Playing for the World

Look, can we get this straight, right from the get-go, from the first whistle: It’s football, O.K.? Football. Not soccer. It’s never been soccer. Nobody but midwestern cougars calls it soccer. Soccer is a late-19th-century English-university slang word that’s an abbreviation of “association,” as in “association football,” to distinguish it from “Rugby football,” which, incidentally, is the origin of the game Americans call football, first played by Ivy League toff boys in 1867. In French, it’s le football. In German, it’s Fuβball. In Spanish, it’s fútbol. In Russian, it’s фymбoл. Though, weirdly, in Italian it’s calcio, from the Latin for “heel.” You may, if you really insist, call it “footie.” It also universally, and without contradiction or cultural snobbery, answers to the appellation “the Beautiful Game.”

I’d still rather call it soccer than fútbol, which just annoys me.