Soccer and the US—what can I say?
It’s complicated.
It’s the sport for everyone, except here, where it’s for wealthy suburban kids.
And it’s the global obsession, except here, where it’s a niche curiosity.
There are the Americans who don’t watch, unable to tolerate the dearth of scoring and the mysterious timekeeping.
And there are the ones who do watch, partly as a flex of their worldliness—they usually ride bikes and claim to like jazz music, too.
But the greatest complexity of all, the one that presumably exposes the dumb American (said to live somewhere in the Rust Belt), is what to call the sport in the first place.
Don’t blame us.
Blame the Brits.
Oh, and blame AI for the fact that I know this.
The prompt was rather simple: What is the origin of the term soccer?
The answer, scraped from a delicate blend of Britannica, Time, Wikipedia, Quora, and, of course, Reddit, changed my life.
In 1863, as Americans had taken to killing each other during the Civil War, the English had taken on a more pressing matter—standardizing the rules of their games.
To differentiate what would become two key sports, they established official names:
- Rugby Football
- Association Football
Later in the century, students at the University of Oxford developed their own slang, shortening words and adding the suffix -er.
Rugby football became rugger.
Association football became soccer (in lieu of asser, I believe).
For years, the Brits used soccer and football interchangeably to describe the sport of FIFA. Meanwhile, countries they had spawned—like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and South Africa—began developing their own versions of football. To avoid confusion, these countries stuck to soccer when referring to the British export.
(In other words, the dumb American is no dumber than the Canadian or Australian, at least in this regard.)
In the 1980s, realizing that their empire had collapsed and their global significance was dwindling, especially relative to that of the Americans, the Brits began a campaign to bash the American use of the term soccer.
And that got me to the next prompt:
Who’s dumb now?
