How did American football get named football, when everywhere else football refers to soccer?
I'm assuming football (soccer) was named football before American football was invented, but please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption. If that's true, why did the creators of American football choose the same name? It's confusing.
Answers ( 1 )
Originally, the game that Americans call soccer was also called soccer in England (where the sport first gained great popularity). There were a number of different kinds of "football" there -- rugby football and association football being the most popular. The former was shortened to just "rugby", but the latter wasn't shortened to "association", or even to just "ass", because that's kind of rude. :-) But "soccer" actually game from the word "asSOCiation", believe it or not, so the two sports were rugby and soccer -- for a while. But eventually soccer became far more popular than rugby and they sort of switched back to calling soccer "football", since it was the predominant sport.
American football is referred to around the world as "gridiron football", to differentiate it from the other two forms of football. In the US, rugby and soccer fell off in popularity as gridiron football gained popularity over the decades and eventually it became football here (just as soccer became "football" in England). I doubt there was ever any malice or forethought about using the same word to describe two different sports on different sides of the Atlantic -- it just worked out that way, based on the popularity of the different sports on the different continents.