It has been an issue which has baffled me for years now, how the American nation took the name of the sacred game for their dressed up rugby and lumbered the rest of us with that horrible s-word, soccer.
With the World Cup about to launch a deluge of sicknotes around the world as billions of people dedicate their life to the great game for a month, here I am writing an article under the category of recreation and sport : soccer! Why? because the internet has become an honorary US citizen.
Everyone else in the world uses the word FOOTBALL. It's the FIFA World Cup (Fdration Internationale de Football Association) after all, and you'll notice that even in French the word football is quite clear! So how did we let this happen? Did we let this happen?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not being anti-American. I just want our word back, you call your thing Gridiron right? So you don't need our immortal phrase. But this does show how the internet has globalised all of us, and our language. I mean try a search for football on google.com and you'll get a load of this nancy-rugby sport, but do the same on google.co.uk (and you may have to select the 'pages from the UK' option) and none of such rubbish.
Football is the same the world over, just with a few different accents here and there. - In Brazil they say 'Football'
- In Germany they say 'Football', or fussball or something
- In Argentina they say 'Football'
- In Italy they say 'Football'
- In Uruguay they say 'Football'
- In France they say 'Football'
- In England we say 'Football'
...so that's all the countries that have won the World Cup then, all united in the fact that the greatest game on earth is called FOOTBALL. |
