The linguistic roots of the soccer vs. football debate run deep. An expert explains why.
The roots of the linguistic divide between football and soccer goes back more than a century and spotlights how dynamic language can be, a linguist said.
World Cup 2026 has already provided compelling match ups between the world’s top teams, but in the mix with a battle over the ball is another fight: one over words.
The linguistic divide between “football” and “soccer” has been on full display, as the former’s global dominance runs up against the latter’s use in two of the 2026 World Cup’s host countries, the United States and Canada. The two are among only a few other nations, including Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, that refer to the sport as “soccer.” The rest of the world is fairly firmly in camp “football.”
Bringing up the topic is a sure way to inspire debate among football fans across the globe, but it also reveals linguistic roots that are more shared than either side might know.
“People can feel pretty strongly that this is precisely the right answer and anything else is just wrong,” said Adam Cooper, director of the linguistics program at Northeastern University. “But to look at it from the perspective of a linguist, we would say that there’s not so much that there’s one right answer but many different right answers depending on your perspective, depending on your context.”
That hasn’t stopped football fans from drawing lines in the sand.
“It’s always football,” Greig McBride, a Scottish fan attending the World Cup in Boston, told Northeastern Global News. “You kick it with your foot.”
Born and raised in London but living in the U.S. where he coaches his children’s football teams, football fan Duncan Hunt uses both “football” and “soccer,” but he still admits the divide between the two is deep.
“I think football fans by nature are tribal, hence as kids we owned the word ‘football’ and rejected ‘soccer’ as something that other people in another country used. Likewise, I see that here too,” Hunt said.
The geographic and cultural divide between the usage of both terms has helped cement them as key to peoples’ sense of identity, elevating the stakes of their usage, Cooper explained. The use of football jargon, like “dead ball” for inactivity on the pitch or “meg” for kicking the ball between a player’s legs, helps further cement a sense among fans that they are part of a group. Likewise, someone’s unfamiliarity with the language of football marks them as outsiders, Cooper said.
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But it’s a debate that dates back more than a century to the University of Oxford, where students in the 1880s found a creative way to distinguish between rugby football and association football, what would be considered football or soccer today, Cooper explained.
Students at the time abbreviated both terms and attached an “er” to the end, known as the Oxford suffix, to form “rugg-er” and “assocc-er.” Eventually, and perhaps ironically given its geographic roots, the latter was shortened further to soccer, Cooper said. It never grew to be more than a nickname for the sport in Great Britain, and by the 20th century, association football had been embraced by the public enough to just be called football.
In the 19th century, America had developed a sport that merged elements of both rugby and association football and ultimately became more popular than either in the U.S., Cooper said. It was known as gridiron football, but most people simply called it football. Given the popularity of gridiron football, association football players in America looked to their compatriots across the Atlantic Ocean and settled on using “soccer.”
By the time the United States Football Association in 1945 changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association, the term was fully adopted stateside.
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The decision to use soccer is also part of a long history of the U.S. trying to distinguish itself culturally and linguistically “not so much as an outlier but as exceptional,” Cooper explained. In 1828, American lexicographer Noah Webster published “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” which included notable differences in spelling and terminology from British English.
While “soccer” remained largely isolated to the U.S. and a select few countries where pre-existing versions of “football” — like Gaelic football in Ireland — had already been taken up, “football” spread globally, largely due to the British Empire’s reach.
“Not only were the British governing so many different parts of the world but they also brought with them aspects of their culture, including their sports, their pastimes,” Cooper said.
While Cooper insists there is no “right” way to refer to the sport, using “football” or “soccer,” whether conscious or not, still tells you a lot about a person.
“Language is so intertwined with the culture and society that it’s used in,” Cooper said. “That’s readily apparent here.”
