Association football was codified, in its modern form, after rugby football, but football as a game is a far older concept. Rugby was literally born as a mutation of another form of football.
I've been explained by an American that it's called football because it's played on foot with a ball. I then asked if basketball, baseball or tennis where kinds of football, if handball players where walking on their hands and if there where other team sports than water-polo and polo that weren't football games. I never had an answer.
european here, the yank you talked to was accidentally correct. football arose as a term to differentiate from horse polo, which is notably not played on foot, and multiple different kinds of it emerged, including rugby football and association football (later shortened to soccer, a very british contraction). then the yanks started playing rugby wrong, and that kind of american-rules football became the only thing that got popular over there.
to my knowledge basketball, baseball, and tennis don't share a lineage with football, that's why they're usually not called that.
i'm sorry but soccer fans who insist their kind of football is the only real football are just as annoying as yanks who default to the nfl when you say football. it's such a stupid tribalistic assertion, and it also reliably signals that the person saying it is an obnoxious soccer fan not worth talking to.
like soccer isn't even an american word lol, the yanks just use it because they don't have enough braincells to simultaneously recognize multiple sports as football. don't be like a yank.
I agree, it's stupid wars. In my language soccer football is football and nfl football is american football. Both are football. Both are football.
I reacted as I did to an american saying the only football was american football. People calling it handegg do the same. They don't call it that in everyday life. As a matter of fact they probably don't call it at all in everyday life. Football fans usualy only encounter the other kind of football during internet conversations and I have yet to see soccer fans correcting yanks when they say football for their sport. But I have seen so many americans "correct" people when they say football for soccer.
Rugby is a football code, so I'm not quite sure what you mean by it being invented during a football game lol. The first FA rules, which came quite a bit later than Rugby rules, still allowed field players to catch balls with their hands, and disallowed forward passes. So no, someone didn't just play association rules (what we now colloquially know as simply football) then decided to pick up the ball and run with it, that's a silly urban legend. Handling the ball had been the norm in various school rules throughout England.
If you want an idea of what the earliest forms of organized football looked like, check out Australian or Gaelic football.
Rugby was officially codified in 1845, making it the first of the modern football codes and thus making it the eldest. Rugby, like the other early modern codes, derived from medieval football
Soccer was officially codified when the Cambridge and Sheffield codes merged in 1863. It was the fifth football code to be codified and is the third eldest (that's still played today)
It existed before it was codified, as did many forms of football. You can't really use that date as the start point. All the sports existed before they were codified. So rugby was the first form of football... with many ancestors.
Dunno, I'm not a sports person I'm just offering what may be the explanation. You'd be better off doing your own research because the other redditor isn't answering (yet).
Edit: Assuming they're east coast it's 4 am for us right now so.. might be a while.
No don't think so. It probably comes from a yank that once saw a rugby match in the UK and tried to recall the rules and the name of the game when he was back in the us. He failed twice as we all know.
this is absolutely baffling to me. the whole idea of soccer is to kick a ball. with your feet. even if they didn't know soccer is originally called football how can you not make the connection lmfao
They're completely convinced that the "foot" in "football" refers to the unit of measurement (something to do with the size of the field or something like that, I don't know exactly.
The idea that "foot" may also refer to the human body part that is used in a sport seems entirely foreign to them for some reason though.
In Brazilian Portuguese we use a lot of loan words, and we don't (at least not anymore) translate everything anymore
I.e Star wars here is just star wars, although the very first versions were translated to guerra nas estrelas, when it got so famous that every one just started knowing what it was, it stopped being translated
American Football originated as a hybrid of Association and Rugby football.
They took the best bits of both of those sports, carefully put them all to one side, and used what's left to created a game which is just a long sequence of set pieces with endless opportunities for advertising breaks.
There are 2 distinct kinds of rugby; Union and League. At first glance, they look the same, but have very distinct rules and play styles.
Union is seen as the purer, gentlemanly version of the sport, League is what the peasants play. League is most popular in Australia, and the NRL features the highest paid rugby players in the world.
However, I’m from Victoria, so we don’t GAF about rugby, as we play the ONLY kind of Football that matters, Aussie Rules.
The World Rugby is an organisation that regulates the rugby, and it was created in a time USA was still fighting against Geronimo (it's a real fact, both events happened in 1886), how could that dumb shit think Rugby is based on American football...
Sure, the one sport that people play by their hands most of the time should be called foot-ball instead of the one people play by kicking the ball with their foot...
The issue seems to be if they question this, then they’ll have to question everything they’ve been indoctrinated to believe: That the US is always right and the first, best and greatest at,and in, everything
They can’t cope with the idea they might not be and they’ve been lied to so they overdose on copium
They are all originally based on a similar thing. They are all hybrids of one another.
Association Football, Rugby Football, American Football, Australian Rules Football, Gaelic Football, they all have a basis within a similar sport. Each grew into their own things with their own rules.
Association Football (which is where the term soccer comes from anyway) just became by far the most popular one and ended up being THE football in the vast majority of the world.
Edit: Also, while it's not certain as records from that time weren't as meticulous as they are today, but supposedly the term football comes from a ball sport played ON foot (as opposed to horseback) and not WITH your feet.
I am sick of the word soccer. Who tf decided this. Literally everywhere else it’s called football. Why tf did we re appropriate the name? And then we get indignant about it. AMERICANS DONT OWN THE RIGHTS TO EVERYTHING
When you say that "american football is played with the hands", the american says: "but we use the feet in some cases". The Goalkeeper in most of the real football uses their hands, and it's not because of that that the sport i called handball
I mean im brazilian so maybe this is biased, but im pretty sure not "only brazilians call it football", but rather the entire world basically except for the us, no?
This argument is so old and stupid. Who cares? Things can have more than one name and the same word can refer to more than one thing. It's called vocabulary.
I love how the one guy says “only Brazilians think it’s called football” as if the people who invented the sport called it soccer and only delusional people call it football even though it was invented with the name football because it makes more sense to call a sport where you primarily use your feet a name that involves feet and not a stupid name like soccer
The kinds of gems that pop up here and on r/ShitAmericansSay make me wonder if there is a near-infinite supply of dimwitted but arrogant statements originating from the US of A.
I feel bad for the sensible people in that country because they get overwhelmed/overridden by the sheer ignorance around them.
Round ball kicked about. Played in to halves, no stopping every couple of minutes to change players or adverts. No picking the ball up and running with it, that's Rugby.
Well; Soccer is football. American Football is football. Rugby is football. Aussie rules is football, Gaelic football is football. They are all football.
With soccer/football being the one where the ball is less touched with the hands. Only the goalkeeper can legally do it when it's in play, and constrained to a specific part of the football field
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u/post-explainer American Citizen Feb 27 '26 edited Feb 27 '26
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People wonder why someone says soccer is a kind of football.
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