Depending on where you live, football and soccer can refer to completely different games. For example, in America football refers to American football whereas in the UK it refers to association football, which in America would be called soccer.
And while American football is the most popular sport in America, football (aka soccer) is the world’s most popular sport. The FIFA World Cup, held every 4 years, is the world’s most popular sporting event with viewership numbers that exceed those of the Olympics.
There are two popular theories about the origins of the the term ‘football.’ Either it was a game that involved kicking a ball around with your feet or it was simply a game played on foot. If the latter origin is true, then football in the American, sense should also be considered correct.
In any case the map at the top of the page looks at the use of ‘football’ and ‘soccer’ to refer to association football. The data used to create it came from Wikipedia. There are some interesting and perhaps counter intuitive findings:
- While England uses the term football, many of its former colonies (e.g. Ireland, Canada, Australia and South Africa, etc.) use the term soccer. This may be because the term soccer in England was widely used until the 1970s, when it switched, in part, because it was viewed as an Americanism. Moreover, Australia, Canada and Ireland all have other games called football that differ from soccer and American football.
- American influence in Japan can be seen in the fact that they use the loan word Sakka instead of football, despite the fact that American football is not popular there and they don’t play other games that could be called football.
- The Philippines is divided between the north that uses futbol and the south that uses saker. This may be due to its history of being both a Spanish and American colony.
- Also interesting to note is that not all countries fit into the soccer vs football divide. Italy, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and both Koreans are among of the few exceptions to use their own terms.
You can learn more about the game from the following books:
- The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer
- Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Spain, Germany, and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia—and Even Iraq—Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport
- Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America’s Forgotten Game (Sporting)
What do you think of the football vs soccer debate. Leave your thoughts in the comment section below:
silvia says
Have you got a map of the most important sport in each country?
Brilliant Maps says
I don’t, but that’s a great idea.
Ned Curthoys says
In Australia soccer/football is never referred to as soccer by the mainstream media in line with the codes official designation but it does survive in common parlance given the prevalence of other football codes in the nations psyche. There is a significant generational divide as the use of the term is considered ignorant in multicultural Australia.
Diyaa says
Can you please provide me more information about the linguistic significance of calling it soccer not football in Australia despite the fact that Australia was a British colony. I am doing an extended essay in linguistics about Soccer VS. Football and if you more resources about the use of the word soccer in Australia, that would be helpful.
Mike says
“the use of the term is considered ignorant in multicultural Australia”.
Why would the term soccer be considered ignorant? Soccer is a British term by the same people (English) who codified the game. Even though modern fans are ignorant of the games history, those same fans are convinced that their sport was the original football (it wasn’t) and everyone else needs to conform to their narrative. The word soccer is still used in UK (Manchester U calls their youth camps, “soccer camp”; “Soccer Saturday” is still on TV).
I am starting to believe that many Association Football fans are more interested in the image of being a fan than the actual game. This superficial fandom leads these fans to get in debates of semantics in order to make them feel like they are real fans. I don’t know how else to explain the irrational need that everyone in the globe conform (and be “everyone” I mean mostly people from the U.S. cause international FIFA fandom doesn’t seem to care what term Canada, Australia, etc. use).
Van says
Australian here. Depending on the state or territory you will hear football being used to describe (usually) Australian rules football or Rugby league or union football. Queensland and New South Wales are more so Rugby states while Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria are more into Aussie rules (especially Victoria where nearly half the clubs in the AFL are from there).
The majority of Australians still call Association Football ‘Soccer’. There’s a level of arrogance that is perpetrated on each side but nowadays it seems like diehard Soccer fans play the victim more and more. They want to spread the usage of what they deem as the “correct” term and label anyone who doesn’t use such a term as being ignorant.
Roy Allen says
Well said. Soccer is an abbreviation of “association football” just as “rugger” was a an abbreviation of rugby football. It originates from the same place as the sport: the public schools of England.
Stanislav Škubal says
FIX ME: Slovakia has “futbal”
jj says
I don’t think that in Armenia they use the Georgian alphabet…
Brilliant Maps says
Quite correct, this was a noted error by the original map creator.
krii says
Polish word for football is “pilka nozna” which is literal translation of “foot ball” (pilka – ball, nozna – of foot).
Tomasz Pluskiewicz says
Yea, well wouldn’t fit on the map. And ‘futbol’ is actually quite common too, isn’t it? 😉
Noctua says
In Hungary we don’t say futball but ‘labdarúgás’ or shortly ‘foci’
Anthony says
While American football is the more popular sport in the United States in terms of the number of people watching the game, and the money involved, there are actually more people playing soccer today in the U.S. than there are playing American football.
lyle says
Soccer is called Fussball in Germany, almost the same. WTH, just had to add that, got Welt Pokal Fieber you might say, that means World Cup Fever in English, almost the same. Deutschland vor, noch ein Tor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Russell Curtin says
The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) defines rugby (league & union) as a game of football played played with an oval ball.
So those codes are quite entitled their call their game football.R
AJ says
Your map is wrong, everywhere you go in The Philippines, soccer is the popular and prefered term.
Khelmart says
Make a map & show the most popular game’s country wise.
Stuart says
It’s ‘football’ in Northern Ireland, and I’ve never heard any Irish person call it ‘soccer’.
Robert says
When I was growing up in England in the 1950s there was Association Football (Soccer) and Rugby Football (Rugger). In America there was American Football.
Alan says
You say that “the term soccer in England was widely used until the 1970s”. I was born in 1955 and we always knew it as “football”. In my experience only rugby fans or people trying to sound posh called it “soccer”.