Donald Trump showed up to the 2026 World Cup draw and declared the game should be called "football." Cue the discourse. Again.
"There's no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL," Trump said, apparently arriving late to the round-ball world. And while his reasoning was muddled, the broader reaction it sparked — the sneering at anyone who dares say "soccer" — deserves a proper response.
The word is fine. It always has been.
It was British slang — invented by the British
"Association Football" was codified in 1863 to separate the game from rugby. British university students, doing what British university students do, started slicing words up and adding "-er" to them. Rugby became "rugger." Association football got shortened to "assoc," then slid into "soccer." The British press used it freely and proudly for nearly a century.
Then, in the 1980s, as American audiences started picking up the term, British fans dropped it. Not because it was wrong — because the Americans liked it. That's the entire foundation of the snobbishness you'll encounter at every pub and comment section when someone says "soccer."
The rejection isn't linguistic. It's cultural gatekeeping dressed up as linguistic precision.
The evidence is hiding in plain sight
The long-running British magazine? World Soccer, founded in London in 1960. Still going. The Saturday morning TV institution that ran for nearly three decades? Soccer AM. The charity match that raises millions every year? Soccer Aid. Sky Sports still broadcasts Soccer Saturday. Nobody cancelled any of them for the terminology.
In countries where other codes of football already exist — American football, Australian rules, Gaelic football — "soccer" does exactly what language is supposed to do: it removes ambiguity. That's not ignorance. That's utility.
Kirk Bowman, a scholar who literally teaches a course called Soccer and Global Politics at Georgia Tech, puts it cleanly: using both words doesn't reveal ignorance, it reveals someone who's cosmopolitan enough to understand the game travels under different names across 4 billion fans.
"Football," "soccer," "calcio," "futebol," "fútbol" — the game absorbs them all without breaking a sweat. The people who can't do the same aren't defending the sport. They're just being precious about it.
