Friday 25 February 2011

Football vs. Soccer - whyever there are 2 words ?!

Soccer or Football, football or Soccer ? - Whyever there are 2 expressions for the same sport? As we all know we tend to call it football in Britain whereas it is typically called soccer in the US to distinguish it from American football. Yet many different nations use the word football as a loan word and not necessarily for the same sport. Here come the Ladysoccer facts !

Ladyfact 1
Wikipedia redirects soccer to football. 1:0 for football !

Ladyfact 2
If you put soccer into Google Search it will show you around 293,000,000 results (23.02.11 @ 16.49).
For football it will display 948,000,000 results (same day @ 16.51). 2:0 for football !

Ladyfact 3
Google Search results for Ladies football are 53,200,000 (23.02.11 @16.53), for Ladies soccer results shown reach 26,600,000 (same day @ 16.53). Again another point for football and a few tears for the ladies.

Ladyfact 4
Wikipedia mentions following nicknames for football: footy / footie, the beautiful game, the world game.
Surprisingly I have never heard anyone say footy and I hope I never will. Whyever would anyone choose the foot part instead of the ball part, and with a minimisation that makes the sport sound cute ?!

Ladyfact 5
HowtoSayin tells you how to say football and I like football in different languages.
You can also translate football rocks, I love football, enjoy football & play football and some other rather strange combinations such as I like touch football. I wonder if this is part of football jargon. If not, it would be quite interesting to know how many people actually translate this sentence.

Ladyfact 6
Google Insights for Search shows how often football (blue) and soccer (red) have been put into the search engine in comparison (25.02.11 @ 10.50) :


Well, soccer nearly made it in 2006 !

So what is the conclusion ? - According to these facts football is more commonly used than soccer. Yet when we say soccer everyone knows exactly which sport is meant.
So why soccer for Ladysoccer ? - Because we love to know what is exactly meant :)
Posted by Suay at 02:57

3 comments:

  1. Mykl25 February 2011 at 06:56

    Touch Football is another name for American Football. I think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Martin S25 February 2011 at 09:05

    Ahh Touch Football is also a varient of Rugby!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_football_(rugby_league)

    So yep all the different footballs are very confusing.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Suay27 February 2011 at 03:31

    Thanks, guys !
    Another step towards my goal of being the ultimate soccer expert, although 'touch football' doesn't actually count as soccer.
    Another thing I found out: If you put 'footy' into Google it will show you 17,300,000 results ! It has even got an entry in Wikipedia.
    My personal highlight though is Footytube on http://www.footytube.com/

    ReplyDelete

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