Today the sport is known by a number of names throughout the English-speaking world, the most common being football and soccer. Although FIFA, the sport's world governing body, defines the sport they govern as Association football in their statutes, the term most commonly used by FIFA and the International Olympic Committee is football.

According to FIFA, the "very earliest form of the game for which there is scientific evidence was an exercise from a military manual dating back to the second and third centuries BC in China."

Ancient Greeks and Romans also played a game that resembled football - although the Greeks permitted carrying of the ball. Olympic games in ancient Rome featured a 50-minute football game with twenty-seven men on a side.

For all the conflicting views on the origins of the game, one thing is incontestable: football has flourished for over a thousand years in diverse rudimentary forms, in the very region which we describe as its home, Britain.

In the 1880s students of Oxford university abbreviated words by adding "er" to the end; for instance, breakfast became "brekkers" and "rugby rules" was referred to as "rugger." When one student, Charles Wreford Brown, was asked if he'd like to play rugger, he was the first to abbreviate "association rules" (Football Association rules) by answering, "No, soccer." Brown later became an England international and Football Association vice-president.