How Soccer Vs Football Went From A Debate To World Cup Beer

Where Does The Word Soccer Come From? A New World Cup Beer And The Debate That Won't End

2026, Beth Fuller

Ahead of the first World Cup hosted on American soil since 1994, a craft brewery in Rhode Island has put a the soccer versus football debate on a beer can. The beer is a clean, mildly citrusy American Golden Ale in a red, white, and blue can called It’s Called Soccer, and it carries more linguistic and cultural history than a six-pack probably should.

The question of what to call the sport has followed Americans for as long as they've had a seat at the table. It shows up in Reddit threads, in comment sections during every major tournament, in the friendly and sometimes less friendly banter between American fans and the rest of the world over whether the word is soccer or football. For most people, the debate is surface-level — a running joke with just enough edge to feel like it means something. The history underneath it, though, is stranger than the joke.

Where Did The Word Soccer Actually Come From?

The word appears to have been coined at Oxford University in the 1880s, according to Dr. Stefan Szymanski, professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, who has written extensively on the word’s history. It is thought to be a byproduct of the British habit of clipping long institutional names, the same pattern that turned rugby football into rugger. At Oxford and Cambridge, adding -"er" to shortened words was a popular fad, and students shortened the phrase association football, the game the Football Association had codified in 1863, to its middle syllables and arrived at soccer.

For most of the next century, the word lived comfortably in British English. Szymanski tracked both words across British and American publications throughout the twentieth century and found that British newspapers used soccer regularly, treating it as an ordinary alternative. The two words were nearly interchangeable in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s, and once American fandom grew and the word became more closely associated with American English, British usage declined through the 1980s and 1990s.

How A British Word Became An American One

The shift can be described as vernacularization, the slow shift by which a borrowed word stops feeling borrowed. For American soccer fans, that shift played out over decades, through World Cups and watch parties and endless arguments online, until the word had stopped feeling like anyone else's.

A post on r/football, laid out the full linguistic history and drew responses that are still arriving as recently as last year. The reactions range from someone proposing American football be renamed "throweggcatchegg" to a user declaring flatly, "it’s called football, be quiet." The post has continued to collect comments across five years from people who cannot stop arguing about what to call a sport they love.

How A Chant Became A Can

Brendan O’Donnell, CEO of Newport Craft Brewing & Distilling Co., was eight years old during the last time the US hosted the World Cup. "I went to the 1994 World Cup with my dad and first heard the chants, 'It's called soccer,'" he says. “That moment stayed with me because it was about more than the game. It was about being part of something collective, something you could hear, feel, and even taste in the atmosphere around you.”

Thirty years later, that memory became a beer. Newport Craft Brewing & Distilling Co., is launching It's Called Soccer this spring as an American Golden Ale designed for approachability — light, easy-sipping, and meant to be shared. The beer is available on tap at select locations across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York, with shipping available nationally through the brewery's retail partners.

American beer consumption is at its lowest point in nearly ninety years, according to Gallup's 2025 survey, and the World Cup is the biggest stage the industry has to work with this summer. Michelob Ultra is the official beer sponsor.

Budweiser is running a nostalgia campaign built around its 40-year tournament sponsorship. Diageo signed on with Don Julio, Johnnie Walker, and Smirnoff. The Beer Institute identified the World Cup and the country’s 250th anniversary as the two cultural moments most likely to shape beer in 2026, noting that both center on what beer has historically done well — bringing people together in shared moments.

For American soccer fans, the word stopped being borrowed a long time ago. The name on that can will get a chuckle this summer, and the beer will end up in a cooler enjoyed by someone who’s been saying it their whole life. The debate over what to call the sport goes further than any single piece can cover, but for the fans who will be watching this summer, the tension has become part of what makes the whole thing theirs.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com