\u201cWhen you look at what has happened to football in the United States, which is soccer in the United States, we seem to never call it [football] because we have a little bit of a conflict with another thing that\u2019s called football,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when you think about it, shouldn\u2019t it really be called … this is football, there\u2019s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn\u2019t make sense when you think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Soccer has a long history in the United States. \/ Stephen Dunn\/Allsport\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
While most common in the United States, the term \u201csoccer\u201d actually has British origins.<\/p>\n
The game known as \u201cfootball\u201d in the United Kingdom is officially recognized as \u201cassociation football,\u201d to keep itself separate from what is technically known as \u201crugby football.\u201d Players of the latter would shorten the name to \u201cruggers\u201d, while \u201cassociation football\u201d soon became \u201csoccers,\u201d but this term soon died out.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in North America, the sport of \u201cgridiron football\u201d exploded in popularity long before \u201cassociation football\u201d made its way across the ocean. Fans would regularly omit \u201cgridiron\u201d from its name, meaning \u201cfootball\u201d was already taken in the national lexicon. As a result, \u201csoccer\u201d became the preferred name.<\/p>\n
The name was formalized during the late 1900s. The United States Football Association became the United States Soccer Football Association in 1945 and ultimately settled on the United States Soccer Federation in 1974.<\/p>\n
The NFL, meanwhile, has had its name since 1922.<\/p>\n
READ THE LATEST SOCCER NEWS, TRANSFER RUMORS AND MATCH REACTION<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump urged the United States to settle on the side of \u201cfootball\u201d when it comes to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":331227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-331226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=331226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=331226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=331226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=331226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}