Team ratings...onto OT football/soccer discussion

[DoubleSkulls]

There are at least 6 sports I can think of called "Football" by their followers

Association Football (or soccer)
Rugby Union
Rugby League
Aussie Rules
Gaelic
American

Ian

[voyagers_uk]

If your nation invent a thing, you should name it as you want, I say we call whatever we like Football and not worry about which sport we are referring to.

after all American football = Monkey Tennis to me so I will call it football and chuckle to myself on the sly

Steve
An out in the open Gooner

[Mestari]

Pariah:
I'm still not trying to predict the winner, but the odds of winning. I admit that a 100% accurate system is practically impossible, but even with less accuracy there's a point to such system, because there are people who like to know the odds. You don't and I appreciate that, but let other people try to develop a system for determining the odds.

Marcus:
That's a really good point. Having played basketball where you score points all the time, luck is clearly not the biggest factor (except in close matches) as statistics step in because of the high amount of attempts.

Whether BB is like normal football I do not know but it's certainly closer to football than basketball, so certainties certainly do not exist. But I'm hopeful that the system now employed by the NAF is a good start for being able to somewhat accurately define the odds of winning.

EDIT:
PS. About the naming convention thing: people use different names - so what? I don't care about what names you use, as long as it is clear to everyone to which game are you referring to. Not much point in arguing about that.

[martynq]

Here's what i think. You come to my place, you call it soccer. I go to yours, i call it football.

OK, fair enough. It could be argued that this is our place though. JohnnyP is, I believe, British and as owner of these message boards, you could argue that this is British territory!

As this is the internet,
we're not at anyone's place.

In which case, shouldn't we follow international convention. The world governing body of football (or soccer as you would call it) is called FIFA and one of the Fs here stands for football. So the international name for this fine sport is football, not soccer.

Also, the population of the forum is about 50-50 Europe and North America (plus the occasional Australian and such), so we can't use that as an argument either.

Actually if you look on Deathwing's nationality polls, you will see that Europeans outnumber North Americans at the moment.

Because this is a forum about Blood Bowl, a game copied on American football (i say American in opposition to Canadian football, i couldn't care less about soccer), i think that sport is very much in the theme, and should win over soccer.

Except isn't the inventor of BB, Jervis Johnson, also British, and working for a company, Games Workshop, which began in the UK, so he would call American Football "American Football" and would call football/soccer "Football".

So let's call it soccer while we're here, ok?

I think this is a no from me!

Cheers,
Martyn

[DoubleSkulls]

So let's call it soccer while we're here, ok?

No. Soccer is a foreign word, that although I understand the meaning I wouldn't use in everyday speech.

[Deathwing]

Guys..we did this one during the World Cup.

Lucien:" and for the record, the term "soccer" was invented and first used (fairly broadly, apparently) in england... it's a derivative of the game having originally being called "Football Association" then split by some into just "football" and others into "association" the press seems to have held onto the association version, first shortening it to "asoc" and then extrapolating it to "soccer"... the reason that the press stuck with the asoociation-asoc-soccer was because at the time, both soccer and rugby were pretty certain they were the "real" football, both games having taken on their identities quite recently and with much strife between the proponents of both as regional ball games were being codified into standard games which could be played by groups from all over the country... so, the press had to differentiate them by the FA and rugby union ruling organizations... somewhere along the way, the sport that chose to carry the ball surrendered it's claim to a name that involved kicking, quite sensibly (we in america never made that stunning leap of logic, i'm afraid), and so soccer became the one and only football and rugby became rugby...

american football developed more or less out of the pre-FA sport which was brought over to then-colonial massacheusets, harvard university specifically... the american game developed alone for a period, before being strongly modified by the influence of european vistors/immigrants who were playing the rugby union game...



DW "Well coupla points.....Association Football pre-dates Rugby Football, in fact legend has it that during a game of football at Rugby school, a schoolboy named Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it...hence both 'Rugby' and The Webb Ellis Trophy. And 'soccer' was English public schoolboy slang.
For the record The English Football Association was established in 1863 (when you Americans were fighting Gettysburg) and the Rugby Union formation goes back to 1871. I've also read that the earliest origins of American Football was due to the influence of Rugby playing Canadians from Montreal, and dates back to 1874.
*cue South Park soundtrack....*
"Blame Canada!"
All clear now?
_________________

Lucien: "well, ellis allegedly first scored by carrying the ball over the goal line at the rugby school in the 1820's, so the beginings of rugby well predate the specific formation of the FA rules by half a century, even if the colloquial use of "football" for the whole genre of games lingered quite longer on both sides of the atlantic...

wheter it was the newspapers or the schoolkids that bastardized football association into soccer, that's still where it came from... scholars can fight over it all they want, in the end, it's a dog chasing it's own tail...

american football, coincidentally, really emerged as a unique sport at about the same time as the codification of FA nad RU, so only drew from teh final versions of those rules in the later stages of development, when the offical rugby union rules were allegedly adopted for collegiate games in 1876, but were never followed in truth, most notably on scoring, and by 1882 were ousted altogether following the formalization of the localized version of the game... basically, we made a conscious decision that we preferred rugby to soccer in the 1870s when harvard, shunned by most established schools because they preferred a rugby-style game, slowly conviced the other schools (penn, columbia, yale, rutgers, etc) to come and play acording to the harvard rules, which grew out of a harvard game which caught on with local boys who then went to harvard and turned it, with the little adjustments along the way based on a marvelous combination of schoolboy creativity and a basic misconception of rugby, into what would become the foundation of american football in the late 1870-early 1880's under teh arm-twisting of yale captain walter camp (cue angelic choir and gestures of humility)....

so, this is really where the american indifference to soccer begins. in the early 1870's, the new england universities played soccer, except for harvard and yale, who were stubbornly sticking to their rugby derivative... in the interests of intramural competition, the other schools started playing with them (had harvard and yale aquiesced instead, what a different world we'd live in), and because they all apparently had a decent time, and even won a bit, they just stuck with it and the ivy league was born (bully bully)... by 1882, when camp (again with the choir) left yale, soccer was all-but dead as a headlining intercollegiate sport.... more or less... and therefore lost from teh american consciousness... either way, they didn't really call it rugby that that point... it was football...

the canadiens in question, a true rugby team from mcgill university, did in fact have a bit of influence on the harvard boys, who they played in that fabled 1874 game, for which they travelled all the wya from montreal to boston so that the harvard team could get in a game as the other schools wouldnt play their style of football yet (it was actually 2 games, they played 1 by each school's rules)... but both sides agreed that at that point, the differencess between the sports were subtle, the biggest influence you can really peg (or blame) on the canadien rugby team's introduction of the "pure" rugby game was that the crimson lads developed a taste for counting tries for points, not merely in that they would grant an attempt to free-kick a goal as had been practiced prior, and the touchdown dance was inevitably born....

Now is everybody :
a) happy?
b) a little more educated?

[Piepgrass]

a) Yes
b) Yes

[Zombie]

There are at least 6 sports I can think of called "Football" by their followers

Association Football (or soccer)
Rugby Union
Rugby League
Aussie Rules
Gaelic
American

Ian

Add a 7th: Canadian football. It's a totally different sport from American football. 3 downs, 12 players, 1 yard between offensive line and defensive line, larger field, longer field, deeper end zones, every player in motion before play, 20-second huddle, and too many other changes to list. It's much more pass oriented and much more exciting to watch.

[Zombie]

In which case, shouldn't we follow international convention. The world governing body of football (or soccer as you would call it) is called FIFA and one of the Fs here stands for football. So the international name for this fine sport is football, not soccer.

So what? The most watched sporting event in the world in the Superbowl. It's the final game of a championship organized by the NFL, where F also stands for football.

Like i said, a place like this oriented on one and only one thing, Blood Bowl, should recognize its origins and know what football is. You wanna talk about soccer once in a while (and football is bound to come up much more often in conversations because of what this forum is about), fine, but call it soccer to clear confusion.

[Zombie]

To Deathwing:

So by all the info you've given me here, i think it's fairly obvious that we should call the sports soccer and football around here. It's not only simpler and less confusing, but the English invented the term soccer for God's sake, so they have no place complaining about it! :D

Yes, i do feel more educated though. Thanks for the info.

[martynq]

The most watched sporting event in the world in the Superbowl.

Gosh! Is it? I never knew that. Do you have statistics to back this up? (I'm not disagreeing with you - it's just that I've never heard that fact before.)

Like i said, a place like this oriented on one and only one thing, Blood Bowl, should recognize its origins and know what football is. You wanna talk about soccer once in a while (and football is bound to come up much more often in conversations because of what this forum is about), fine, but call it soccer to clear confusion.

How about not using football for either - either use the term American Football or the term "soccer"? Personally, I'm never likely to discuss american football at all - I'm just not interested in that sport - whereas I might discuss "soccer".

Cheers,
Martyn

[DoubleSkulls]

So what? The most watched sporting event in the world in the Superbowl. It's the final game of a championship organized by the NFL, where F also stands for football.

So what? Football is the biggest sport in the world. ~200 countries participate in qualifying for the World Cup - from China to San Marino to Brazil. More people play football than any other sport, more people go to games to watch it and more people watch it on television.

Ian

[DoubleSkulls]

Add a 7th: Canadian football. It's a totally different sport from American football. 3 downs, 12 players, 1 yard between offensive line and defensive line, larger field, longer field, deeper end zones, every player in motion before play, 20-second huddle, and too many other changes to list. It's much more pass oriented and much more exciting to watch.

I'm quite happy to add it to the list. There are lots of sports that call themselves football, it doesn't make them Football though.

Ian

[Deathwing]

This could go on forever. Superbowl viewing figures are irrelevent, what we call football is the most popular and widely played sport in the world. How many countries are on the FIFA ranking list? 203. Says it all really.

We may have invented the term Soccer, but we don't really use it over here. I guess it just sticks in the gullet to have a sport which you invented and gave to the world re-branded because it doesn't happen to sit with the original name of the sport being adopted by colonials for their own later (and isolationist) versions. It'll always be football to us, and the way I see it that's our perogative. Sorry.

And while I'm here, hockey is played on a grass field with a round ball. What you chaps play is ice hockey. OK?

[Zombie]

We play hockey, and you play grass hockey. There's also rollerhockey, deck hockey, and i don't remember the name of that underwater hockey. Oh, and of course there's street hockey.

Like i said, soccer it is and soccer it should be for clarity. It can't make everyone happy, but neither would calling it football. It's just the easier and the least confusing choice.