Cup Final Day tomorrow (Saturday), so this week we’re talking spherical
objects. Want to know how to wind up a British football fan? Well, there are
many ways – in fact, if they’re a Spurs fan the ways are almost too many to
enumerate – but there is one surefire way to rile just about any British fan.
Open your mouth and utter the word ‘soccer’. Then take cover. This exercise is
not to be undertaken lightly.
You’ll be surprised just how irate they get. ‘Soccer’, they’ll tell you, is another
one of those ‘ugly Americanisms’. But, like so many people who rail against
‘ugly Americanisms’, they’ll be wrong. ‘Soccer’ is as English as spotted dick.
Responsible Victorians in 1863, needing an abbreviation for their new form of
entertainment, Association Football, to put up against Rugby Football’s ‘rugger’,
decided not to go with the more logical first choice but plumped instead for
‘soccer’. And the rather strange name spread around the world.
It would be another 18 years before anyone referred to the game as simply ‘football’ and, even so, ‘soccer’ remained in popular usage for another hundred years. It was only in the 1980s, when Chris Waddle’s haircut shocked everyone into a wholesale restructuring of the game, that ‘soccer’ fell out of favour in Britain. They kept using it in America, though, where the mullet was yet to be deemed a criminal offence, and hence the misconception that ‘soccer’ originated across the pond.
So enjoy the soccer tomorrow. May the boldest team win.
