It started with a WhatsApp message in the VIC U19s coaches group.
“Coaches, just the 11 sets of soccer goals we’ll have to move off the ground. Got a new warm up for the lads. And 3 sets of soccer punters to kick off too!! 🙄”
First outdoor training session on an all-weather ground in Carrum Downs—not traditional cricket territory in August.
I replied: “Tank, if the punters give you grief, swap football in for soccer.”
Which got me thinking—dangerous!
The last World Cup was played across the U.S, Canada, and Mexico. In two of the host nations, it’s called soccer. Here in Australia, soccer is common too. The rest of the world, mostly, uses football—some get very precious about it.
Here’s what I know: soccer is an English word. Coined at Oxford in the 1880s, where snobby students had a habit of shortening words and adding “-er” to the end. Breakfast became brekker. Rugby became rugger. Association football—the game founded by Oxford graduates in 1863—became soccer.
The Australians kept it. The Americans kept it. The British quietly dropped it sometime in the 1980s and then acted like it had always been an affront.
Stefan Szymanski, emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s. He says soccer was perfectly acceptable then. Nobody batted an eyelid. It’s very different now—almost full-circle snobbery.
“It’s an English word,” Szymanski says. “Feel free to use it.”
Language drifts. Words travel. And sometimes the people who invented them forget they did.
I’ll let you know how we got on with the “soccer punters”.
Happy Sunday.
Nick
