I have been looking into Major League Soccer and I have noticed some teams call themselves “X FC” or “FC X”. FC stands for football club, and I was wondering why they call themselves that if the word used for the sport is usually soccer and football usually refers to NFL or college football there.
Doesn’t using the term football club in the name of a soccer team confuse people there? Are there any linguistic rules in the US about when to call soccer football and when to call it soccer?
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Some examples of teams from the US with the words “Football Club” in the name are:
FC Cinncinati
Charlotte FC
Chicago Fire FC
FC Dallas
Houston Dynamo FC
Austin FC
Los Angeles FC
Minnesota United FC
The term “football club” confuses no one who cares about sports. We know the difference between Charlotte FC and the Charlotte Panthers or FC Dallas and the Dallas Cowboys. No NFL franchise uses the “FC” moniker.
American teams choose that naming convention because it’s familiar and common in other parts of the world, it sounds like a soccer team.
Americans who like soccer enough to pay attention to professional soccer teams are able to use context clues to determine which “football” sport is being discussed.
I don’t follow sports myself, but I would assume calling your soccer team a “football club” is to tie it into wider global soccer culture.
On an unrelated note, why did you capitalize every word in your thread title?
MLS teams started off with American naming, but then started using European naming conventions to sound more “authentic”. No one really calls it football or a football club.
Soccer and gridiron are both codes of football, so it’s perfectly sensible for American pro soccer teams to use FC.
Because the Europeans scream and cry and shit their pants if we don’t say “football”
Because they’re trying to be fake-European, thinking it gives them more credibility or something. An even worse example is “Real Salt Lake,” which is meaningless garbage — this Utah-based team has no “royal” connection, it’s just to sound like a Spanish team or something. It’s one of things I really dislike about American soccer — gratuitously fake Europeanism. See also: soccer commentators using British English grammar instead of American English (e.g. “New York is winning” vs. “New York are winning”).
> Doesn’t using the term football club in the name of a soccer team confuse people there?
The above notwithstanding, no, it’s not confusing. Nobody’s thinking that “FC Cincinnati” refers to the Bengals. It’s patronizing, not confusing.
No one is going to confuse anyone who uses fc or football club with American football vs soccer. No one in American football uses football club or fc.
Beyond the fact that most people don’t even think a lick about mls people generally refer to the teams by their name, or have context of the sport. People will say the cowboys, Dallas, or Dallas cowboys. Or if they’re talking about Atlanta they’ll usually say the Hawks, Falcons, braves, etc. and time of year also matters. While sports go on at the same time generally no one cares about baseball until they have to (basketball ends, football starts, and the playoffs). Basketball doesn’t really start until the end of football season. So by context alone people will also know which sport you’re talking about
FC is used in mls now because they want to be taken more seriously than in the past. Until Beckham, and maybe even Zlatan, mls was seen as players in Europe go when they aren’t good enough to play in the top leagues but want to extend their careers. And since most soccer teams don’t use names like “galaxy” or “Red Bull” it was seen as another knock, so many opted for more “traditional” monikers like “fc” and “real” and “United”
Because soccer is a shortened version of “association football”. Unlike how the rest of the world may want to view it, the terms are not synonymous and not exclusive. People just call the entire sport soccer because they don’t care, but clubs call it football because they do.
It’s an attempt to market American soccer to teaboos, that’s all it really is
So far the most popular answer seems to be that they are copying Europeans, because they think it makes them sound more authentic and cool. So, that would be the same reason the EIHL (Elite Ice Hockey League) UK uses American pronunciations. And yeah, British ice hockey fans usually just say hockey for that reason, even though hockey mostly refers to field hockey in the UK.
We’re not idiots.
US soccer likes to use conventions found elsewhere, so we have team name FC, FC team name, and so on. Also extremely dumb shit like Real Salt Lake. Inter Miami is also a dumb name. We should come up with our own traditions and naming conventions imo.
Tradition.
No one calls football teams “football clubs”. The use of the word “club” calls to mind the European phrasing of “football clubs” and helps remove any confusion.
American football does not use the term “club”, they use “team”. That makes it less confusing.
American football teams also use nicknames for all of the teams. Cincinnati Bengals or New York Giants.
Soccer varies on the nickname, some use it, most don’t: FC Cincinnati and Columbus Crew as examples.
Also, do not forget the massive amount of influence on soccer in America from Mexico and South American Futbol.
Everyone else won’t let us describe them as soccer teams without calling us uneducated rubes.
Because we don’t seem to have such an issue with using context clues to differentiate.
Because Americans are smart enough to understand *context*
Because almost every American is smart enough to understand that soccer is sometimes called football, especially if they are a soccer fan.
I’m impressed at how dumb you think Americans are. It takes an impressive amount of ignorance to get there.
Because it’s easier to say than “European Grass Diving Club.”
Nah, it’s easy to tell from context what sport you’re talking about. And no self respecting football team is going to call itself a “club” over a team. Plus the fact that people are talking about it *at all* means that it’s pretty much guaranteed to be football.
American sports don’t use the club system except for soccer teams. And they only use it because they’re both pretentious as hell and desperate for Daddy Europe to notice them.
Because we have this strange, and it often seems somewhat rare, ability to understand words in context. ¯\_( ͡❛ ͜ʖ ͡❛)_/¯
The league is Major League Soccer. It’s no confusion. Besides, the franchises exist for a recently immigrated audience anyway
A youth league in my area is called Fútbol League (spelled like that) because so many of the people who sign their kids up to play come from Spanish-speaking countries, so the teams are part of FCs, but futbol, not football.
Marketing.
Marketing. The names don’t mean anything and this helps sell merchandise.
Ngl that is so stupid. I only know a few teams so this is surprising.
The term “Football Club” is not used for any professional football team in the US, nor any school team in the US. As such there is no real situation where it could be confusing to people.
So many defensive answers. I’ll give you the real answer, its just a way to make the league feel vaguely European or similar to the global soccer world. Really its a nothing sport in America, its always going to be a nothing sport with not much locally derived soccer culture, so its just a way to feign like what they want soccer to be in America.
SC is used as well. Orlando City SC for example.
Soccer is the only sport in America that uses any naming convention other than [Location] [Mascot]s, so that makes it pretty easy.
American football, Association football, Gaelic football, Canadian football, Australian rules football, etc., are all various forms of football. They have some common heritage and have influenced each other over time.
*In general* in America, American football is (understandably) called “football,” while the others are specified. “Soccer” is generally used for association football (just like it’s used in other countries that have their own kind of football).
But once context is established, “football” is a perfectly understood word for any of them.