• The Octonaut
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      1911 months ago

      This is true only in the vaguest sense.

      1. “Europe” didn’t invent the term soccer. A specific group of people in England did.
      2. Those people were upper class posh boys, the same ones who call rugby “rugger”. They are not the people who support football today or made football what it is around the world.
      3. If you can’t tell, it’s an obvious nickname for something. The equivalent of one nation deciding to exclusively call basketball “shootin’ hoops”.
      • Flying Squid
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        511 months ago

        Looks like the name is far more confusing than that. Apparently, ‘football’ used to mean multiple types of games, soccer started out as ‘association football,’ and then a British public school took ‘association’ and turned it into ‘asoccer,’ which spread to Oxford and became common there and then everyone else started calling it ‘soccer’ but then they dropped ‘soccer’ in favor of just ‘football’ except in countries which already had a football, which was sometimes the same as rugby.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football#Name

    • @[email protected]
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      1511 months ago

      Doesn’t change the fact that football makes more sense and that while the British did come up with soccer literally every country uses something like football.

      • @[email protected]
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        -811 months ago

        Except we came up with another game we called football so we can’t exactly change the name of that game so soccer can be renamed

        • Synapse
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          2011 months ago

          I my language, we just call it “American Football”. And it works pretty well since only USA plays it. The real football is just “Football” of course.

          • @[email protected]
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            011 months ago

            There are teams and leagues in Britain and Germany that play “American Football.” They just aren’t at the level of US teams yet. But they are getting better at it.

            The NFL has been playing games in Britain for years now. And I think this year they played in Germany also. It’s an open secret that the NFL wants a team based in Britain also. They just can’t quite figure out the logistics.

            Like it or not, American Football/Hand Egg is gaining popularity around the world - slowly perhaps but steadily. The NFL is coming for your “football”. In any case, it’s better than Cricket…

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          Except that football already existed and there were a bunch of variations, including association football which is what we call soccer, Australian football, and its variant Rugby which is what American football was based off of when it was brought to the States in 1870.

          They all are called football, technically. We just don’t use that name anymore.