Soccer or football?

Alan Jacobs follows the sport. I don't, but then I don't pay much attention to sports at all (apart from the Packers). The arrival of the World Cup has, though, impinged upon my consciousness. Jacobs has found the Brits' commentary on the games particularly annoying. From "Pot, Kettle, Soccer, Football":

I just saw a Brit on BlueSky mocking “an actual respected American online news commentator” for pronouncing “Macron” to rhyme with “Ramone.” My first thought: Pronounce the word “Paris” for me. .... Brits can look down their noses at Americans for many things, but when it comes to mispronouncing foreign words, they are the undefeated world champions. ....

...I have had to stop consulting the Guardian’s World Cup coverage. I typically find their soccer coverage the best available, but these days virtually all their commentators feel the need to belittle everything American at every opportunity — they seem to be under some compulsion to shoehorn the belittlement in even when it’s irrelevant....

...[H]aving the World Cup in the USA has, inevitably, revived British hatred of the word “soccer” — which is a British word. And isn’t it also odd that the regular denunciations of stupid Americans for saying “soccer” aren’t accompanied by denunciations of the Irish for doing the same thing? (In Ireland “football” means “Gaelic football,” so, like Americans, the Irish need a different word for what’s going on now in the World Cup.) As Paul Rouse, a historian of sport at University College Dublin, has pointed out,

The word [soccer] can be found in the title of a book written by one of the iconic personalities of the sport in England – Jimmy Hill – who published Striking for Soccer in 1961.

In England, for most of the 20th century, the words “soccer” and “football” were used interchangeably. Perhaps the best example of this is the title of the former Manchester United manager Matt Busby’s autobiography in 1973, Soccer at the Top: My Life in Football.

On another level, of 75 Annuals listed in a compendium as being published for the children’s market in England between 1949 and 1995, 29 contained the word “soccer” in the title and 32 contained the word “football”.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that the British use of “soccer” began to disappear. The Brits mocking Americans for using the word are ignorant across both space and time. ....

Thanks to all this, it has been great fun to see all these foreign visitors being fascinating and delighted by a country they’ve been taught to despise: I could choose a hundred such stories, but here are one, two, and three. It’s been rather heartwarming to hear this refrain from so many strangers: “I feel like I’ve been lied to all my life about America.” ....

Alan Jacobs, "Pot, Kettle, Soccer, Football," The Homebound Symphony, June 20, 2026.