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Soccer? Don't The English Call It Football?
Rare souvenir poster map, celebrating the history of English professional football, which is curiously called Soccer in the title, suggesting that perhaps it was made for an American audience, rather than an English audience.
The "Pictorial Map of Soccer" offers a detailed insight into the history of English professional football up to the year 1971.
Covering the geography of England and Wales, the map overlays the terrain with the context of football. Each football club's location is indicated.
At the top corners of the poster, representations of the Football Association Challenge Cup and The Football League Cup are proudly displayed, emblematic of the prestige and importance of these competitions in English football.
The map's left column contains a list of over 50 professional football clubs, providing essential information about each one, including their names, nicknames, team colors, and dates of foundation. This veritable encyclopedia of clubs offers a comprehensive view of the landscape of English professional football as it stood at the time.
The opposite column, meanwhile, highlights the winners of the F.A. Challenge Cup from 1872 to 1970, recognizing the achievements of the teams that claimed this coveted prize during the competition's first century.
Four separate text boxes distributed across the poster present key moments and transitions in English football history. One box recounts significant milestones in the history of football from 1846 to 1971. Another lists the teams that were promoted or relegated in the Football League between 1923 and 1970, tracing the shifting fortunes of these clubs. A third box highlights the champions of the Football League from 1889 to 1970, while a fourth box displays World Cup statistics at the bottom center of the poster.
In a nod to the players who shaped the game, the map also includes a list of 24 players who made significant contributions to their teams and the sport. Names like George Best, Bobby Charlton, and Gordon Banks are featured, linking the past of English football with the time the map was made.
Overall, the "Pictorial Map of Soccer" serves as a detailed chronicle of English professional football up to 1971. It's a carefully curated collection of information, a celebration of the sport's history, and a tribute to the clubs and players who shaped it. It provides not just a geographical overview but also a temporal journey through the football landscape of England and Wales.
Etymology and History of The Word "Soccer"
While in modern times, the popular British culture has considered the word "Soccer" as a pejorative Americanism, the word is deeply rooted in British Football history.
The nickname soccer began as upper-class Oxford slang in the late 1860s. Students needed a short handle for the newly codified “Association Football” (rules agreed by the FA in 1863) to set it apart from Rugby Football. They clipped Assoc. to “soc ca/ soc ker,” adding the fashionable -er ending used in words like rugger and brekker. Although legend credits England international Charles Wreford-Brown with the coinage, evidence shows the term was already in circulation when he reached Oxford in 1886; its first known appearance in print is a December 1885 school magazine that spoke of “the most important Socker game played in Oxford this term.”
From the 1890s the word migrated from public-school circles into mainstream British journalism, where it served as a handy label whenever rugby, Gaelic or Australian codes might cause confusion. Newspaper databases and book-title surveys show that usage rose steadily through the inter-war years and, according to economist Stefan Szymanski’s corpus study, soccer reached peak popularity between about 1960 and 1980, appearing almost interchangeably with football in everything from match reports to coaching manuals.
The tide turned in the 1980s. As the game’s profile grew in the United States—and the word soccer became fixed there to distinguish the sport from gridiron (American Football)—British writers and fans began to treat the term as an unwelcome “Americanism.” Its frequency in titles such as The Times plummeted to single-digit percentages, and today it survives in Britain chiefly in historic club names and contexts aimed at global audiences, even while remaining the default term across North America, Australia and much of Asia.
