Soccer

Soccer (pronounced sok-er)

(1) A form of 11-a-side football played between two teams, in which the spherical ball may be advanced by kicking or by bouncing it off any part of the body (excluding the arms and hands unless re-starting the game by throwing in the ball from the sideline), the object being to score points by putting the ball in the opponent’s goal-net. The special position of goalkeeper may, within certain positional limitations, use their arms and hands to catch, carry, throw, or stop the ball.

(2) In the slang of Australian Rules Football (AFL, the old VFL), to kick the football directly off the ground, without use of the hands.

1888 A coining in British English, a colloquial abbreviation for association football, the construct being (As)soc(iation football) + -er.  The other forms were socker (1885) & socca (1889), the first known instance of soccer noted in 1888, the word coming into general use between 1890-1895 and it evolved from slang to a standard form.

The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English -ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or & -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our), from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.  Usually, the –er suffix was added to verbs to create a person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun and if added to a noun it usually denoted an occupation.  However, there was also the special case of the “slang –er”, which etymologists sometimes call the “Oxford –er” because of the association (though not the origin) of the practice with the university in the nineteenth century.  The slang –er was used as a suffix to make jocular or convenient formations from common or proper names and appears to first have been English schoolboy use in the 1860s before entering the vernacular via its introduction to Oxford University slang from Rugby School, the Oxford English Dictionary even identifying the first documented instance “at University College, in Michaelmas Term, 1875".  The first coining was probably rugger (the game of Rugby) and constructs on the same model include brekker (breakfast), fresher (freshman), leccer (lecture), footer (football), fiver (five-pound note) and tenner (ten-shilling note).  The practice continued in the twentieth century and some coinings endured in the plural such as preggers (pregnant), bonkers (behaving as if bonked on the head) and starkers (stark naked).  Given it was originally the work of schoolboys, some have expressed surprise they didn’t instead render a verbal shorthand of “Association Football” in a form using “ass” (although at Oxford it briefly was assoccer before quickly being truncated).

Football-type games have been documented for centuries and it seems likely something similar was probably played in prehistoric times on occasions when young people congregated but the point of Association Football was that in 1863 it codified a set of rules, allowing structured competitions to be formed.  Prior to that, clubs abd schools played many variations of the game and this caused difficulties when the young men met at university, finding no general agreement on the rules.  The University of Cambridge did create their own rule book but it was but one of many and it was this proliferation which lead to the formation of the association, the discussions eventually producing not only the rules of what would emerge as modern football (soccer) but also the schism which saw some schools and clubs go in another direction and play what became known first as rugby football and later simply rugby.  Later still, when it suffered its own schism and begat rugby league, the name “rugby union” emerged although “rugby” remains most common.

In most parts of the world, the game is known as football but in places where other forms of (closely or vaguely) similar ball sports had become popular and referred to either officially or casually as “football”, soccer was adopted as the preferred term for what was, at the elite level, a minority sport.  Thus in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa & Ireland the game came to be called soccer although, in New Zealand, beginning in the late twentieth century, “football” increasingly supplanted “soccer”, the assumption being that because the volume of overseas matches televised (with the native commentary) vastly exceeded that of local content, the word became accepted.  Additionally, because the rugby codes (historically rugby union and increasingly after the 1980s rugby league so dominated) and the common slang was “footie” rather than “football”, the latter in that sense never achieved the critical mass needed to entrench use.

It was different in Australia because of Australian Football which, while occasionally called “Aussie Rules” has long been commonly known as football (or footie) so the round-ball game became soccer and the name Socceroo (the construct being socce(r) + (kanga)roo)) was adopted as the official name for the national team.  In Japan, where the dominant influence on the language in the twentieth century was the US, the most common form is サッカー(sakkā, from soccer).  In the US, a hybrid (with a few unique innovations) of rugby and association football emerged and was soon more popular than either.  The early name was “gridiron football” but in the pragmatic American way, that quickly became simply “football” although curiously, “gridiron” has survived among many foreign audiences.  Realizing the linguistic batter was lost, the United States Football Association, which had formed in the 1910s as the official organizing body of American soccer, in 1945 changed its name to the United States Soccer Football Association before deciding the advantages of product differentiation should be pursued, deleting entirely any use of “football”.  The other great US contribution to the language was the “soccer mom”, an encapsulation of a particular (usually white), middle-class demographic describing (1) a woman who often drives her school-age children to sporting activities and (2) in a quasi-disparaging sense, a white, middle-class woman who obsessively talks of her children’s successes and achievements.  There are derivative terms such as soccer dad & ballet dad but they’ve never achieved the same cultural traction.

The well connected Sepp Blatter (b 1936; President of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 1998-2015).

(1) With Silvio Berlusconi (b 1936; thrice Italian prime minister 1994-2011).

(2) With Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001).

(3) With Elizabeth II; Queen of the UK and other places, 1952-2022).

(4) With the FIFA World Cup trophy (which hasn’t actually been a cup since 1974).

(5) With Vladimir Putin (b 1952; Russian president or prime-minister since 1999).

(6) With Benjamin Netanyahu (b 1946; thrice Israeli prime-minister 1996-2022).

(7) With David Cameron (b 1966; UK prime-minister 2010-2016).

(8) With Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al-Thani (b 1988; chief of Qatar's 2022 World Cup Bid).

(9) With Nicolas Sarközy (b 1955, French president 2007-2012).

(10) With Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (b 1954; Turkish president or prime-minister since 2003).

(11) With Boris Johnson (b 1964; UK prime-minister 2019-2022).

(12) With Kevin Rudd (b 1957; Australian prime-minister 2007-2010 & Jun-Sep 2013).

Unlike some sports where the influence of technology or improvements in this and that are so significant that it’s verges on impossible usefully to compare players from different eras, probably few would agree that among sports administrators, Sepp Blatter has achieved extraordinary things.

In office as president of FIFA between 1998-2015, Blatter devoted much of his time (and FIFA’s money) to building his power base among Football’s influential in Asia and Africa.  This attracted some comment from the football community in places like Europe and South America but in was in May 2015 he really made the headlines when a joint operation by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Swiss investigators staged a raid on the Zürich hotel where FIFA were about to conduct their annual congress.  Seven FIFA executives were arrested and charged with racketeering and money laundering while a further seven officials and sports-marketing figures were indicted by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for offenses reaching back more than two decades.  Shortly afterwards, the DoJ revealed four other executives and two companies had already pleaded guilty in the international probe, which involved the payment of some US$150 million in what were alleged to be bribes and kickbacks.  Despite it all, two days after the arrests, Blatter was re-elected president by nearly a two-thirds majority of the 209-member FIFA voting body.  Contrary to the president’s expectations, a public outcry ensued which in just a few days escalated so rapidly that Blatter called for a special session of the FIFA congress to be convened, vowing to resign once a successor had been elected.  In October 2015, following the announcements of further investigations of Blatter’s conduct, FIFA’s ethics committee suspended him from the organization for 90 days, appointing an acting president.

Two months later Blatter was found guilty of ethics violations and barred from football-related activities for eight years.  Some of the charges were pursuant to a US$2 million payment Blatter made in 2011 to Michel Platini (b 1955; president of Union des associations européennes de football (UEFA) 2007-2015), the supporting documentation associated with the payment said to be about as extensive as that attached to the receipt in the petty-cash tin for a packet of biscuits.  Platini had long been assumed to be Blatter’s successor.  Blatter appealed the decision and in February 2016 FIFA’s appeals committee reduced the ban to six years, a ruling upheld by the Tribunal arbitral du sport (Court of Arbitration for Sport in December (CAS).  Under new FIFA President Gianni Infantino (b 1970; FIFA president since 2016), further investigations were undertaken and in December 2020, FIFA filed a criminal complaint against Blatter relating to his role in the FIFA Museum project before in March 2021, citing financial wrongdoing in the payment of huge “bonuses”, imposing a fine of just over US$1 million and extending his ban from football for a further six years, beginning as soon as his original ban expired in October 2022.  That was bad enough but his life appeared to be getting worse when, in November 2021, Swiss authorities brought to trial fraud charges associated with the falsification of documents relating to the mysterious payments to Platini.  Some eight months later, Blatter and Platini were cleared of all charges.  Sepp Blatter has achieved extraordinary things.