It is sometimes worth reminding ourselves that the term ‘Foot-ball’ originated in the British Isles and that over a period of around seven hundred years (the first recorded use of the word was in 1314) the game has developed from a ‘free for all violent kick-about’ to the highly structured global phenomenon that we see today and also that The Football Association (FA) set out the rules of Association Football in 1863.

‘Mob football’ was played in Britain from the middle ages.
There is a general misconception however that because the sport is referred to as football in Britain and soccer in the US, that the latter must have been first coined in America, but in fact it was a thoroughly British invention, even though it was never more than a nickname this side of the Atlantic.
In Victorian England, Oxbridge men had a tendency to add ‘er’ to the end of many words, so rugby became ‘rugger’ and association football was known as ‘assoccer’, which naturally evolved into soccer.
It was suggested initially that it should be called ‘socker’ to emphasise the correct pronunciation and it was in this form that it appeared in the first edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary in 1911, but soccer prevailed.
The man credited with first coming up with the name soccer was Charles Wreford-Brown , the Corinthian who captained the England football team and played county cricket for Gloucestershire (and would later represent GB at chess at the 1924 Olympics).

Charles Wreford-Brown was reputedly the first to use the term ‘soccer’.
Legend has it that while having breakfast one morning he was asked
How about a game of rugger after brekker?
Wreford-Brown is said to have replied,
No, thanks, I’d prefer soccer
In 1887, Wreford-Brown made his debut for Corinthian F.C. against Oxford University (where he was a student), which is where the term was reputedly first used and by 1895 newspaper reports in England began to use the term to differentiate it from other codes of football.
Founded on the principles of amateurism, fair play, sportsmanship and ‘the Corinthian spirit’, the club was formed by N.L. Jackson in 1882, in an attempt to help England challenge the Scottish national team, who had enjoyed a lot of success including a 6-1 win over the old enemy, all of whom played for Queens Park (the oldest club in Scotland which remained amateur for 152 years until finally turning professional in 2019).

Corinthian FC in 1896/97
The Corinthian team were all amateurs who believed in playing exhibition football and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, toured the world, popularising the sport and leaving their mark in every country they visited, the most significant of which was in Brazil in 1910, which resulted in the formation of Sport Club Corinthians Paulista; currently playing in Brazil’s top tier, they are one of the world’s most widely supported teams.

The badge of ‘Sports Club Paulista’ in Brazil.
Famous Corinthians, include the polymaths C.B Fry (England cricketer, footballer and athlete) Max Woosnam (Tennis Olympic gold medallist, England and Manchester City footballer), Frank Hartley (England and Spurs footballer and minor counties cricketer) and Andrew Watson (the world’s first black international footballer).
- CB Fry
- Maz Woosnam
- Frank Hartley
- Andrew Watson
The club sadly lost 107 men during WW1 and never really recovered from this and in an attempt to inject new life into the club, they entered the FA Cup in 1923, but struggled to get beyond the fourth round. In addition, interest in amateur football was waning by the late 1930’s, so a decision to merge with The Casuals was taken; they merged in 1939 and to this day still adhere to the founding principles of amateurism, fair play, sportsmanship and The Corinthian Spirit.
After rugby and football spread across the Atlantic in the mid 19th century, the Americans invented their own variant of the game that they called Grid iron Football (due to the grid lines on the pitch) which was a creation of the elite universities of Harvard, Yale and Princeton and soon became known as just football and as a result American association football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their own sport.
- Grid-iron football circa 1890
- The Harvard University ‘Football’ team circa 1895
Today, The United states Soccer Federation (USSF) governs most levels of the the game in the USA and was formed in 1974, when the word football was dropped from its name; the USA hosted the Men’s World Cup in 1994 and it was marketed as: World Cup USA94- Making Soccer History.

World Cup USA94- Making soccer history!
Other countries where the term soccer has become common include Canada where they have their own version of gridiron football known as Canadian Football (again just known as football in Canada) which closely resembles the American version and was developed at Toronto University in the early 1860’s.

Canadian Football
In Ireland, Gaelic Football (codified in 1884) is only played there and in some parts of the USA and is referred to as football in most parts of Ireland, although the terms football and soccer are interchangeable in the north and in the media, but in the south , soccer is more widely used.

Gaelic Football
There are similarities with Australian Rules Football (AFL codified in 1859), initially known as Melbourne or Victorian rules football, which is now simply known as footy in Australia. In 1967 there was a series of games held between an Irish representative team and an Australian team, followed in 1984 by the first official representation match of International Rules Football, which is a hybrid of football codes developed to facilitate matches between the two countries; last played in 2017, there are now suggestions that the series may be revived.

Australian Rules Football
In Australia, soccer is used to differentiate it from the three other codes and the national men’s team is called The Socceroos; it is also sometimes referred to as the round ball game or the world game.
Despite being interchangeable, most British people stopped using the term soccer in the late 1970’s to mid 1980’s because of its perceived American connotations and due mainly to the high profile of The North American Soccer League (NASL 1967-1985) that had attracted top players such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best and Johann Cruyff and it is this growth of Americanised Soccer that seems to have put people in the UK off the word.

Pele in The National Soccer League circa 1975
Sports Historian Dr Andy Carter believes that
British people are mildly irritated by the use of soccer over football because of the friction between British and ‘American English ‘and see it as another example of the Americanisation of our society.
Conor Heffernan at Ulster University sees it more about
…ideas of ownership around the game as well as a sense of what it is and is not and that there is certainly some snobbery towards its use.
In It’s Football Not Soccer, published in 2018, Szymanski and Weineck, attempt to explain
how a British word became an outcast in the country of its origin
and suggested that there
Is to our knowledge, no other word that has been exiled in quite this manner.
The book suggests that while soccer was recognised in Britain, it was not widely used in publications in the early twentieth century, but was used more frequently after WW2 (the great John Charles’ early autobiography was called King of Soccer, published in 1950) and peaked somewhere around 1980, but since then the usage of the word in British publications, usually refers to it in an American context.

John Charles’ autobiography in 1950
Szymanski argued that
Thus, in Britain the word has experienced a relatively abrupt rise and fall, whereas in the US it appears to have grown steadily relative to the term football for more than a century.
However, TV shows on Sky such as Soccer AM (1994-2023) and the very popular, Soccer Saturday, which still goes out every week during the football season demonstrate that the term still holds some weight in the UK.
With soccer gaining in popularity in the US (now the fourth most popular sport to watch) and the favourite sport for children, due to its appeal amongst young parents, its popularity has tripled in the last decade and with the World Cup in the US and Mexico on the horizon, it would appear perhaps that some kind of agreement with FIFA is required as to which word is used, when marketing the event in different parts of the world.
Soccer is very much the American word despite the fact that it was cobbled together at Oxford University over 140 years ago and debates around the linguistics of the sport will continue to rage on, but Szymanski and Weineck believe that,
The rationale seems quite simple: Football where the Association game reigns and Soccer where a clash between the association game and another national sport blurs the lines.

It’s Football not Soccer
Article copyright of Bill Williams [December 2024]