16 June 2006
Football fan-dom, part 1
During this World Cup season, it has been reported that as many as 1 in 5 men are taking leave to watch the games. Even outside of Cup season, many men follow sports, especially soccer, avidly. Why? And why is the following mostly male? Yawning Bread conducted a survey during the first 2 weeks of June, and here, I present a part of the results. Full essay.
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2 comments:
no surprising results from the survey, but I'd like to comment on "soccer" vs "football".
The sport is officially known as "football" in the FIFA world cup and Olympics. Though the term "soccer" originated in England, it is most commonly used by the Americans.
If you search for "soccer" on Wikipaedia, it re-directs you to "football". Their entry also mentions that "football" is perhaps the most widely used term for the sport.
So it's not really a Singapore-centric term, like your example of "MRT".
You don't have grounds nor facts to conclude on the origins of the word 'soccer'. Truth, is that there is no evidence of the word 'soccer' being used at some point in england. If used at all, it was in a couple of schools and for a very limited amount of time. See logs, papers at the time for those schools. Football has always been the word used to refer to the game that the world knows as football.
Instead, there is plenty of evidence of US organizations and gridiron fans pushing the word 'soccer' as a correct term to use when referring to football. This is wrong and simplistic.
I would encourage you to check who posted the argument; as seen in the paragraph that you use as an explanation of why the word 'soccer'. It's a poor attempt of a gridiron site to explain the why of 'soccer'.
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