What sports are called

What is this page about?

A sport can carry a different name in every country that plays it, and the name is usually the first thing a reader has to get right before a result, a record or a governing body can be found at all. The differences are historical far more often than they are national. A name takes hold in a place because of what was already being played there when the game arrived, and it then survives long after the reason for it has gone.^[3] [5]

Three patterns account for most of the cases. A sport arrives somewhere another game already holds the generic word, and takes a distinguishing name instead: that is how “soccer” persisted in the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa.^[9] [10] A federation adopts a name in one language and national bodies borrow, adapt or replace it: Spanish “fútbol” is a loan from English, while Italian “calcio” is a native word for kicking.^[7] [8] Or the popular name is a trademark owned by a manufacturer, which is part of why the Olympic sport is table tennis.^[22]

What follows takes the case that gets asked about most, association football, then the other codes that answer to “football”, then sports that go by two current names, and finally the rule this site applies when a page has to be given one name.

Why association football is called soccer

“Soccer” is an English word. It clips assoc., the standard abbreviation of “association” in “association football”, and adds the “-er” suffix that was Oxford undergraduate slang in the 1880s and also produced “rugger”, “footer” and “brekker”. Merriam-Webster gives the derivation as “by shortening & alteration from association football” and dates first known use to 1885.^[2] [3] The earliest quoted citations are British: “socker” in The Oldhallian of December 1885, “soccer” in The Carthusian of 1886, and, as quoted by Grammarphobia from the Oxford English Dictionary, a citation from the poet Ernest Dowson in 1889.^[1] [3] A North Wales Chronicle piece of 14 March 1891 lists the word among the Oxford “-er” coinages, alongside “togger” and “ekker”.^[3]

The coinage is widely attributed to Charles Wreford-Brown, a Corinthians and England player, who is said to have answered an invitation to play “rugger” by asking for “soccer” instead. The account that carries the story in most detail, by Bill Williams for Playing Pasts, reports it as “reputedly” and “said to have”, and places the incident around Wreford-Brown's Corinthian debut in 1887 — after the 1885 and 1886 printed uses. It is an attribution that has been repeated rather than a coinage that has been documented.^[4] Stefan Szymanski's history of the word finds it in ordinary British use through the twentieth century, at its most frequent between about 1960 and 1980, and receding afterwards as British writers began to describe it as American.^[5]

Where the name stuck, and where “football” won

The word held on wherever another code already owned the generic term. The United States body was founded on 5 April 1913 as the United States Football Association, renamed the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945, and renamed again to United States Soccer Federation in 1974 — so the word entered the federation's own title only once gridiron football had taken “football” in American speech.^[9] [17] The Canadian body describes itself as Canada Soccer, “the official governing body for soccer in Canada”.^[23] In Australia, where Australian rules and both rugby codes answer to “football” in different states, the national federation was Football Federation Australia from 2005 and became Football Australia in 2020.^[10] In South Africa the top division is run by the National Soccer League, trading as the Premier Soccer League.^[11] In Ireland, “football” is routinely Gaelic football, codified by an association founded at Thurles on 1 November 1884.^[15]

Elsewhere the plain word carried. FIFA's registered name is French — Fédération Internationale de Football Association — and its Statutes define its sport as “association football”.^[6] Most national words are borrowings of the English one: the Real Academia Española derives “fútbol” from English football, and Priberam derives Portuguese “futebol” from English foot-ball.^[7] [25] A few are not borrowings at all. Treccani derives Italian “calcio” from calciare, to kick, and records calcio fiorentino as the older Florentine game of that name.^[8]

The other football codes

“Football” on its own names a different sport depending on where it is said, because several codes were written down separately from the same set of school and club games. The Football Association was formed at the Freemasons' Tavern in London on 26 October 1863 “for the purpose of … establishing a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game”, and settled its first Laws at a sixth meeting on 8 December 1863; the dispute that split those meetings was hacking, which Blackheath wished to retain.^[12] The handling clubs went their own way, and the International Rugby Football Board followed in 1886; it became the International Rugby Board in 1998 and World Rugby in November 2014.^[14] On 29 August 1895, at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, twenty-one clubs met and resolved to form a Northern Rugby Football Union; all but Dewsbury handed in their resignations from the Rugby Football Union that night, and from the new union rugby league descends.^[13]

Two codes were written outside Britain. Australian football was codified in Melbourne in the late 1850s and was first known as Melbourne, or Victorian, rules.^[16] Gaelic football is governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, founded at Hayes' Hotel, Thurles, on 1 November 1884 “for the preservation and cultivation of our national pastimes”.^[15] American football, which Britannica also indexes as gridiron football and describes as evolved from English rugby and association football, shares that ancestry with Canadian football.^[17] The generic word resolves by place: to association football in most of the world, and to one of the others in Melbourne, Dublin or Dallas.

Sports that go by two names

Association football is the loudest case, not the only one. Athletics and “track and field” name the same sport: the international federation was the IAAF until its Council approved a change on 8 June 2019, announced the following day, with the new brand rolled out from October 2019 after the Doha championships; the United States national governing body for the same events is USA Track & Field.^[18] [19]

“Hockey” unqualified resolves differently either side of the Atlantic. The field game's international federation was founded on 7 January 1924 as the Fédération Internationale de Hockey sur Gazon — hockey on grass — and uses “hockey” unqualified in its own English text.^[20] The ice game's body was founded in Paris on 15–16 May 1908 as the Ligue Internationale de Hockey sur Glace.^[21] Both federations qualified the surface in their founding French names; English-speaking countries qualify whichever one is not the local default.

Table tennis is the federation's name — the International Table Tennis Federation.^[24] “Ping-Pong” is a trademark: United States registration No. 283766, for bats and rackets of the tennis type, was filed on 25 January 1930 and registered on 9 June 1931, originally to Parker Brothers and recorded to Indian Industries, Inc.; the United States Patent and Trademark Office status recorded on the register is “Registered And Renewed”.^[22]

How this site names a sport

The rule here is one line: a sport is called what its international federation calls it in English. That is why the sport page is Soccer at /soccer, why Athletics (Track & Field) carries both names in its title with the federation's word first, and why rugby union sits under the name World Rugby has used since November 2014 rather than under the one it used before.^[14] [18]

For association football the rule produces a result that looks American. FIFA's own Statutes call the sport “association football”; the single English word that distinguishes it from six other codes carried here is “soccer”, and that is the title this reference uses.^[6] The word is English in origin, older in Britain than in America, and it disambiguates a title in a way “football” cannot.^[2] [5]

The general principle behind it is that a federation's own English name is checkable against a document and changes rarely, and that it is the same test everywhere: World Athletics, the International Table Tennis Federation, the International Hockey Federation and the International Ice Hockey Federation all name their sports in their own titles, and a readership spread across every country is served by one consistent test rather than by whichever usage is local to the reader.^[20] [21]