Do the England team play football, footer, footie – or soccer?

I have never been a soccer mom, described in the Washington Post as ‘the overburdened, middle-income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school’. That was in 1996, during the American election campaign when Bill Clinton wished to appeal to this stereotype. I admit there have been days devoted to Veronica and gymkhanas, but that is a different matter.

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Julie Burchill

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I don’t understand why British writers should mind when the Americans call association football soccer. It used not to be foreign usage in this country. As Steve Hendricks, an American from Boulder, Colorado, points out in a well-researched paper on the origins of soccer, Jimmy Hill called a book Striking for Soccer (1961) and Matt Busby called another Soccer at the Top (1973).

There has been a tendency in the last few years to call football footie.