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What Is Soccer?

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There is but one game that is loved across the world. It mixes aesthetical beauty with raw talent. Where the poor compete with the rich. Where the only defining trait of a person is their sheer skill. This game is made up of twenty-two players, eleven on each side. A round ball starts in the center. The way to win is rather simple. Just get the ball into a net on the far side of the field without letting it get in the net behind you. This game is called soccer. The game we now recognize as soccer (or football to many non-Americans) started on October 26th, 1863, where a few teams came together to create the football association (1). Though it wasn’t like the soccer that is watched today. Handling the ball was allowed and forward passing deemed …show more content…

In fact, if you google something along the lines of why is soccer called football. Many results that turn up will be calling Americans idiots for inventing such a ridicules name. This is oh so very completely wrong. There was once a time where the two words coexisted peacefully in the land that created both their names. That’s right the United Kingdom. Soccer, the word, seems to have originated at the end of the nineteenth century and was then adopted by the Americans (2). One theory is that the word soccer originated from the shortening of the word association football. This theory comes from the idea that the rugby football association was shortened to rugger (2). In a letter to the New York Times, one gentleman writes to the editor saying, “Some wise person (presumably an Englishman) explained to a reporter the game was called soccer because the players wore socks”. There is also a class difference between the words soccer and football. Soccer has an elitist connotation toward it where football’s connection is more middle working class.(2) Most likely the hate we get for calling it soccer stems from the fact that we Americans already have football. Which is more popular here than soccer is, and to outsiders is a strange game. So an argument of semantics was bound to

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