[Sca-cooks] Soccer, was, Re: Juana la Loca
Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius
adamantius1 at verizon.net
Wed Feb 27 10:40:04 PST 2008
On Feb 27, 2008, at 1:28 PM, rattkitten at bellsouth.net wrote:
> Ok quibbling aside...
> What is the difference (for those of us who aren't sports
> enthusiasts) I thought Soccer was Football.
> Please explain. You can do so off list if we think it is going to
> start a whole sports thread. Cause I know that this is off topic.
> But I am curious.
I don't think there's much material for a separate thread. The deal is
that football of various kinds is ancient, and with the advent in the
19th century of things like steamships and train travel, intertown and
even international rivalries between teams of players of what used to
be a local or pick-up activity (just as was beginning to happen in the
US with baseball), developed, and it became necessary for teams to
agree on a set of rules. Previously rules were traditionally specific
to a given location or group of teams/players (such as with those
Robin Hood movies where they speak of Barnsdale rules for staff-
fighting, or Marquess of Queensbury rules for boxing).
Enter the European (or British, or whatever it was, it'd be easy to
look it up) Football Association, with its new set of written-down,
universal rules for all players and teams choosing to adhere to their
international standard. Games played according to those rules became
known as Association Football, to distinguish them from games that
weren't, such as Rugby Football (unique to a college and its environs,
originally).
"Soccer" is generally believed to be a typical British diminutive and
abbreviation for "Association".
Adamantius
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