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Thursday, June 19, 2014
Up in Arms Over ‘Soccer’ vs. ‘Football’
With World Cup in Headlines, a Debate Continues on What to Call the Game
The letter writer was incensed, as so many people so often are, by America’s insistence on using its own special word to describe the game that almost everyone else calls football.
“It seems a thousand pities that in reporting Association football matches The New York Times, in company with all the other newspapers, should persistently call the game ‘socker,’ ” the writer, one Francis H. Tabor, said in The Times. “In the first place, there is no such word, and in the second place, it is an exceedingly ugly and undignified one.” That was in 1905, and it was proof that the perennial debate on the topic of “What is America’s problem?” began not in this World Cup, or in the one before that, but a full quarter of a century before there was such thing as a World Cup. Ranting irritably about American usage — only to have Americans rant right back — turns out to be almost as popular a sport as soccer (or football) itself.
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The latest analysis of this issue came in a much commented-upon academic paper published recently by Stefan Szymanski, an economist who is a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan and the co-author of “Soccernomics.” In his analysis, Szymanski points out that the word soccer actually began in Britain and continued to be used there happily — right alongside “football” — until at least the 1970s, when a surge of bad temper and anti-Americanism made it virtually radioactive.
A shift was seen in the pages of The New York Times in 1905 and 1906.
Oct. 21, 1905
The Pilgrim team of English Association amateur football players will play against a team representing all-New York at the Polo Grounds this afternoon. The mission of the visitors is to introduce the sport to American colleges, with the expectation of international contests between representative elevens from England, America, and Canada.
“I’m English, and I’m in my 50s, and I remember, as a kid, soccer being a perfectly acceptable word in the U.K., without being this big no-no Americanism that it’s become,” Szymanski said in an interview. “There are so many people who seem to be totally ignorant, as if this is entirely an American invention, and so I was keen to set the record straight.”
Among other things, he pointed out, Matt Busby, the manager of Manchester United in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote an autobiography, “Soccer at the Top,” and a biography of the renowned player George Best was called “George Best: The Inside Story of Soccer’s Super-Star.”
But while the two terms were apparently coexisting harmoniously abroad, the opposite was happening in America. By the early 20th century, of course, the United States already had its own kind of football, called “football.” This is a sport, foreigners like to point out, that mostly involves people doing things to the ball with their hands. But never mind that right now.
In those early years, a parade of super-keen Britons ventured across the Atlantic in an effort to popularize soccer — then known in England by the formal title “association football” — as a more civilized alternative. Articles in The Times from that period reflect both a kind of delighted curiosity about the sport and a great deal of confusion about what to call it.
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A letter from Dec. 4, 1905, criticized the use of the word "socker" in The New York Times.
At that time, football in Britain had already split into two kinds. One was association football; the other was rugby football, known as rugby.
Already, Szymanski said, the term “soccer” was being used in Britain, having perhaps begun in Oxford and Cambridge as a shortened form of the word “association.” The students there liked, for some reason, he explained, to add the infantilizing “er” diminutive to random words. (Rugby, under this system, had been shortened to “rugger,” a term that is still widely used. Even today, English people sometimes call football “footie,” but that is another issue).
Discussing this exciting new sport in 1905 and 1906, The New York Times seized on “soccer” as a useful shorthand, particularly in space-challenging headlines. But only sometimes. Other times it spelled it socker. Sometimes it called it soccer, but put quotation marks around it. Other times it used “association football,” referred to it as “soccer football,” or called it “English football.”
An article on Oct. 10, 1905, described the efforts of Sir Alfred Harmsworth, an aristocratic London publisher, to “send corps of experts to American colleges” to teach them the correct way to play “socker.”
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A vintage postcard of St. James Park, the stadium of Newcastle United, from 1905, a time when there was considerable debate over the proper term for the sport.CreditPopperfoto/Getty Images
“It is believed that if the game is properly introduced to the patrons of football through the medium of the leading colleges,” the article said, American-style football would “eventually play a secondary part to the ‘socker’ style of playing.”
Fat chance. But the article also noted, for good measure, that “English football players say the American college game is brutal and featureless.”
Then, on Oct. 22, in an article describing a match between “the English Pilgrim Association football team” and the “all-New York Eleven,” whoever they were, The Times threw a big dose of semantic confusion into the mix with its headline: “English ‘Socker’ Team Won Football Match.” The Times then lurched merrily along for a while, using “socker” and “soccer” interchangeably. The word, in whatever form, did not thrill all of its readers.
A few days after Tabor’s attack on the word “socker” in 1905, another Times reader, Lawrence Boyd, issued an indignant response — though, confusingly, he appeared to be responding to something other than Tabor’s actual point.
The best soccer players in the world are converging in Brazil and The New York Times has you covered. We'll have a regular digest of news, highlights and context from Times reporters and editors.
“May I ask Mr. Tabor how he expects his word ‘soccer’ to be pronounced?” Boyd wrote. “If pronounced as written it would be more than ever a reminder of socks.” He added: “ ‘C’ before ‘e’ has the value of ‘s,’ with almost no exceptions.”
After those rocky times, The Times eventually settled down, dropping the k, dropping the word “association,” dropping the word “football,” dropping the quotation marks. Soccer it was. An article in 1914 referred to “50,000 British soccer fans” who attended a match between Chelsea and the Bolton Wanderers in England.
For much of the century, said Syzmanski, Britons would not have minded being called soccer fans. The problem came, he said, in the 1970s and ’80s, as the sport became more of a force in the United States under the now-defunct North American Soccer League.
That threatened people, and the English particularly, he said, and caused them to go on violent rants on the topic of America’s obnoxious and perverse tendency to do things differently from everyone else and then claim its way to be superior.
“I think the rest of the world finds the concept of American exceptionalism — ‘We’re giving it a different name because we’re better and different than you guys’ — very irritating,” he said. “But that’s not what happened here.”
His paper, while seemingly definitive, has hardly dampened the enthusiasm of the anti-soccer brigade.
“It’s called FOOTBALL,” a blogger from Britain, Anonymous Coward, posted this month on an Internet forum devoted to this very topic. “Us Brits invented the game, so why is that only our USA cousins call it SOCCER.”
To which another poster, from Australia (a country that also happens to call it soccer), responded: “check your dictionary MORAN” (sic).
The best soccer players in the world are converging in Brazil and The New York Times has you covered. We'll have a regular digest of news, highlights and context from Times reporters and editors.
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