A Brief History of Soccer and the World Cup

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-sev­en­ties, soc­cer even­tu­al­ly came in handy on the oth­er side of the pond to dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from what most of the world calls “Amer­i­can foot­ball.”

As explained in about 20 min­utes in the Geo His­to­ry video at the top of the post, the his­to­ry of soc­cer, foot­ball, fút­bol, or what­ev­er you may call it is full of facts that will sure­ly sur­prise those of who only pay it any atten­tion when the World Cup comes around — and may occa­sion­al­ly sur­prise the die-hards who live and breathe the game even dur­ing the off years. For a much deep­er (and more humor­ous) dive into a nar­row­er slice of the past, we also have this two-hour his­to­ry of the World Cup from foot­ball YouTu­ber Vizeh.

If you want to avoid a name spe­cif­ic to any one nation­al lan­guage, you can always refer to “the beau­ti­ful game,” but even if that adjec­tive applies to the action on the field, at least on a good day, it sits less eas­i­ly with the pol­i­tick­ing, back­bit­ing, and not-always-above-board deal­mak­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic of its busi­ness and admin­is­tra­tion at a glob­al scale. The whole enter­prise has come to rep­re­sent all the glo­ries and ugli­ness of moder­ni­ty, reduced to a rigid­ly stan­dard­ized bat­tle­field on which increas­ing­ly many nations of the world aspire to achieve first pres­ence, then dom­i­na­tion. For exam­ple, South Korea, where I live, has made its seri­ous­ness on the pitch suf­fi­cient­ly known over four straight decades of World Cup par­tic­i­pa­tion that you might want to learn the Kore­an word chukgu — at least if the com­ing match with South Africa goes its way.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Restored Footage from the First World Cup: Uruguay, 1930

Pelé’s Great World Cup Goals (RIP)

Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Play­ing Goalie: “What I Know Most Sure­ly about Moral­i­ty and Oblig­a­tions, I Owe to Foot­ball”

The Mon­ty Python Phi­los­o­phy Soc­cer Match: The Ancient Greeks Ver­sus the Ger­mans

Why Jorge Luis Borges Hat­ed Soc­cer: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

The Rules of 100 Sports Clear­ly Explained in Short Videos: Base­ball, Foot­ball, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Crick­et, Pétanque & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.