Eccles Blue
Well-Known Member
S04 said:
The Bluemooners are so erudite. That is why I love this forum. :-)
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St Louis review
- Thread starter gymshoe
- Start date
The Bluemooners are so erudite. That is why I love this forum. :-)
Rochdale Blue
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- 3 Jun 2009
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- 3,491
Caveman said:To be fair we came up with the name soccer back in Victorian times, here, in England.Why Always Ste said:Just a question for Gymshoe (as he used the term Soccer)
Do Yourself or Americans you know not feel embarrassed that the vast majority of humans on this planet refer to the sport City play as Football, whereas Americans tend to use the term football when referring to something else (NFL) ?
When I've spoken about the sport over in USA I've always used the word Football, and always will do.
Soccer can go fuck itself :)
Football is a broad term that includes rugby league football, rugby union football, Australian rules football, Gaelic football, gridiron football, probably a few others too and of course association football (association, as in soccer). In Australia's NRL you hear the term "great footy there" when there's some good play in the game (rugby league, which I'm a great fan of).
And don't forget that turncoat club who go by the name of Soccer Club United of Manchester!
I would imagine that those who invented the term and carried the name forward were raised in a rugby playing environment. Same with the early commentators on tv and radio who used the term so much, I doubt they ever queued up all night for a cup ticket or kicked a tin can around the streets as a snotty nosed kid.These days with people in advertising and the media who use the term, i'd bet none of them have ever hitched lifts to away games when they were skint as kids or got laughed and jeered at if they ever uttered the word.
It's pathetic how every time some unknown American gets interviewed on Talksport the interviewer is scared to death of annoying some gridiron star by calling our sport by its proper name, you can practically see the condescending smirk on his face as Hawksbee or Jacobs go on about "soccer,as you call it." I would give a life ban to anyone using the word.
S04
Well-Known Member
The Irish call it soccer don´t they?
Eccles Blue
Well-Known Member
When I was a kid playing on the crofts and streets of Eccles we called it footie sometimes and soccer other times and when I first left school and went to matches people would say are you "goin to't soccer terday'. So it wasn't those Yanks who started it.
BobbyLazarus
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- 245
Indeed.Eccles Blue said:When I was a kid playing on the crofts and streets of Eccles we called it footie sometimes and soccer other times and when I first left school and went to matches people would say are you "goin to't soccer terday'. So it wasn't those Yanks who started it.
In my handed-down 1940s/50s Subbuteo set ( cardboard players ) it is most certainly Table Soccer.
stevemcgarry
Well-Known Member
BobbyLazarus said:Indeed.Eccles Blue said:When I was a kid playing on the crofts and streets of Eccles we called it footie sometimes and soccer other times and when I first left school and went to matches people would say are you "goin to't soccer terday'. So it wasn't those Yanks who started it.
In my handed-down 1940s/50s Subbuteo set ( cardboard players ) it is most certainly Table Soccer.
Going into my smartarse mode ... the terms soccer and football have always been interchangeable in Britain. As others here have said, the game was started by posh blokes who used the terms 'soccer' and 'rugger' to distinguish which sort of football they were talking about. As the game was embraced by ordinary British people, we called it football and that's the name we used to spread the game around the planet.
I did a bit of research for an article a while back on this very subject, so I have a few facts to hand: The longest-established football magazine (and one of the best) in Britain .... it's been going for over 50 years now ... is called World Soccer. Before that, Raich Carter's Soccer Star launched in 1952 and ran every week for 20 years. (Carter was a Sunderland legend and the mag was a competitor to Charles Buchan's Football Monthly.) The official journal of the Football Player's Union, launched in 1947 was called .... yes, you guessed it ... Soccer: The Official Journal of the Football Players Union. Old farts will remember that in the 1960s and '70s, football programmes came with an insert from the football League. For the first season or two, it was actually called The Soccer Review.
In a 1954 "Boy's Own" article by Stanley Matthews, the celebrated England footballer, recorded the following incident : "A small boy in one of our large industrial towns once asked me, "What does it feel like to play for England ?" I could see that he was puzzled and very, very interested. "Do you play soccer, son ?" I asked him. He nodded. "Then you know what it's like to play for England. Every boy in England who does his best to play a good clean, worth-while game is playing for his country."
So it was perfectly acceptable to call it soccer long before the Yanks thought of getting seriously involved, back when it was an obscure amateur and collegiate game over here. They just seized on our term soccer to make it easier to differentiate.
As to using the term over here, I have no problem with it. I don't bother calling the trunk and hood of my car the "boot" and "bonnet" because the mechanic will have no idea what I'm talking about. I just want him to fix the bugger ... and no amount of zealous preaching from me will get him to start using those terms. Similarly, I don't really care what they call it, I'm just pleased that they are embracing the game on all levels and that the coverage over here is exploding.
When my lads were younger, I used to coach their AYSO teams. The teams were invariably made up of the kids of European and South American expats who already had the game in their blood through their dads ... and then American kids who were signed up by their parents for a bit of fresh air and exercise. Some of the latter would fall by the wayside, but year after year we'd make converts of loads of them. It coincided with the arrival of Fox Soccer Channel and it was brilliant to see these kids discover the game, watch it on TV, play it and fall in love with it. They'd rave about it to their mates and those kids would sign up too. Those kids are now blokes with kids of their own, and I bet a lot of them are passing on the religious zeal.
Why Always Ste said:Just a question for Gymshoe (as he used the term Soccer)
Do Yourself or Americans you know not feel embarrassed that the vast majority of humans on this planet refer to the sport City play as Football, whereas Americans tend to use the term football when referring to something else (NFL) ?
When I've spoken about the sport over in USA I've always used the word Football, and always will do.
Soccer can go fuck itself :)
That might have been taken offensively. And to the OP: we took our Banana in no problem. Only problem we had was some guy yelling at me at the end after I was done singing "3 nil and you fucked it up". He kindly pointed out there were kids around ( there were three sitting with us ), being drunk all I could reply was " welcome to football". We had been singing all night, some with swear words. Oh well, used to have the same issue at FC Dallas games, until we moved to the "adults only" section. Fook me.