Blame the Brits for the Word, Soccer
As an American, I often use the term “soccer” to describe the game the rest of the world calls “football”. As an American, who started playing the game after forty so he could coach his kids, I often use the term “football” to describe the game. They are both burned deeply in my brain. After you play the game, you cannot help but refer to the game as FOOTBALL. You spend the whole game using your feet to move the ball around…unless you are a goalkeeper.
Once I had played a bit, using the term football was an easy thing. Unfortunately in America, there is already something we call football. Which led me to begin referring to the NFL as “American football”. However, doing this led many of my fellow Americans to see me as some kind of poser or worse, a communist. Even then it failed to help very much in distinguishing the two sports in America because football has such a strong zeitgeist in America. The word literally means tailgating, and giant men pushing each other around to get to the Super Bowl.
So strong is the desire to use the term football for soccer after one has played, that it is very difficult to get it out of one’s head. Therefore as time went on, I would have to catch myself. In my brain would rise the term “football”, and then I would simply prefix it with “American” before I finally replaced it in my head with the American term, “soccer”…
