Pcacmar

Welcome, and "Association Football"

Hi Pcacmar,

Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm replying to you on this page because, frankly, this issue has been done to death on the Association Football talk page. I invite you to look through the archives to read the debates.

Firstly let me say the title of this page is unlikely to ever be Football. That is because that name can be applied to many codes and variations, and is invariably applied to the most popular code in any region. Thus for people in the US it is American football, in Canada, Canadian football, in Australia, Australian football or sometimes, rugby league, and in New Zealand it is rugby union. In all these countries your football is almost always referred to as "soccer". Indeed I would bet that a good majority of your google hits for football were for other codes. Thus amongst the largest nations that speak English as a first language, it is only in the UK and maybe Ireland that football refers to association football. Therefore "Football" is just not available as a title for this article.

For a long time this article was titled "Football (Soccer)". This never really satisfied anybody, because it was against Wikipedia naming policies, and because it implied that football was a form of football called soccer.

So we came back to Association football. This is indeed the legal name for the game, no matter how infrequently used. It is called "Association Football" because it is the form of football codified by The Football Association in 1863. FIFA translates to "International Federation of Association Football". Consensus was that it is a better title for the article than "Football (Soccer)" and so after a long debate that is what it became.

You are of course welcome to suggest an alternative name. Just as long as it is not "Football" or "Football (Soccer)", as these would not get support. --Michael Johnson (talk) 03:19, 25 September 2008 (UTC)