JOHANNESBURG No matter how much the United States continues to emerge as a competitive World Cup nation, there is little doubt that the international perception of American soccer will Why? Because Americans dont even call the sport by its proper name, of course. They dont call it football. They call it soccer.

In the USA, football is that game that dominates winter Sundays and features Lycra, helmets and men so large they should come with their own zip code.
always be doused with suspicionElsewhere, football is football. The round-ball sport, the beautiful game, with its biggest prize to be handed out here on July 11.

Soccer? Pah, a silly American term created by a nation that has its own national obsession.

No country has been snootier toward the USAs use of the term soccer than England. Before the Group C opener between the two sides in Rustenburg, the Sun newspaper even ran a spoof front page urging Fabio Capellos side to win the soccerball world series.

But lets take a halftime break here.

Coupled with their teams humiliating exit from the World Cup it might be another rude awakening to the Brits that soccer isnt an American term, it is actually an English one. And it isnt some modern fad that shows disrespect to the worlds most popular sport, it dates back to the earliest days of the games professional history.

Indeed, until the last few decades, even Englishmen would routinely refer to their favorite pastime as soccer, just as often as they would say football.

Clive Toye, an Englishman who moved to the U.S. and became known as the father of modern American soccer, bringing Brazilian legend Pele to play for the New York Cosmos, takes up the story.

Soccer is a synonym for football, said Toye, who helped launch the North American Soccer League in the late 1960s. And it has been used as such for more years than I can count. When I was a kid in England and grabbed a ball to go out and play I would just as easily have said: Lets have a game of soccer as I would use the word football instead. And I didnt start it.

To trace the origin of soccer we must go all the way back to 1863, and a meeting of gentlemen at a London pub, who congregated with the purpose of standardizing the rules of football, which was in its infant years as an organized sport but was growing rapidly in popularity.

Those assembled became the founding members of the Football Association (which still oversees the game in England to this day). And they decided to call their code Association Football, to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

A quirk of British culture is the permanent need to familiarize names by shortening them. My friend Brian Johnston was Johnners, said Toye. They took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer. So there you are.

So forget that English condescension and carry on calling it soccer, safe in the knowledge that youre more in tune with the roots of the sport than those mocking Brits.