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Comment by hhmc | Hacker News Reader

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

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 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%.

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