The ‘soccer’ vs. ‘football’ war has a 160-year history — and your snobbish friends are wrong about which one is right

At the 2026 World Cup draw, FIFA Peace Prize recipient and U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the game should really be called “football.” “There’s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn’t make any sense,” said Trump, an apparently new convert to the round-ball game. He isn’t alone. The word “soccer” is, in some parts of the world, shunned by some fans. Indeed, as a scholar of the sport who teaches a course called Soccer and Global Politics, I am bombarded with comments that the word “soccer” does not make any sense, and that people who use that term obviously know nothing about the beautiful game. To me, this disparagement of the word “soccer” is not only petty and tiresome – it is also incorrect. It ignores the roots of the sport and the development of the language of the game. Rather than making the word taboo, the football ecosystem should embrace it. To understand why, let’s go back to the beginning. Associated to ‘assoc’ and then ‘soccer’ The game has been around in various forms for centuries, but it began to be codified in the mid-19th century. “Association Football” was coined in 1863 to distinguish the game from rugby football, which, somewhat ironically, is played largely with the ball in hand. British university students created their own slang at the time by abbreviating words and adding “-er” to them. Thus, “rugby” became “rugger” and “association football” was shortened to “assoc” and slanged to “soccer.” And this term “soccer” was freely and proudly used in the British press and in public for nearly a century, until the 1980s. United by a common love of the game (whatever you call it). Phil Cole/Getty Images In countries with other established codes of football – American football, Australian rules football and Gaelic football in Ireland – “soccer” became the dominant term. But British fans began abandoning the word in the 1980s, largely as a response to the embrace of the term in the States. A