891 it was spelled socker, and in 1895 took the current spelling. Then etymonline.com makes an unusual aside for a scholarly resource: “they hardly could have taken the first three letters of Assoc.”

Games where a ball is kicked around, like soccer and rugby, have existed since Roman times, and kicking a ball around was known to take place during the Han dynasty in China (2nd century B.C.). In 1331 King Edward III passed a law to suppress the playing of the game, which had become more akin to jousting than sport. The first recorded game was in 1409, and by 1424 Scotland had a statute forbidding its play. Reference to the ball itself didn’t come until 1486, and by 1630 the game had reached great popularity in England.

Historyofsports.net recounts a different series of events leading to the name soccer:

In 1815, the renowned English school, Eton College, laid down a code of conduct regarding football for other schools and universities to follow. This set of rules came to be known as Cambridge Rules, which were diligently followed by most of the educational institutions by 1848. Football was now divided into two separate games - those who followed the Cambridge rules and those who followed the rules laid down by the Rugby school. The Rugby school allowed shoving, tripping, shin kicking and using hands while handling the ball.

On October 26th, 1863, eleven clubs in London sent their body of eminent members for a federation meeting in the Freemason’s Tavern to streamline a single set of fundamental rules that would govern the matches played amongst them. The meeting was quite eventful, as it led to the creation of The Football Association. The Rugby school did not agree with the outcome and so there was a split on December 8th, 1863, where the Rugby Football and The Football Association parted ways. The Football Association laid down strict rules in 1869, which discouraged any kind of handling of the ball. This laid down the norm of the basic rule of Soccer that is the essence of the modern game.

So for those of you still watching the World Cup even though England, the United States, and Mexico have been eliminated, now you know it’s acceptable and even historical to call it soccer. (You may feel like socking the refs.)