Why is it called football in America and not football?

In 1314, King Edward II banned the playing of football “because there is much noise in the city, caused by running over large balls from which much evil might arise which God forbid”. There’s a man who had a vision of Argentina fighting its way to the World Cup final 700 years later. Football is referred to twice in Shakespeare’s works. In King Lear, the Earl of Kent calls Oswald (steward of Lear’s daughter Goneril) a “basic footballer”, an insult that can still be found to this day on X, the everything app.

North of the border, the Scottish Football Act of 1424 states that “the king forbids any man to play on the football ball under the supervision of [four pence] to the lord of the land”. That’s $24.14 in today’s currency, making this perhaps the first pay-to-play scandal in football.

You can still see the remnants of formative football in events such as the Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football match in Derbyshire, a county in the heart of England. It has been played every year since 1667 and bears some of the hallmarks of the game that keeps us so busy in 2026. There are two targets, but they are five kilometers apart. The game is divided into halves, each lasting eight hours. The ball is not passed or kicked, but moves in something akin to a rugby union scrum or a punch-up outside Yate’s wine hut on a Friday evening. Interestingly, this latter aspect of the game persists and was the preferred tactic for ball progression at Manchester United for much of the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era.

If the above can be considered football: a prehistory, then the game as we know it emerged in the public schools and factories of 19th century Britain, where clubs attempted to establish a set of shared rules. In Yorkshire, the Sheffield FC team would codify their own game in the Sheffield Rules, 11 years after representatives from some of England’s biggest schools agreed their own guidelines in Cambridge. Finally, in 1863, the first meeting of the Football Association at the Freemasons’ Tavern on Long Acre in Covent Garden, London, codified the game, with the Cambridge Rules as their guiding star. Association football was born.

Meanwhile, in the Midlands, William Webb Ellis had had a (perhaps apocryphal) revelation that, instead of kicking the ball backwards as the rules dictate, he could pick it up and run with it. From there came Rugby School football, or rugby as it would later become known (to this day the sport’s governing bodies in England and Ireland remain Rugby Football Associations). Of course, the powers that be at the FA could not allow this. They went one way, the rugby boys the other.

After association football and rugby football, with a few adjustments, come Australian rules football, Gaelic football and of course the vastly inferior American football.

You may have noticed the problem here. That’s a lot of footballs. How do you distinguish them? As always, the University of Oxford has the answer. One of its many gifts to the world is the Oxford ‘-er’, a suffix applied to bring an air of diffidence to conversations. Think of cuppers for inter-university sporting events or Bodders for the university’s main library. It holds up to this day. Bengers, they always called me. Well, that and some other non-printable stuff.

Legend has it that Charles Wreford-Brown, who captained both the England football team and the amateur side of Corinthian FC, was asked one morning at breakfast if he would like a game of ‘rugger na brekker’. [rugby after breakfast]. He replied that he would rather play football, which, it must be said, is a rather ambitious blend of association (although it is certainly better than a more traditional formulation, which would have been ‘asser’). The lengths the English will go to avoid saying what they really feel.

For most of the 20th century, football and soccer were used interchangeably in English sport, with the former being more of a signifier of the upper class than any signifier of interests outside the British Isles. The greats of the game certainly had no problem with it. John Charles’ autobiography was titled King of footballSir Matt Busby’s Football at the top: my life in football. That title alone points to the value of football, which is much the same as why we could name any of the hosts of this World Cup as any of the following: USA, USA, USMNT, the Stars and Stripes, and the team the rest of the world is competing against. It is useful for the reader and the writer not to have to repeat exactly the same nouns.

Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck note in “It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa)” that the London Times’ use of the word football to refer to the sport rose steadily until 1980. In a similar New York Times survey, the use of football over soccer did not skyrocket until the 1970s, the era in which American football began to establish itself as the dominant sport across the country. Like Wreford-Brown almost a century earlier, a different word was needed to distinguish these footballs. This time there was no need to invent one.

Nevertheless, football continued to exist in England for quite some time. As recently as 2023, you could turn on your cable/satellite/streaming TV on a Saturday morning and enjoy four hours of Soccer AM before Soccer Saturday took you across the grounds at 3pm. No one, not even Matt Le Tissier, seemed to mind.

And yet anyone who has ventured onto social media and put the word football in their bio will find out how short shrift it is. I’ve seen them all, and it has to be said, this one was actually pretty decent.

What’s going on here? After all, Americans aren’t the only ones who call it football. You’ll hear the same term in Australia and, in context, in Ireland. That doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

The answer to that is of course even simpler. Even at the height of Crocodile Dundee mania, no one was particularly concerned about the distorting effect of Australian culture on the rest of the Western world. Would French farmers have protested as loudly against Supermac’s as they did against McDonald’s? Since World War II, much of the rest of the Western world has both quietly embraced and loudly rebelled against much of the culture that smacks of America. And when America is the largest soccer country that primarily calls the game soccer, you can be sure that soccer will be seen as an American word.

Maybe after reading this you still believe that football is an American word. You have the right to do that, as much as you can There are those who have the right to hear English fans sing ‘It’s Coming Home’ and assume it is an act of triumphalism. They might be wrong, but that’s their fault to own.

Whether they realize it or not, @TikaTakaUnited [sic] and so many other football complainers are involved in the fight against Coca colonization. To them, the word football is as American as apple pie. Apple pie, which has its origins in a 14th-century English cookbook.