Why is it called American football when players use their hands?

Carrying the ball was already legal in rugby football, whose rules American colleges adopted, and rugby still counted as football. The American game kept the name while its scoring moved from the kick to the touchdown between 1898 and 1912, and throwing the ball forward was illegal until 1906.

Is America the only country that calls football soccer?

No, association football is also called soccer in Australia, Canada and South Africa, and sometimes in Ireland and New Zealand, according to Wikipedia's Football article. The word is British slang built from Assoc., short for Association football, and was in print in English school magazines by 1885. Stefan Szymanski of the University of Michigan found that British use of soccer peaked between 1960 and 1980, and that Americans adopted the word later to distinguish the game from gridiron football.

Why do Australians call it soccer and not football?

For the same reason Americans do: to tell it apart from other football codes. Football Australia's own history says a handling game influenced by Rugby School and the Victorian code were popular before 1880s immigration brought newcomers, some of whom knew the Football Association game, and that association football was 'sometimes now called British football or soccer to distinguish it from the other codes'. The national governing body carried soccer in its name from the 1920s until it became Football Federation Australia in 2005.

Why Is American Football Called Football? So Was Rugby

Q: Why is American football called football?

Because it grew out of the football games American colleges were already playing, and its rules descend from rugby football, one branch of a family of ball games that all shared the name. Harvard took up the rugby game after playing McGill University in 1874. Early scoring still favoured the kick: in 1891 a field goal was worth 5 points and a touchdown 4, or 6 if the kick at goal after it succeeded.

Under the rules Walter Camp printed in 1891, a touchdown came with an obligation: “A side which has made a touch-down in their opponents’ goal must try at goal.” The kick decided what the touchdown was worth, 6 points if it cleared the cross-bar and 4 if it missed. A goal kicked from the field, with no touchdown at all, counted 5.

Camp, who would become known as the father of American football, set out those values in his book American Football. He called the book’s first chapter “English and American Rugby”, and its opening sentence says where his game came from: “it is from the Rugby Union Rules that our American Intercollegiate game was derived”.

Why is American football called football?

American football is called football because it grew out of the football games American colleges were already playing, and its rules descend from rugby football, one of several games that shared the name. Rugby, in which carrying the ball was legal, reached the United States through Harvard’s 1874 games against McGill. The early game favoured the kick: in 1891 a field goal outscored a touchdown, 5 points to 4.

As for why football is called football at all, the word is older than every code that uses it now, from association and rugby to Gaelic and Australian rules. Etymonline records it in the mid-1300s as the name of the inflated ball, and by about 1400 as “any open-air game involving kicking a ball”.

Rugby was one school’s football

Rugby School was one of many English public schools with its own version of football, the World Rugby Museum notes, and the rules differed from school to school. Rugby union and rugby league are named for Rugby School because both evolved from its version of the game. The kicking version was codified as association football in 1863.

Camp drew the same line in 1891. The Association game’s “essential characteristic is, that it is played with the feet, in distinction from the Rugby, in which the ball may be carried in the hands.” Carrying the ball made a game rugby, and rugby was still football.

Harvard learned the rugby game from McGill

American college football began as a kicking game. On 6 November 1869, the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s chronology records, Rutgers and Princeton played “a college soccer football game, the first ever”, using “modified London Football Association rules”. Etymonline notes that Princeton called the game foot-ball.

Rugby came south from Montreal. The Canadian Encyclopedia says McGill University was invited to Harvard in 1874 and found on arrival that Harvard played a kicking game closer to soccer. Harvard won 3-0 under its own rules on 14 May, and the next day the sides tied 0-0 under Canadian rules. Then “Harvard took immediately to the new game and sent to England for the current rugby rules.”

The Hall of Fame dates the first written rules for American football to the Massasoit convention of 1876.

A touchdown once scored nothing

The Rugby Football Union’s first laws, from 1871, say “A match shall be decided by a majority of goals only”, and so does the edition adopted on 31 March 1874, about six weeks before Harvard played McGill. Touching the ball down behind the opponents’ goal line earned a kick: the side that touched down “shall try at goal either by a place-kick or a punt out.”

The rule Camp printed in 1891 is the same law, reworded twenty years later. The World Rugby Museum’s most notable example of the flawed goals-only system comes from 1872: Royal High School Former Pupils scored eight tries to Edinburgh University’s two, each side converted one, and the published result was a draw.

The word touchdown came with the rules. Etymonline dates it to 1864, “originally in rugby”. The NFL rulebook defines a Try as “the attempt by a team that has scored a touchdown to add one point (by a field goal) or two points (by a touchdown)”, so even the extra-point kick is a field goal in the rulebook’s own words.

Under the Rugby Football Union’s first laws, a touchdown scored nothing. It earned a try at kicking the goal, and the NFL rulebook still calls the play that follows a touchdown a Try.

Four rule changes turned the scoring around

The Hall of Fame chronology dates each change that reversed the 1891 values.

Season	Touchdown	Field goal
1891, in Camp’s book	4	5
1898	5	5
1904	5	4
1909	5	3
1912	6	3

Touchdown values leave out the kick at goal that followed, which in 1891 lifted a touchdown from 4 points to 6. The touchdown drew level in 1898, passed the field goal in 1904 and was worth exactly twice as much by 1912.

Throwing the ball forward was illegal for most of that stretch. The rules printed in Camp’s book allowed a pass “in any direction except towards opponents’ goal”, and the Hall of Fame records that “the forward pass was legalized” in 1906. In 1891 Camp called “skilled kicking” the only way to beat an aggressive defence.

The horseback story is a theory, the Webb Ellis story a legend

Two origin stories travel with this question, and neither is established fact.

The first says football was named for games played on foot, as opposed to on horseback. Wikipedia’s Football article carries it only as “an alternative explanation” to the version in which the ball “was apparently so named because it was moved with the feet.”

The second says William Webb Ellis invented rugby in 1823 by running with the ball. The World Rugby Museum answers “Did he invent rugby?” with “No”, and says the story was “first circulated by Matthew Bloxam in 1876”, more than 50 years later. The museum’s curator, Phil McGowan, points out that Bloxam had it from “an unnamed third party”. The oldest surviving version of Erik the Red’s sales pitch for Greenland was written later still, about 140 years after his voyage.

Even the commemorative stone at Rugby School calls the game football: it honours Webb Ellis’s “fine disregard for the rules of football”.

Soccer is British slang

The word Americans use for the other football is British. Etymonline traces it to “Assoc.”, short for association, and Andy Mitchell of Scottish Sport History has it in print by 1885, in three English school magazines, spelled “Soccer” or “Socker”. Stefan Szymanski of the University of Michigan found that it was “only later adopted by Americans to distinguish it from gridiron”, and that British use peaked between 1960 and 1980, according to the university’s 2014 release.

Between 1898 and 1912 the points moved from the kick to the touchdown, and the name never followed them. Like the em dash, which kept a name borrowed from a capital M it no longer matches, American football still carries the name of the kicking game it started as. Strictly FYI.