Names For Association Football - Background

Background

The rules of association football were codified in the United Kingdom by the Football Association in 1863, and the name association football was coined to distinguish the game from the other versions of football played at the time, such as rugby football. The word soccer is a colloquial abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in the 1880s. An early usage can be found in an English 1892 periodical. The word is sometimes credited to Charles Wreford Brown, an Oxford University student said to have been fond of shortened forms such as brekkers for breakfast and rugger for rugby football. (See Oxford -er) Clive Toye noted "A quirk of British culture is the permanent need to familiarize names by shortening them. ... Toye 'They took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer.'”

The term association football has never been widely used, although in Britain some clubs in rugby football strongholds adopted the suffix Association Football Club (A.F.C.) to avoid confusion with the dominant sport in their area, and FIFA, the world governing body for the sport, is a French-language acronym of "Fédération Internationale de Football Association" – the International Federation of Association Football. "Soccer football", is used less often than it once was: the United States Soccer Federation was known as the United States Soccer Football Association from 1945 until 1974, when it adopted its current name. Some soccer clubs, in Australia for example, still contain the words "soccer football" in their titles.

The game is now generally known in English as "football" or "soccer", with the relative prevalence of the two words varying from country to country (in Australia, Canada and the United States, for example, local "football" codes are prevalent). It is also colloquially called footy, footie or footer in various places.