As the 2026 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, draws near, a longstanding linguistic debate has reemerged for football fans across the globe: why do U.S. and Canadian fans call the world’s most popular sport soccer, rather than football? For one sports academic who grew up in 1960s and 1970s England, this debate always felt deeply odd. Stefan Szymanski, emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, recalls that “soccer” was a completely unremarkable, acceptable term during his childhood in Britain, prompting him to dig into the little-known history behind the word.
Szymanski’s research traces the origin of “soccer” back to the very founding of modern organized football in 19th century Britain. When elite Oxford-educated graduates founded the Football Association in 1863 to standardize the sport’s rules, the new code was formally named “association football” to clearly separate it from the other dominant mainstream 19th century football variant: rugby football.
By the 1880s and 1890s, wealthy students at top British universities had developed a popular slang trend: shortening common nouns and adding an “-er” ending to the end of the truncated word. This habit turned breakfast into “brekker” and rugby football into “rugger” — and it was this same trend that gave birth to soccer. Students extracted “soc” from the middle of “association,” added the characteristic slang “-er” suffix, and created the term we know today. While Szymanski notes that no historian can claim absolute certainty over the word’s earliest origins, multiple documentary sources confirm it was coined by Oxford students. Sports historian Andy Mitchell supports this timeline, having identified at least three printed instances of “soccer” (or its variant “socker”) in British school publications dating back to late 1885, with evidence suggesting the term was already in common verbal use even earlier.
As the sport of association football spread across the world throughout the 20th century, the term “soccer” traveled with it. Today, the name remains in common use in countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and of course the United States, where “football” had already been adopted to describe the distinctly American gridiron variant of the sport that evolved from rugby in the same 1880s-1890s period that “soccer” was coined in Britain. Szymanski points out that American football and association soccer are actually close sporting cousins, and the parallel rise of both games in the late 19th century cemented the use of “soccer” for the global game in the U.S.
What many modern fans do not know is that “soccer” remained in widespread use across British media for decades after it caught on in North America. Analysis conducted by Szymanski and his colleague Silke-Maria Weineck shows that major British newspapers continued to use “soccer” alongside “football” well into the 1960s and 1970s, only phasing it out gradually to leave “football” as the universal dominant term in Britain by the 1990s.
Today, it is common for American fans to feel awkward about using the word “soccer” around international supporters, often apologizing for the term out of a belief that it offends British fans. Szymanski says this unnecessary awkwardness is rooted in a modern misconception: “soccer” is not an American corruption of the proper name — it is a uniquely British invention from the sport’s earliest days. For the professor, there is no reason for North American fans to hesitate to use the term that has been part of the sport’s linguistic history for more than 130 years.
