Football
Every year during the World Cup or whenever some important football game is occurring passionate football fans go on the offensive toward Americans for two things: the fact that Americans don’t much care for their sport and that we call it soccer. It flabbergasts me whenever it happens because it shows they’re woefully ignorant of their own sport’s history, and to a true sports fan the history of their sport of choice should be quite important. I’ll like to explain why the sport is how it is in the United States. For the sake of clarity I’m going to refer to soccer as football for the majority of this unless when discussing it would be confusing to call it such.
Football hasn’t yet made a foothold in the United States although it has rapidly grown in popularity here. It’s especially popular among small children today — although it is established as an LK sport. It’s only been played professionally since 1996, and therefore it doesn’t have the status of sports either invented or established on this continent. The United States isn’t the only place where football isn’t the dominating sport. It’s not dominant in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand — all of them also formerly directly controlled by Britain and for much longer periods of time. Canada established its own sports and took a liking to American ones while Australia and New Zealand took a liking to rugby. Japan prefers baseball. Football became popular throughout the world because of the immense power of the British Empire and the cultural influence such created. The British Empire was the largest empire in the history of the human race, and it spanned the globe. It’s quite arrogant to attack Americans for having a liking to their own sports when there’s other countries on the planet who show similar favoritism to their own sports and when the popularity of football across the planet was created out of imperialism and cultural influence born out of power. The latter is usually bounced back at us due to the popularity of baseball in Japan, but upon further investigation of the history of baseball there it’s shown that the Japanese took a liking to baseball long before we occupied the country after the end of World War II.
Will football ever gain vast popularity in the United States? I very much doubt it. American football only gained the dominant position because of mismanagement of baseball by MLB. Money is the most important factor in baseball today. Players are paid ridiculous amounts of money, and have struck when their million dollar plus paychecks weren’t enough. Teams with the most money get the best players. These are long-established problems the MLB refuses to rectify, and because of such many people have given up on baseball for good. After the 1994 strike I never watched a single baseball game again, and I won’t. Baseball is still popular in the North, but that is mostly because of the greater concentration of teams there. There are 5 teams in the South in the United States while there’s 9 in the NFL. With American football it’s easy to find a local or somewhat local team to root for. For football to gain ground like American football did in the United States there would have to be a catastrophic failure of many popular sports in the US such as American football, baseball, basketball, and stock car racing all at one time. Football is gaining in popularity, and the spark for such was the 1994 World Cup held in the United States which still today holds the highest attendance record of any World Cup and of any sporting event in the history of the United States — including any Olympic Games held on US soil. However, without transcontinental professional teams filled with primarily American athletes it’s going to be a hard road ahead.
That first point isn’t thrown at us Americans as much as the second, and the history of football is especially important when discussing the word soccer. In the latter part of the 19th century there were two sports in Britain named football that by that point even had been played for some time — Association Football and Rugby Football. In fact at one point they were both simply called football, so it’s easy to imagine exactly why there was a necessity for the two completely different sports to be differentiated with an adjective. The word soccer was born out of Oxford slang created in an attempt to further simplify the name of the sport as let’s face it Association Football is a mouthful. Soccer grew in popularity quite a bit more than rugby did, and simply due to its sheer popularity it gained the right to be simply called football. The old slang term for the sport was generally forgotten by the British who invented it because many generations of Britons were born not knowing anything other than the term football to refer to their country’s most popular sport.
When the two sports were brought over here by British immigrants they were called soccer and rugby football. Over here the term soccer became the proper name for the sport rather than slang. Rugby retained its original name, and therefore its child sport — football — was never called anything else. Because of blind targeting of Americans it’s not widely known that Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders all call the sport soccer. Australia and New Zealand made formal announcements that in international competitions the sport is to be called football in 2005 and 2007 respectively. The US and Canada both have yet to do this and probably never will. The sport is already referred to as football in international competitions, and changing the associations’ names from soccer to football in the two countries would do nothing but cause confusion. It’s completely ignorant and arrogant to wish that Americans change their beloved football to something else in favor of a sport which they mostly not a single bit of adoration for especially when other countries’ general populations call it the same thing for the exact same reasons. To put it simply if you didn’t want us to call it soccer the British — the inventors of the sport — never should have told us to call it such in the first place.