The History of Soccer and the World Cup: A Short Introduction

The History of Soccer and the World Cup: A Short Introduction Every four years, humanity undergoes a great increase in its number of soccer fans — or rather, football fans, depending on what part of the world we’re talking about. That’s not to imply that the world otherwise suffers from a dearth of enthusiasts of that particular sport. Nor is football an obscure secondary term: the language of most every country obsessed with the thing itself has localized that name for it, resulting in a variety of words from fútbol to futbol to futebol to Fußball. There remains the matter of calcio, but then, Italians have always done things their own way. So do Americans, as this year’s World Cup has emphasized, but you’ll find that soccer actually turns out not to have originated as yet another awkward custom exclusive to the United States. In fact, it derives from a few letters of the full British name of the game, “association football.” Commonly heard in the U.K. up until the nineteen-se