How Soccer got it’s Name
Although the first official set of rules for soccer was drawn up in 1848, Association football as it was originally called, continued for most of the 19th century to be a rough and tumble affair. Most matches took place without a referee and tripping, hacking, elbowing and shirt-pulling were all regarded as part of the way to keep possession of the ball.

The name soccer was coined by an Oxford player named Charles Wreford Brown in 1863 at a time when Oxford students had a habit of turning colloquial words such as ‘swots (for bookworm) and Togs (for clothes) into ‘swotters’ and ‘toggers’. Wreford Brown stretched part of the word ‘association’ in the same way to create ‘soccer’ as a neat but distinctive counterpart to ‘Rugger’.