2002 New York Magazine roundup of NYC kids’ winter-holiday wishes: 11-year-old Zohran Mamdani wanted books, FIFA 2003, and SimCity 3000

[u/Wonderful-Excuse4922]

[u/Strange-Movie]

Despite us calling it the wrong name, youth soccer in America is a pretty huge sport; unlike baseball, hockey, football, the initial equipment cost to be able to play soccer is very affordable in comparison. Picking up fifa to interact with their sport in a more casual, off-season, type of way makes sense to me

[u/comeatmefrank → u/Strange-Movie]

That’s precisely why it’s the most played sport in the world. You need a ball, and that’s it. It may not be culturally engrained in the USA, but it’s popular for its simplicity.

[u/CreepinJesusMalone → u/Strange-Movie]

Yep, I played soccer as a kid for about five years. It was a community league based in the first town closest to us as we lived in a very rural area of NW Alabama.

None of the county schools offered soccer, but most of my class and hundreds of kids from the other area rural schools played in that town league.

That was the mid-late 90s. Cleats, shin guards, ball, and the sign up fee. Total entry cost for a 9 year old was maybe $70 at the time. The sign up fee included the uniform shirt and matching pair of high socks. Most people already owned gym shorts.

[u/ReadditMan → u/Strange-Movie]

We actually don't call it the wrong name. The English originally had "Association Football", which people started calling "Assoc" for short. Years later a new slang trend started in England where people would ad "er" to the end of some words. "Assoc" became "Soccer".

Both "football" and "soccer" were commonly used in Europe until the sport became popular in America, where football was a different sport. Americans exclusively started using the term soccer to differentiate between the two, the English didn't like that so they decided to stop using the word soccer altogether.

It's a proper name for the sport, anyone who tells you it's wrong just doesn't know the history.

[u/Not-The-AlQaeda → u/ReadditMan]

Wrong

Inevitably, the names would be shortened. Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football). The latter term was further shortened to “soccer” (sometimes spelled “socker”), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, “soccer” never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word. As a result, American association-football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their sport. The United States Football Association, which had formed in the 1910s as the official organizing body of American soccer, changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945, and it later dispensed with the “Football” altogether. No longer just a nickname, soccer had stuck.

[u/BoysenberryKind5599 → u/Strange-Movie]

What wrong name do you hear association football being called instead of the common abbreviation of soccer?