What even is football
So I generally don't have much interest in sports, but I was inspired by a conversation at work to look into how the word “football” is used across English-speaking countries (as in, what game is referred to by that word). The topic turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole, but there’s a Wikipedia article on the word “football” that seems to cover it pretty well. I thought it was interesting and I’m a total nerd, so I put together this table to summarize what the word “football” (by itself) might mean in various English-speaking countries, based on that article:
There’s definitely some nuance lost by rolling things up to the country level (there are some notable regional differences within a bunch of the countries mentioned), but the chart does make it easier to see some general trends. For example, some of the game types are fairly similar to each other, so you could group the countries into categories based on the general type of game(s) that they refer to as “football”:
Association football (soccer) only: Bermuda, South Africa, and the English-speaking Caribbean countries
Gridiron football only: Canada and the United States
Multiple game types: Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Kingdom
