Association Football

I remember nodding along to Steve's post:

It's funny reading people coming from a non-football-playing country talking about football (I guess they would've called it soccer instead of football...) 

According to James Hamilton:

the word [soccer] has fallen into relative disuse in England, but only very recently. And the evidence is that it was, until recently, a “down-to-earth” “working class” word

the ancient rumour is that an Oxford student, Charles Wreford Brown, coined “soccer” from a contraction of “Association Football”