At the 2026 World Cup draw, FIFA Peace Prize recipient and U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the game should really be called “football.”

“There’s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn’t make any sense,” said Trump, an apparently new convert to the round-ball game.

He isn’t alone. The word “soccer” is, in some parts of the world, shunned by some fans.

Indeed, as a scholar of the sport who teaches a course called Soccer and Global Politics, I am bombarded with comments that the word “soccer” does not make any sense, and that people who use that term obviously know nothing about the beautiful game.

To me, this disparagement of the word “soccer” is not only petty and tiresome – it is also incorrect. It ignores the roots of the sport and the development of the language of the........

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