Only a name?
A football man — that is to say, a soccer man — took exception to what he seemed to consider a derogatory name for the world’s most popular sport.
He is not alone. Only recently, a columnist in a national newspaper revealed his revulsion at the use of the word while, over the years, I’ve lost track of the number of times the subject has been the occasion of heated and, invariably, drink-fuelled debate.
Just as well there aren’t more important things to be worrying about, eh? I suppose we must concede that, in Ireland, wrangling over the word does carry some significantly weighty historical baggage, the ancient antipathy in certain quarters to ‘foreign games’ making it a kind of Falklands/Malvinas of the Code Wars.
And while I don’t doubt that there are still a few sad backwoods folk out there who use ‘soccer’ with pejorative intent, it seems to me that the vast majority of GAA people who would use the word would do so simply for reasons of clarity.
Growing up in Kerry, for example, I would imagine it’s a useful distinction, otherwise some young lad or lass invited to come out and play an informal game of ‘football’ will, without clear instruction, run the risk of being ridiculed for either handling or not handling the ball.
Similarly, it’s understandable that, almost alone among the nations of the world, America has institutionalised the word soccer. Where the vast majority of FIFA members have football leagues and football associations, the US has Major League Soccer. But, again, the reason is clear enough: to distinguish the sport from America’s own infinitely more popular brand of domestic football.
That popularity might baffle many of us — just as we are bemused that the name ‘football’ can even be applied to a sport in which use of the hands is paramount — but given the prevailing reality of the situation, the official adoption of the word soccer in America makes complete sense.
Ditto Australia, another country with its own dominant brand of homegrown footie. Hence, there too the diminutive of the term Association (as in Association Football) survives as the lingua franca, even if the game’s governing body did move to step into line with most of the rest of the world by changing its name from the Australian Soccer Association to Football Federation Australia in 2005.
Growing up in Dublin in the ’60s, as I did, football meant soccer, the rival game being ‘Gaelic’ or ‘gah’. With most of our football being played on the street, realistically it was only ever going to be one kind anyway, since scoring a point would invariably mean your precious ball disappearing over a roof.
But I don’t recall there ever being any kind of preciousness about what we called our favourite game, the terms football and soccer being more or less interchangeable. Probably we were just too busy playing it and loving it to get hung-up about labels. Kids, eh?
Actually, as I think about it, ‘soccer’ seemed to be in much wider usage back then, even in the self-styled home of the game. In England, ‘football’ might have been the name used on the ground and in the grounds, but some of the sport’s most celebrated chroniclers were happy to give ‘soccer’ an airing, especially when they went between hard covers.
Three of the greatest ever books on football by three of the greatest ever football writers are still within easy reach on my shelves – The Soccer Syndrome by John Moynihan (1965), The Football Man – People & Passions In Soccer by Arthur Hopcraft (1968) and Great Moments In Sport — Soccer by Geoffrey Green (early ’70s). Moynihan, long associated with the Sunday Telegraph, only passed away in January of this year and, in praising The Soccer Syndrome as “one of the best books ever written about football and the emotion it generates”, the columnist James Lawton took great relish in recalling one especially memorable passage in which Moynihan “wrote heart-rendingly of the end of an affair, in Paris, which was redeemed only by the fact that the woman he loved, who was telling him that she had found a new interest, had her back to a café television set which was providing him with a grainy but utterly unequivocal picture of the unfolding genius of the teenage Pele”.
Now, that’s a football man all right.
Whereas, frankly, I would have my suspicions about some of those who are only too quick to take umbrage when the perceived profanity of ‘soccer’ is used in their presence. Often, it seems to me, there’s more than a hint of self aggrandisement at work, a kind of holier-than-thou impulse which is intended to convey nothing more or less than that the aggrieved individual is a more authentic football man than the next.
This despite the rather awkward fact that some of the loudest whingers on the subject wouldn’t dream of darkening the door of a League of Ireland ground and are content to sustain an ostensibly deep and passionate relationship with their chosen club in England solely through the medium of the barstool and Sky Sports.
Methinks they doth protest too much.
