They named the stadium Soccer City because Football City is trademarked by an Australian retailer.
No, in South Africa it’s called football, and is presided over by the South African Football Association. Soccer, as in Britain, is a nickname - and the name soccer is occasionally used in Britain the same way (as in the charity Soccer Aid).
Minimum would be two.
Kick off for each half.
There is no ‘overtime’ in football.
However in cup competitions there can be Extra Time if the tie is even after 90 minutes.
The only exception to this is if Manchester Utd are at home in a league match and the match is tied the game enters ‘Fergie Time’ whereupon the match continues until Utd score.
He wasn’t talking about soccer, he was talking about football.
Plus ca change, eh?
Indeed. We like to take the piss out of Americans and others for calling it soccer, but in fact that term is and always has been commonly used here (Britain). There are several TV programmes, magazines etc. with the word “soccer” in the title.
I think it’s partly because Americans always call it soccer, apart from that small band of aficionados who follow the game closely. And also perhaps because, over here, “soccer” is sometimes used by people who prefer rugby or other varieties of football, and who maybe resent the idea that “football” automatically means association football. Coming from them, “soccer” can sound a little dismissive.
But you’re right, there is no actual basis for rolling our eyes when people call it soccer.
It seems trivially easy to find references to South Africans calling the sport “soccer.” I mean, just just a quick Google search and read person after person explaining why it’s called soccer in South Africa. In fact, it’s frequently referred to as “soccer” on the website of the South African Football Association. The fact that SAFA calls itself that doesn’t necessarily mean common people don’t say “soccer.” As I’ve pointed out, the Australian association used to use “football” even though Australians call it soccer, and now that I think about it, Canada’s two pro soccer teams are official styled with the word “football” even though Canadians call it soccer. Even French Canadians call it le soccer.
It certainly seems that a LOT of South Africans call the sport soccer. And the point remains that most people who grow up speaking English call it soccer.
You have missed the point entirely- or not actually read my post, more likely. As I pointed out, Britons call it soccer sometimes. However, that is not the primary name of the sport in Britain, and it isn’t in South Africa either. There are several posts from South Africans about this in the main WC thread, and the “WTF a tie?” Pit thread.
More than half of all the people who speak English as a first language are American, so that is rather less than surprising.
Again, this is a matter I went to some effort to address in my first post on the matter; as the populations of Canada and Australia both call it soccer, and it appears quite a great many South Africans and most New Zealanders do as well, the overwhelming population of the USA isn’t the only reason most English speakers call it soccer. If the population of the United States was exactly the same as the UK’s, it would still be the case that most people raised speaking English would call it “soccer.”
“Soccer” is in fact the standard term for the sport in most of the English-speaking world.
What part of this don’t you understand? South Africans call it football. Sometimes they call it soccer. The equivalent is “gridiron” for football (though soccer is more common) or “fucking boring” for baseball.
Think of ALL the things for which Americans and Britons use different words. Why do you people get your knickers/panties in a bunch every four years on this ONE thing?
Speaking for myself, I’ll have you know my panties are constantly bunched.
Back to the OP: I always figured it was because every score ends in a kick unless time has expired, of course. You score 3 with your foot and after you score 6, you get one more for 1. Then you go and kick it again.
You don’t need safeties or the end of the game. What if, in the final seconds of the first half, you score a TD and then go for the conversion? Then you kick off to start the second half. That’s only two kicks and the game wasn’t even tied at the half, let alone require overtime.
Add Ireland to the list of countries that call the World Cup sport “soccer”. “Football”, there, means Gaelic rules football. What all are the English-speaking countries that do call it “football”? It seems like that’d be a shorter list. Meanwhile, look at all the countries that speak romance languages, but call the World Cup sport “futbol” or something similar, instead of “pedbol”.
While we’re at it, the reason the sport (any version of it) is called “football” isn’t even because of the kicking in the first place. It’s because the players are all on foot, as opposed to polo.
Considering that polo doesn’t appear in English until 1872, while football was recorded as early as 1409, I give you an A+ for creativity and an F- for accuracy.
Exactly. This is what I was referring to when I mentioned that Wikipedia had a good explanation for the name.
To those who misunderstood: The OP was not meant to disparage people who call American football ‘football’. I was just curious if kids, not knowing the etymology of football mentioned by Chronos above, where curious enough to wonder about the name of a sport in which the foot and the ball don’t come into that much contact (considering the entire duration of the game)
From Wikipedia
The word “polo” may be new, but English gentry has been playing games on horseback since the middle ages. The commoners, being common, played on foot. With a ball. Hence, “foot-ball”.
Nope, it’s hardly the only case in which there’s a disparity of English terms between nations. See also fag, holiday, lift, etc.
Did I say in the OP, or anywhere else in this thread, that you should be “suspect” of the name because of the disparity in terms with other countries?
No, I just thought one might be curious about the name just because it doesn’t (on the surface) seem to jive with what is actually going on during the game. Even if no other country in the world existed, the name should have made some people question it (as, apparently, it did, as seen in some of the replies in this thread)
That smells like urban legend to me. The references in the Wikipedia article all go back to one person, a Bill Murray (not *the *Bill Murray). The idea that there was this class of sports that “aristocrats” enjoyed, all of which apparently required them to be on horseback…
I am sceptical. Surely most games are played on foot, even those enjoyed by posh people who can afford horses? Why didn’t they call croquet “football”, for example?
Because the length of a football is about a foot, and the diameter of a soccer ball isn’t?
That’s always been my response to this ridiculous notion.
Soccer should really be called kickball, but that’s already taken.