The INCREDIBLE Mark Parisi has rocked it out of the park again with this one.
It has been debated whether it was actually George Bernard Shaw who said the US and the UK are two countries divided by a common language. Whoever it was that said it, in many instances it is true. For example,
- in the UK you wear your pants inside your trousers. In the US they are your trousers
- what is called a vest in the US is a waistcoat in the UK. A UK vest is like a tank top
Getting back to soccer/football:
English speaking countries that use the word soccer instead of football have another form of football (for example American football or rugby football) as their national sport. The word ‘soccer’ is probably derived from the term ‘association’ – as in association football. As an example: South Africa, which has rugby union football as the national sport, uses the word soccer to refer to what the UK calls football.
Wikipedia states the following: Where English is a first language, the unqualified use of the word football is used to refer to the most popular code of football in that region. The sports most frequently referred to as simply football are association football, American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby league football and rugby union football.
Americans are often surprised to find out that what they call soccer is the most popular sport in the world. ‘Soccer’ has 3.5 to 4 billion fans worldwide. American football by comparison has less than 200 million fans. My favourite sport is rugby but it’s never possible to watch the Rugby World Cup final on Swedish television. I tend to listen via radio.
The top sports in the world come as quite a surprise if you normally view sport only through European and US eyes. Asia and Africa tend to be forgotten markets when it comes to sport.
Interestingly, hockey in this article (link below image) seems to include both field and ice hockey. In Sweden people just say hockey to mean ice hockey, but in South Africa hockey means field hockey and ice hockey is named as such.
I think the South Africans, Kiwis and West Indians might have a few words to say about where cricket is played…
And there’s Rugby Union and Rugby League. Again, that list of countries is pretty poor; Union is played fairly widely in Europe (France, Italy, Scotland, Wales & Ireland certainly; maybe they fell for the old ‘England = Britain’)…
Probably! My family is cricket-mad. I like day-night cricket but those five-day matches growing up were almost the death of me!
I played rugby in college and this quote is VERY on point: “football is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.” My coach described it as controlled violence!
Very confusing – LOL. We have Canadian football, with an oval, brown ball. We also have “soccer” with the black/white sectioned round ball and we also have Rugby but that is where I am lost. I know that we play all three in town here but I am not a fan so not really sure re difference between Rugby and what we call “soccer”. My silly for the day!