For Professor Stefan Szymanski it all started about 20 years ago, when he began to read and hear people say that football should be called soccer and not soccer, that “that word was incorrect.”

That debate seemed “strange” to him and made him travel to the 60s and 70s, straight to his childhood, which he lived precisely in the cradle of modern football.

“I remember that, when I was a child in England, the word ‘soccer’ was perfectly acceptable,” the emeritus professor at the University of Michigan tells BBC Mundo, from the United States.

"I started asking my friends, 'Do you remember? Maybe it's a false memory. Was it ever a problem?' I started talking to people about it. And sure enough, the consensus was that in the '70s there didn't seem to be any problem with that word."

His interest in the debate about football and soccer ended up turning into an investigation, a book and another trip, this time more than 100 years back in time, in search of the origin of the word soccer.

And he arrived in a place far from the United States, although very familiar.

On the other side of the Atlantic

Szymanski completed his university studies in England, where he also worked as a professor and researcher at higher education institutions.

In 2009, the sports economist published, together with Simon Kuper, “Soccernomics”, whose Spanish edition is “El Fútbol es Así!”.

After living much of his life in London, he moved to the United States.

In 2018, he published: “It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa): On the History, Emotion, and Ideology Behind One of the Internet’s Most Ferocious Debates.”

That book was written with Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

Szymanski says that, at the beginning, football was a very posh sport.

“Those who founded the Football Association in England, in 1863, were graduates of Oxford, who had gone to the great public schools and were from the rich and exclusive classes of the country.”

That same year, that organization drafted regulations for that discipline.

“The game played under Football Association rules became known as association football,” wrote John M. Cunningham in the article “Why Do Some People Call Football ‘Soccer’?” (Why do some people call football 'soccer'?) from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

This name also served to differentiate this new sport from another sporting discipline that has also survived to this day: rugby.

“So, there were two sports: one called rugby football and the other called association football, if we want to be very formal,” says Szymanski.

In rugby football, players could run with the ball, loaded, towards the goal, in association football, this was not allowed.

The “er” at the end

Although over time football spread and began to be identified with the working class of England, Szymanski reminds us that “in its early days it was upper class and very popular at Oxford and Cambridge, which were luxury universities.”

Among those wealthy students in the 80s and 90s of the 19th century there was a custom that consisted of shortening words and adding “er” to the end, creating a kind of slang.

“So instead of eating breakfast, they said breaker.”

Applied to rugby, for example, these young people “would play rugger,” according to Szymanski.

And then how did the word soccer come about?

There is a theory, Szymanski notes, although he warns that “no one is entirely sure.”

Everything seems to indicate that creative young Englishmen took “soc” from the middle of the word association and added “er” to the end, creating the term “soccer.”

“Obviously, no one knows for sure, but what they are sure of is that it comes from Oxford, because there are numerous documentary sources that affirm that, indeed, it was a word coined at the University of Oxford by students.”

At the same time

Andy Mitchell is a sports historian and researcher and has written several books, including “First Elevens” and “1824: the World’s First Football Club.”

On his blog “Scottish Sport History”, he wrote the article “The mysterious origin of ‘soccer’- what happened in 1885?” (The mysterious origin of 'soccer'. What happened in 1885?).

He says that there are “at least” three examples of the use of “soccer” or “socker” in school magazines from late 1885 in different parts of England (Shropshire, Oxfordshire and Wiltshire).

“My intuition is that the terms ‘soccer’ and ‘rugger’ were already used verbally and had appeared in print earlier that year in another – as yet unidentified – magazine and these three contributors picked it up,” Mitchell wrote.

The expert also found both terms in an 1889 article on “Football at Oxford”, from the publication “Boy’s Own Paper”, in which they noted that “in university slang, rugby is called Rugger, while the term Association has Socker as a synonym”.

The socker variant was lost and the one that would remain over time was soccer.

The historian cites a paragraph from an article from 1899 in the British newspaper Daily Telegraph: “Who now talks about Association or Rugby football and who does not appreciate the abbreviated forms of ‘soccer’ or ‘rugger’?”

The word soccer began to travel to other continents at the same time that the sport was exported.

James Nalton, a soccer journalist, says that “references to soccer, soccer fields and soccer fields” arose in both England and the United States before 1900.

This was stated in the article “Call it Soccer: A history of football words” on the World Football Index site.

Like “cousins”

Szymanski points out that the reason a word like soccer emerged was because that discipline had to be distinguished from another variant of soccer that was being played.

In England, it was originally between association football and rugby football. But, in other countries there was also a need to make a differentiation because they had other versions of soccer.

In Ireland, for example, Gaelic football is very popular and “the use of the word soccer has always been very common.”

Soccer has also been used in countries such as Australia (their men's team is called the Socceroos), New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada.

In fact, in that host of the 2026 World Cup, the governing body of that sport is the Canadian Soccer Association.

In the United States, the most popular sport is American Football, played in the National Football League (NFL). But in that country they simply call it soccer, says the researcher.

"It's all related, I mean, the American version of soccer evolved from rugby, but it has elements of soccer too."

"They're like close cousins, and that's why the American version of soccer became so popular around the same time that the word soccer was coined, in the 1880s, 1890s."

Organized since 1913

Szymanski's knowledge of the words soccer and futbol goes beyond historical sources, his experiences also complement it.

“I teach at the University of Michigan and I often teach classes where I talk about soccer and football and something that Americans tend to do when they use the word soccer in conversation is they say, 'I'm really sorry, I meant football' because they think that the British are very sensitive about that word and, yes, they're right, some of them are,” he says.

“I think it's nice that they apologize so much and what I usually tell them is: 'It's an English word, feel free to use it, there's no problem.'

The United States has hosted four soccer World Cups: two women's World Cups (1999 and 2003) and two men's World Cups, in 1994, and the one that has just begun and that it organized together with Mexico and Canada.

Its women's team has won four world cups.

Although football has become very popular in that country, “Americans will continue to call it soccer,” says the professor.

"And that's exactly what they should do because (dropping the word soccer) would be very confusing for them. If someone says, for example, 'Are you going to the soccer game?' The other person will respond: 'What soccer are you talking about?' That would be absurd."