• 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