Football, or association football, is a sport that has been around for centuries. It originated in England, where the rules of the game were first codified in 1863. Since then, it has become one of the most popular sports in the world, with the English Premier League being one of the most important leagues. In England, it is commonly referred to as “football” or occasionally “football”. At the beginning of the 19th century in England, football and rugby were two different variations of the same game.
But in 1863, the Football Association was formed to codify the rules of football so that aristocratic children from different schools could play against each other. In 1871, the Rugby Football Union followed suit. The two sports were officially known as Rugby Football and Association Football. The new rules were slow to spread to the United States, where another version of the game was evolving, one that the rest of the world now knows as “football” and is played in the NFL. Despite this, the country's national association is called the South African Football Association and football is mainly used in official contexts.
In England, writes Szymanski, aristocratic children came up with the abbreviated terms “rugger” and “football” to differentiate between rugby football and association football. Although the name football comes from the United Kingdom, there it is predominantly called football, while in other English-speaking countries colonized by the British it is called football. The word football comes from the use of the term association football in Great Britain and dates back 200 years. For example, Canada has its own version of field football; Ireland is home to Gaelic football; and Australia is crazy about Australian football (which is derived from rugby). Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged at the end of the 19th century that borrowed elements from both rugby and association football. Association football is much less popular there and is referred to as “football” or “European football”.
There are also many other languages in which the common term for association football is phonetically similar to the English term football. For most of the rest of the world (including England, the birthplace of modern sport), it is football. This coincidence is reflected in the auxiliary languages Esperanto and Interlingua, which use football and football, respectively. Across the pond, fans of world football may find themselves in shock to see American footballers pick up and throw an oblong ball, almost like rugby. The exception is the Bahamas, where the term football is used exclusively (although not really in the Caribbean, the use in Bermuda follows that of the Bahamas).
Within Australia, the term football is ambiguous and can mean up to four different football codes in Australian English, depending on context, geographical location and cultural factors; this includes football, Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union. One of the best known differences between British and American English is that what we know as football in Britain is usually called football in America. For a similar reason, football became a favorite term in America as a way to differentiate itself from field football. In Britain, meanwhile, association football became a way to distinguish it from other versions of football. Football has been around for centuries and has become one of the most popular sports around the world.
It originated in England where its rules were first codified in 1863. In England it's commonly referred to as “football” or occasionally “football” while other English-speaking countries colonized by Britain call it “football”. In America it's usually referred to as “football” or “European football” while other languages have their own phonetically similar terms for association football.
