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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

Fantasy Soccer.

It’s known as fantasy football to anyone outside of North America.

fantasy Association Football rather than Gridiron Football. apparently Soccer comes from asSOCiation.

I’d wager the majority of both the readers and commenters on this site are American legal residents so using “soccer” would be the democratic choice.

Your comment got me curious about this. The closest thing I could find is an old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

According to that one ~2/3 of HN visitors are not from the US. It’s old though, and now I’m wondering what the current statistics would look like.

Based on that post more than 50% would use the term soccer.

Opt-in polling is notoriously unreliable but even that poll backs up my claim. You need to add the multiple parts that use “soccer” (which includes Canada) that combined total to about 54%.

Regardless, the parent comment was useful to me and I assume others. Perhaps I should have assumed association football was meant, since Magnus is European, but for whatever reason I didn't.

Fantasy American football is extremely popular in the US, so I think a lot of people would automatically assume that's what was meant.

And yes, we're aware that people in different countries use different words for things.

(And no, actually, it's not called "football" everywhere outside North America. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football)

Fantastic, if you're aware that people in different countries use different words for things, then you can also recognize that GP condescendingly correcting to "fantasy soccer" is unnecessary.

It didn't read to me like a correction; rather, pointing out what the article was about to people who might not have immediately realized.

I have absolutely no problem with people calling it football, soccer, calcio, or anything else.

Fantasy Premier League, in fact, which clears up confusion/bickering, is more accurate, and is the actual text of the OP.

It is now, it wasn't always, and I apologise for the oversight. I watch this argument unfold a few times a week on Twitter, despite everyone in the UK watching TV shows like "Soccer AM" and "Gillette Soccer Saturday" every week of the season.

"Football" is the proper name for hundreds of millions of people, and literally anyone outside North America.

And yet so many of them know so little about the history of the name and think that they are “correcting” Americans who call it soccer.

The second part is not quite true. It's called soccer in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (and sometimes in Ireland), Calcio in Italy, Sakkā in Japan, Zu Qiu in China...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football

In Aus and Nz, the recent trend has been to use Football than Soccer, the national associations has been renamed accordingly.

Maybe among soccer fans, but the term “football” is rarely used in au and nz to mean soccer.

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