10 hours ago
Where does the word ‘soccer' come from?
The word 'soccer' remains at the heart of one of the most enduring, if comparatively low-key and petty fronts of the culture war.
At its most basic level, it's a transatlantic disagreement over language, but there seems to be more to it than that. The most basic and probably most sensible point of view is that it's simply one country — America, though there are others — using a word to differentiate one extremely popular sport from a slightly less popular sport.
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But use the word in the wrong context — which is to say, 'in England' — and you can expect paroxysms of disgust from people who seem to think it represents something much deeper. These people are, admittedly, those who are far too easily outraged (check their sent email files and there's a reasonable chance they have also complained to a TV station about a newsreader not wearing a tie), but it seems like these people think of this as somehow chipping away at the identity of the game, and even themselves. It's an Americanism, as everyone knows, and this is apparently something to be suspicious of.
If you look on Etsy (surely the great battleground for any sporting culture war), you can find merchandise on either side: in one corner, a T-shirt with the slogan, 'It's football, not soccer', in the other a hoodie proclaiming, 'It's called soccer', complete with suitably patriotic Star-Spangled Banner.
It's a curious thing. As Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck wrote in their book It's Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa), 'In general, transatlantic relations have remained peaceful when it comes to sweaters and jumpers, trucks and lorries, boots and trunks, or pants and trousers. Americans get to marvel at the quaintness of the English, the English get to take joy at the Americans' failure to master basic vocabulary. Everybody is happy. Except when it comes to soccer. Why does this word generate such vitriol?'
The quick answer is that some people will get outraged about anything. Perhaps more interesting is to look into the story of how the word 'soccer' came into being, which is a bit more detailed than you might think.
You probably already know the basics. These days, it is viewed as an Americanism (and also used in Australia, Canada and a few other countries whose own version of football dominates the collective consciousness) but the word soccer came from England at some point in the 1800s. Then, there were two types of football: rugby football and association football, and 'soccer' comes from a contraction of the latter, to differentiate it from the former.
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But where did that contraction originate? It's hard to say exactly how the word came into being, but the most common origin tale comes, as with many things in England in the 1800s, from private schools.
The story goes that a student and amateur footballer called Charles Wreford-Brown (who would go on to be a relatively senior figure at the Football Association) was having breakfast at Oriel College, part of Oxford University. The English have a habit of essentially giving nicknames to nouns by adding 'er' onto the end, or by contracting the word and then adding the 'er', with the colloquial word for a five-pound note ('fiver') acting as a good example.
So, as Geoffrey Green, the great former football/soccer correspondent for the Times, the London-based newspaper, wrote in his book Soccer: The World Game:
'He was approached by a friend: 'Wreford, come and have a game of 'rugger' after 'brekker'?'. 'No, thank you, John. I'm going to play 'soccer'.' In that fleeting moment, a new word came into being. Little could Wreford-Brown, who was to grace the game for so long afterwards, have realised how the word would finally ring around the world.'
It's not clear exactly when this was, but Wreford-Brown was born in 1866, so would have attended university at some point in the mid/late 1880s. Of course, much like many of these neat stories where something has a definitive beginning, there's every chance it's apocryphal: arguably, it's more likely that the word started being used in those circles at around that time, and that the Wreford-Brown story is just a neat peg to hook it on.
Indeed, it seems to have been mentioned in print for the first time in 1885, in an edition of The Oldhallian, which was a periodical for Oxford alumni. An unsigned letter to the Oldhallian said: 'The Varsity played Aston Villa and were beaten after a very exciting game; this was pre-eminently the most important 'socker' game played in Oxford this term…'
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It took a little longer to enter more mainstream discourse. The first mention of it in the Manchester Guardian newspaper (now the Guardian) came in 1905, while its first appearance in the Times came in 1907, presciently enough in a letter to the editor about hooliganism.
Football gradually became the more prevalent word for the game in England as its popularity grew and became the sport of the working class, but soccer was still routinely used, most often by more highbrow newspaper columnists to differentiate it from rugby, until the 1980s. One of the most popular football entertainment shows in the country was called Soccer AM. Anyone who pretends that soccer is purely an Americanism and football always has been the term used in England is simply incorrect.
But of course, despite this, the word soccer is the one that has always been used in America, right? 'Football' is the one with the oval-shaped ball and the helmets, and always has been.
Well, sort of.
The first mention of soccer in the pages of the New York Times came on October 22, 1905, in a report of a game involving a team known as the Pilgrims, who had come over from England to promote the game in America. 'English socker (sic) team won football match,' read the slightly confusing headline (above), followed by an account of the game at the Polo Grounds in New York that ended 7-1 to the English touring team, declaring it to be a 'clean, well-played contest, bristling with clever passing, intricate dribbling, capital dodging and exceptionally hard kicking'. Capital dodging! Exceptionally hard kicking! Sounds like a jolly old show.
You have probably noticed the incorrect spelling in the headline — that may have been the work of some wisecracking members of that Pilgrims team, who told people present at the game that the term came from the thick woollen socks that the players wore.
But New York Times reader Frances H Tabor picked up on the snafu, writing a letter to the paper that was published a few weeks later, upbraiding them for their mistaken use of the word. 'In the first place,' wrote Mr Tabor, 'there is no such word, and in the second place, it is an exceedingly ugly and undignified one.'
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But the letter is instructive beyond the ramblings of a haughty pedant, because Mr Tabor (below) goes on to repeat the popular story about where the word came from, writing that it was 'a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use 'er' at the end of many words, such as foot-er, sport-er and as association did not take an 'er' easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as soccer'. This indicates that the Wreford-Brown origin story is relatively solid.
The word seemed to be taking hold by the following year, particularly when English team Corinthians arrived in New York for a tour of exhibition games. And who should be with them, in the touring party as a player but listed as the referee in one fixture that they won 18-0, but our old friend Charles Wreford-Brown? Alas, history doesn't record how he reacted to the word he coined a few years earlier being used halfway around the world.
The natural assumption would be that 'soccer' became the automatic term for the sport in America fairly quickly, but that isn't quite the case.
The name of the sport's governing body was called, until the 1940s, the United States Football Association. And even when it was changed, 'football' remained. The Harrisburg Telegraph, a newspaper published in Pennsylvania, reported in July 1944 that: 'United States Soccer Football Association is the new name of the organisation having supervision of the booting game, and conducting annual amateur and professional tournaments throughout the country.'
In fact, 'football' wasn't entirely dropped from the organisation's title until 1974, when it became the United States Soccer Federation, the name it is known as today. There doesn't seem to be any more complicated reason for this than a sort of institutional dithering — or, as Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman put it in their book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, it represented their struggles to 'find a distinct identity for soccer that was American, yet also apart from the behemoth of American football'.
These days, the distinction is a little clearer. The word that Wreford-Brown (or at least some of his peers) coined is still used by those who love the game around the world, and irritates those of a slightly pedantic disposition. Surely, we can all just settle on that.
