New Zealands largest newspaper is deeply conflicted.

With the World Cup underway in Brazil, should

The New Zealand Herald refer to the global round-ball game as soccer or football? The question
has been put to readers, and the readers have spoken. Its footballby a wide margin.

We in the U.S., of course, would disagree. And now we have a clearer understanding of why. In May,
Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, published a paper saying that
soccer is a semantically bizarre American invention. In fact, its a British import. And the Brits used it
oftenuntil, that is, it became too much of an Americanism for British English to bear.

The story begins, like many good stories do, in a pub. As early as the Middle Ages, Szymanski explains,
the rough outlines of soccera game, a ball, feetappear to have been present in England. But it
wasnt until the sport became popular among aristocratic boys at schools like Eton in the nineteenth
century that these young men tried to standardize play. On a Monday evening in October 1863, the
leaders of a dozen clubs met at the Freemasons Tavern in London to establish a definite code of rules
for the regulation of the game. They did just that, forming the Football Association. The most divisive
issue was whether to permit kicking an opponent in the leg (the answer, ultimately, was no).

But that wasnt where the controversy ended. In 1871, another set of clubs met in London to codify a
version of the game that involved more use of the handsa variant most closely associated with the
Rugby.

From this point onwards the two versions of football were distinguished by reference to their longer
titles, Rugby Football and Association Football (named after the Football Association), Szymanski
writes. The rugby football game was shortened to rugger,' while the association football game was,
plausibly, shortened to soccer.'

Both sports fragmented yet again as they spread around the world. The term soccer caught on in the
United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, in part to distinguish the game from American
football.

If the word soccer originated in England, why did it fall into disuse there and become dominant in the
States? To answer that question, Szymanski counted the frequency with which the words football and
soccer appeared in American and British news outlets as far back as 1900. . The rugby football game
was shortened to rugger,' while the association football game was, plausibly, shortened to soccer.'

What he found is fascinating: Soccer was a recognized term in Britain in the first half of the twentieth
century, but it wasnt widely used until after World War II, when it was in vogue for a couple decades,
perhaps because of the influence of American troops stationed in Britain during the war and the allure
of American culture in its aftermath. In the 1980s, however, Brits began rejecting the term, as soccer
became a more popular sport in the United States.

Football. Soccer. Were not so different after all. Today