On October 26, 1863, a group of the representatives from eleven football clubs met at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London to discuss the creation of a set of unifying rules for the game we now know as soccer. Football, as it was called then, was not so much an organized sport in the way it is now, and in fact often involved players carrying the ball with their hands, teams of 16 to 20 men, and the wearing of colored hats to indicate teams. The rules of the game varied depending on where the game was being played, and thus, at the request of one of the team organizers, the group met to formalize a set of rules that would allow for regular and broad competition throughout England. The first meeting was introductory, creating the organization and setting up another meeting of the representatives to begin hashing out just what these official rules would include.
Even by the mid-1800’s, football was an old sport. It had begun in schoolyards where boys would kick and throw a ball around. The game developed according to the surroundings, and boys who were playing on rocky fields that prevented accurate kicking of the ball began playing variants with throwing as a central feature. Those with smoother playing surfaces played a game that was far more focused on the dribbling of the ball with the feet. These games all fell under the broad definition of football, a sport that was growing in all incarnations. The representatives that met at the Freemasons’ Tavern that night were from a diverse set of teams from all walks of life. In attendance were educational institutions like the Blackheath Proprietary School and the Forest School, adult clubs like No Name Kilburn and Barnes, and even a team comprised of government workers recorded in the logs simply as War Office.
As they began to hash out the rules for their game at the second meeting of the Football Association, it became clear that a rift was forming. The main points of contention were over the use of hands and throwing, and the use of violence, but specifically the ability to hack at an opponents shins with the intent of bringing him down. This split would never be bridged, and some of the clubs that had sent representatives chose not to join the new Football Association when it officially published regulation forbidding passing with the hands during the run of play. These fleeing clubs continued to develop their version of the game and, in 1871, formed their very own formalized group called the Rugby Football Association.
This schism is where the confusion with modern terminology for the game arises. All versions of the game, both those involving the hands and those eschewing their use, had been colloquially referred to as football. As they both became more entrenched and took increasingly divergent paths, (paths so different that today they are not readily recognizable as related in any way other than that they both involve running around a green field with a ball) it became more confusing when they were both called by the same name. And so, rugby football became just rugby, while association football, which was, and still is, the formal name for the type of football played by the Football Association, was shortened to soccer, taking the middle portion of the word association. While the English actually called the sport soccer for over a hundred years, they began to return to the original and formal name for the sport when they felt that the word soccer had been corrupted by the Americans, who, at least in the 1980’s, used the term mostly to refer to the kind of mom who was shuttling kids back and forth to soccer practice. And so, linking together the chain of events we can see that the reason Americans call the sport by a different name is somehow because of Rugby.