Names for association football

The names of association football are the terms used to describe association football, the sport most commonly referred to in the English-speaking world as "football" or "soccer's".

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 an abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in universities in the 1880s (sometimes using the variant spelling "socker"). 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 familiarise names by shortening them. ... Toye [said] '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 and the Canadian Soccer Association was known as the Canadian Soccer Football Association from 1958 to 1971.

For nearly a hundred years after it was coined, soccer was an uncontroversial alternative to football, often in colloquial and juvenile contexts, but also in formal speech and writing. In the late twentieth century some speakers of British English began to deprecate soccer for reasons that remain unclear. "Soccer" was a term used by the upper class whereas the working and middle class preferred the word "football"; as the upper class lost influence in British society from the late 1970s on, "football" supplanted "soccer" as the accepted word, possibly as a byproduct of class warfare. There is evidence that the use of soccer is declining in Britain. Since the early twenty-first century, the peak association football bodies in soccer-speaking Australia and New Zealand have actively promoted the use of football to mirror international usage and, at least in the Australian case, to rebrand a sport that had been experiencing difficulties. Both bodies dropped soccer from their names. These efforts have met with considerable success in New Zealand.

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