Tell that to @[email protected], who came in just before you in my notifications inbox (though that’s reverse chronological, so obviously your comment was written much earlier…) edit: disregard. They were apparently trolling

But yeah, the history of football as a class of sports is really interesting. You may know this, but I strongly suspect at least some people who might read this comment won’t know it, especially the sorts of people who get upset by “soccer”, so I’ll share, briefly, some of the interesting history.

Football sports throughout England have a long history, but football codes as we know them today really only begin to take shape in the 19th century. Different schools and towns would have different variations in rules around things like catching the ball, tripping, “hacking”, and a whole bunch of other factors. If two teams from different regions wanted to play, they first had to agree to a set of compromise rules. Sort of like how “International Rules Football” is a compromise between Australian Rules Football and Gaelic Football occasionally used for matches between AFL players and Gaelic Football players in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Rugby School actually codifiers their set of rules far earlier than the Football Association, but later in the 19th century, a bunch of different clubs get together to form the Football Association to try to come up with a standard set of rules everyone can use. Ultimately, Rugby School and a few others cannot come to agreement with those who remain in the Football Association, and so we end up with rugby football and association football, sometimes called rugger and soccer for short. Both sports end up evolving a lot after this stage, but this is where we can first concretely start talking about rugby and soccer as discrete sports. But both share a common history, and neither has a better claim to the name “football”.

American football also evolves more or less out of this same place, coming not out of rugby as is sometimes claimed, but out of that pre-standardisation football, albeit clearly with more influence from the rules that would end up becoming rugby than those that would end up becoming soccer. The same is largely true of Australian football, which drew heavily from Eton and Rugby school rules, among others, though there are some claims also that it may have borrowed from indigenous Australian games, or that it shares a history with Gaelic football. Even Gaelic football traces its origins in much the same way, albeit out of local Irish football-type games rather than schools like Eton and Rugby, along with much later influences from England after rugby and association football started being played in Ireland.