Bofferbrauer said:
Wow, now that's really lazy naming. It's as if Each videogame would only be called Videogame with the name of the developer and maybe a number |
Yes and no. What we now call soccer/football did not exist before the late 1800's. Before then just about every school in Britain had its own rules for its local dismounted team game. Since there was usually just one such game, it was natural to call it "football," even if your football was very different than the football played literally down the road. To go with your example, it's as if every house only had one videogame, so if I invited you to my place to play a "videogame" it might be anything from a shooter to a RPG.
It was only in the mid 19th-century that folks started trying to make the rules uniform, (my own pet theory is that this happened because travel was now more easier for teams and spectators thanks to railroads). It was a London based group, the Football Association, that got the standardization started in earnest, hence the name "association football," which was colloquially reduced to "soccer" by the British at the time. The story of why they settled on the current rules is a prety long but interesting one: I recommend looking it up if you ever have time.
As an aside, American football underwent a nearly identical process. In fact, the reason why you're allowed to carry the ball in American football is primarily due to Harvard insisting on a game that's more like rugby: the other major schools wanted something closer to soccer, and if they'd had their way we Americans would probably be playing soccer instead of football today. So even Harvard was able to contribute positively to the world at one point.
