"Football" and "Soccer"

First is a point of order—it's also frequently called "soccer" in South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, among other English-speaking places.

The Wikipedia article on the topic is "Association football", which is the full formal name of the sport—its governing body FIFA stands for "Fédération Internationale de Football Association", which in English is "International Federation of Association Football". If you want to be perfectly unambiguous, just call it "association football", and you can be sure that almost no one will know just what you mean.

In my experience as an American, when English people are discussing soccer they call it "football" and when it becomes apparent there may be some confusion they clarify by calling it "real football", which is delightfully arrogant.

However, once it's been clarified which sport is being discussed, we Americans are perfectly capable of understanding they mean "soccer" when they say "football".

The name soccer is derived from Association Football in the same way that rugger is derived from Rugby Football. In other words, it has its origin in the upper class slang of boys’ boarding schools. For this reason, among others, many English people dislike that name.

Here’s a little taxonomy of football:

The insets are descendants, not varieties.

• Association Football (soccer)
• Rugby Football (rugger)
  • American Rules Football
  • Canadian Rules Football
• Gaelic Football (Gaelic) (shares many rules with Hurling, which is not a football code)
  • International/Compromise Rules Football (with input from Australian Rules)
• Australian Rules Football
  • International/Compromise Rules Football (with input from Gaelic)

I'm neither British nor American, but I'm fairly sure most Britons know about the word "soccer", so there wouldn't be big misunderstandings while visiting America even when they prefer to call the sport "football" themselves.

I imagine they might utter some clarification ...

They were playing football – oh, that's soccer for you guys – yesterday.

...and probably some clever or slightly condescending remark about the fact that a different word is used. Or maybe even a little rant, like this one by John Cleese. ;-)

I live in Melbourne, Australia and there's this sport called Footy which is believed to be "the real football"! Irony of it is that they mostly hand pass the ball (good guess, it's not round!) and sometimes kick it around the field as well!

So, whenever they talk football here, visitors usually don't have any idea what they are talking about.