 So a few months ago, I made a video that as I uploaded it, I decided to call European Soccer Explain for Americans, which outlined, among other things, how soccer leagues function differently in Europe than sports leagues, including the National Football League, due in the United States. I mentioned multiple times in the video that I know most people in most places call it football, but I switched back and forth between using the word soccer and football, thinking that most people would understand it would be confusing if I said in football things are like this but in football things are like that. As an American, I've always thought of soccer or football as just another installment in the American versus British English saga, like calling a trunk a boot or a flashlight a torch or a game a match or a field a pitch. Now some phrases will get you in trouble, but this is generally a family friendly channel so we won't go too in depth. The point is that they are both correct, just different places use different words for stuff, and nobody really gets upset about them. But some people seem to get really upset about me having even uttered the word soccer. One commenter on the video even went so far as to say that the word soccer isn't actually a word, it was just made up. I assume that he will be sad to discover that this is kind of how words work, they were all just kind of made up. But there were so many comments like this that I had to make this video to figure out why, because as it turns out, I am far from the first person to hear these types of comments. So first things first, just to make it clear where I stand in terms of ranking which sport is the best with regards to the three that we're going to get into most, football is best, rugby is second, American football is third. This is a heretical thing to say in the United States, but if you disagree with that ranking, a wager that you probably played your favorite sport and likely have brain damage as a result, which has resulted in your skewed list. But our issue here is not with which sport is the best. If you are in the United States and someone in general conversation uses the word football, they are referring to this football, American football. I have never heard an American use the terms either American football or gridiron football. I've also never heard the word egg ball exit an American mouth, although I suppose it just did. Many people like to call American football egg ball with a bit of an insulting connotation, which doesn't really make sense to me. Frankly, the word fits a rugby ball better than an American football. At least, I've never seen a pointy egg. The only times that an American means soccer when they say football is one, if you are literally at a football match slash soccer game, or two, well, that's pretty much it. Look, I don't make the rules. This is probably similar to how people in Europe would never say I'm headed off to the association football match, or as they would say, I'm headed off to the association football match. That's how all English people sound in my head. It's just that American football is by far the biggest sport in the United States, at least for a few more years until video games overtake it. Just as an example, the 2018 World Cup made $5.4 billion in revenue. That same year, the NFL made $14 billion. And keep in mind that the World Cup is a global event that happens once every four years. Even our highest league is called Major League Soccer. Although in a linguistic twist, 12 MLS teams have FC, meaning football club, in their name as opposed to just two with SC. So we get it. And this may be the key point of this whole video. If you want to call us for football, that's fine. But people in the US call it soccer simply to avoid confusion. We don't have some dumb, blind allegiance to one particular sound that we can make with our mouths over another particular sound that we can make with our mouths. But just out of curiosity and to kill some further time, because I assume you're either procrastinating or still sitting on the toilet, where did the word soccer come from? So back in the 1860s, England's football association was kind of in charge of stuff. And they took to using the term association football, because at the time there were other types of football, including what they called rugby football, because apparently every sport needed a two name title. The youth of the day, much like the youth of two day, took to using slang terms to shorten everything. One of the most popular ways to do that was to add ER to half of a word. So a school lecture became lecker, breakfast became breakfast, rugby football became rugger, and they chopped off part of association, keeping the SOC part to which they affixed an ER, thus resulting in soccer. I mean, I said I would tell you where it came from, I didn't really say it made sense. It's not clear whether he invented or just popularized the word, but the person who gets most credit for this is a guy called Charles Weirford Brown. That is, unless you live in the US, then we would say he is a guy named Charles Weirford Brown. While at Oxford, he played cricket, soccer, and I assume quidditch. He was fond of appending ER to the end of words. You actually heard of his work before, he was the Breckers guy from earlier. As in, after I have Breckers, I'm going to get my nimbus back from Erie to play a game of quiddes. Stupid as it may be, the term soccer started to spread and appear in various media in the 1890s, although it was sometimes spelled with a CK rather than ACC. English sports writer E.W. Swanson wrote in his book, sort of a cricket person, rugby football in those days I think was never called anything but rugger unless it were just football. Imagine that, they were using the word soccer because another sport was already called football, what a concept. Although to be fair, the term footer also seems to have been used to refer to football. I mean, soccer. For its part, gridiron football is called football in America because it pretty much started out as rugby, which obviously in the late 1800s would have been called rugby football. People talk about the earliest games of American football being between universities in the 1860s and 1870s. These games were nothing like modern day football. Basically it was just soccer, but you could also use your hands to punch the ball forward too, although you were not allowed to pick up and carry the ball. So it had the aggression of rugby, but with a soccer goal as opposed to a rugby in goal zone, which Americans would know as an end zone. Oh, and both teams had 25 players, which sounds more like Italy's Calcio Fiorentino than any other sport that we talked about until now, but that's a sport for another day. If we go back to England though, the term soccer was widely used in Britain for a long time, although it did tend to be employed more in upper class circles, whereas football was used by the rest of us losers. A research paper called It's Football Not Soccer from Stefan Sismanski found that even in the London times, the usage of the word soccer increased after the Second World War and was used over 10% of the time to refer to the sport in the 1960s and 70s. It's far from a majority, but it's not nothing, and certainly more than if people would have been upset about its very usage as they seem to be nowadays. In the U.S., soccer's usage increased a lot around 1914, just prior to the war, although people aren't quite sure why, and later from the 1960s to the 80s during the life of the North American Soccer League, which popularized things in the U.S. with the signings of players like Pele, Carlos Alberto, Johann Cruyff, and George Best. Sismanski points out that, surprisingly, one of Best's biographies, as well as soccer at the top, the autobiography of Sir Matt Busby, both employed the use of soccer in their titles. This was typical for the period, however, where in everyday life, even in Britain, soccer and football were both used until as late as the 80s. However, despite being used for around 20% of the references of the sport in the 80s, since then, the Guardian and the Independent have both seen a large decrease in their usage of the word soccer since, whereas the U.S.-based Time magazine has seen the opposite. It uses the word soccer for the majority of its references to soccer, or footer, football, whatever the heck it is. If we zoom out from just the U.S. and Britain, though, we find some interesting things, and if you're from one of these places, please correct me in the comments if I am wrong, but from what I could find out, in Ireland, football is sometimes a reference to Gaelic football, and the word soccer is still quite commonplace. In South Africa, despite the official governing body being called the South Africa Football Association, the word soccer is used just as much to refer to the sport as football is. Canada is pretty much on par with the U.S., as gridiron football is popular there, too. However, even while they may look similar, there are rules that are different, kind of like a rugby union versus rugby league thing. Thus, the differentiation between Canadian football and American football. In Japan, the word soccer, obviously the translation for the word soccer, is more commonly used than football's translation, footoburo, although, again, the Japan Football Association is the governing body. Papua New Guinea also refers to the sport as soccer, to differentiate it from the also popular rugby and Australian rules football. Speaking of Australia, the land down under, along with New Zealand, have over the past couple decades or so been switching from using soccer to football, first by removing the term football from various rugby leagues, and then in one situation renaming the Australian Soccer Association to Football Federation Australia. If you go to the Wikipedia page for football, it highlights six different forms of football, association, gridiron, Australian rules, rugby union, rugby league, and Gaelic. It makes sense that different places, especially the places where each of these varieties are most popular, would develop their own vernacular realm. So we have found a few answers in this video. The word soccer comes from England, where it was used as much as football for many decades, but now is primarily used in multiple different countries where other forms of football are more popular. What we haven't done is find an answer to my other question, which is why do people get so upset about other people using the word soccer? I'm not sure there is an answer to that. Perhaps there is a fear that if the U.S. gets into football, we'll try to Americanize it and ultimately ruin it, but I don't think that that's going to happen any time soon. As I've said, there are lots of language differences where different words are used to describe the same thing, but this is the only case I've heard of people getting upset over it. I have just two thoughts on this. The first one is for people who don't like that people in other countries use the word soccer and who are also apparently in denial that other kinds of football exist. I say to you, what I say to Americans who get upset that the clock and soccer counts up instead of down. It doesn't matter, get over yourself. Besides, we need your help for something. Americans won't stop calling the sport soccer anytime soon. American football in the NFL is just too popular. On the other hand, there are many signs that soccer is increasing in popularity in the U.S. A 2018 Gallup poll showed that 7% of Americans said soccer is their favorite sport to watch. And keep in mind, this is a head of hockey, auto racing, tennis and golf, all of which seem to attract as much if not more media attention in the U.S. According to Football Observatory, average attendance for MLS games from 2013 to 2018 was just a few hundred short of the crowds drawn by League Un and Serie A matches. The U.S. women have obviously been great and the men are, well, we have Christian. So in all, if we can get the United States on board, there is actually a chance that we can drastically increase the fan base of this one game that we all really enjoy watching and being a part of. And I think that would be really cool for everyone. But that's not going to happen if every time some young American who isn't quite sure what she's getting into, because football doesn't get a ton of coverage here, goes online to try to learn more about the sport, and she's met by some smug winner saying it's football or nothing.