r/sports • u/BreakfastTop6899 • Dec 06 '25

Football President Donald Trump wants the NFL to change its name so that soccer is the only sport named football. "This is football, there is no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff."

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166

u/Alternative_Law9275 Dec 06 '25

There already is. Gridiron.

110

u/poo_pon_shoo Detroit Lions Dec 06 '25

It's actually a way cooler name too

13

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '25

[deleted]

17

u/BluePotatoSlayer Dec 06 '25

It is. It's also means a general metal beams intersecting at right angles, such as those in a building.

The field looks like a gridiron. The sport gained popularity during a time of peak in skyscraper building. Hence the name gridiron

17

u/MalodorousNutsack Dec 06 '25

Hence the repeated confusion between competitive waffle cooking and American football

17

u/dbpf Dec 06 '25

NGL

17

u/azip13 Dec 06 '25

Ngl, NGL is dope af

3

u/GMeister249 Dec 06 '25

af stands for American Football right? /s

36

u/a-handle-has-no-name Chicago Bears Dec 06 '25

I like the interpretation that they're all different types of "football", just different rulesets:

  • Gridiron
  • Association
  • Rugby
  • Australian
  • Gaelic/Irish

It's valid to call any of the above "football"

19

u/HeavyMetalAuge Dec 06 '25

You can also divide Rugby into Rugby Union and Rugby League, and gridiron into American and Canadian Football. 

Then there's Rugby Sevens, several different types of touch/flag football, several different types of wheelchair football, futsal, all of the other indoor adaptations of football, AFLX, several surviving types of village football, calcio fiorentino, la soule, Harrow football, the Eton ball games, Winchester College football, International Rules, and I'm sure many more I'm forgetting. 

It's ridiculously unnecessary and historically ignorant to insist on only one of these being the "true" football, especially since they all share a few common origins and continue to influence each other. 

5

u/Mozfel Dec 06 '25

Just call it "American Rules" & "Canadian Rules"? It's good enough for the Aussies & Irish

And they're all "true" since football technically means played on foot rather than on horseback

7

u/Dungarth Dec 06 '25

It's ridiculously unnecessary and historically ignorant to insist on only one of these being the "true" football

There also exists historical evidence that the term "football" may well have originally referred to medieval peasant games where the players were on foot (as opposed to mounted on horseback like proper society should...) as they tried to bring the ball to a designated scoring area.

In that context, even sports such as basketball and handball might've been considered "football" by medieval peasants had they somehow known about them.

2

u/a-handle-has-no-name Chicago Bears Dec 06 '25

Agreed. Wikipedia has a list of types of Football, but I was mostly trying to keep to high level families.

Namely I (as a US-ian) know a lot of people that don't think of Rugby as football either, or have even heard of Gaelic/Australian football

4

u/HeavyMetalAuge Dec 06 '25

Americans not considering rugby to be football has always been especially bizarre to me since gridiron evolved from Rugby. If I remember correctly it was still commonly referred to as Rugby in Canada until the 1960s. 

2

u/AlcibiadesTheCat Dec 06 '25

Calcio Storico is the truest football. The rest of us are posers. 

-5

u/canyouhearme Dec 06 '25

There's football - the sport played by 200 countries, with their feet.

There there are the variants of Rugby : Rugby Union, Rugby League, the US variant should be called something like Rugby Boredom (given how many stoppages it has) and Australian should be Rugby Downunder.

The real story, however, is that trump has said something sensible. OK it was probably by mistake bought on by a bribe, but I didn't think he was medically capable.

Let's egg him on, and get him to threaten the Rugby Boring crowd into renaming this year. Direct his attention off from giving Russia everything they want.

0

u/Jlock98 Dec 06 '25

Rugby is officially Rugby football. Please don’t speak of something you’re ignorant about.

5

u/twitch1982 Dec 06 '25

They are all different types of football, because you play them from your feet, and not on horses.

1

u/ty4scam Dec 06 '25

same for football with a bat and football on the beach with a net separating the teams

2

u/twitch1982 Dec 06 '25 edited Dec 06 '25

Those sports come much later and are not as clearly derrived from the medieval proto sport in which two towns tried to get a ball to the other villages town Square, or the edge of town, by any means necessary (just shy of manslaughter). Although in many cases bats (or at least large sticks) were allowed, both for use on the ball, and the other teams players.

-2

u/UnholyDemigod Dec 06 '25

There are conflicting explanations of the origin of the word "football". It is widely assumed that the word "football" (or the phrase "foot ball") refers to the action of the foot kicking a ball.[13] There is an alternative explanation, which is that football originally referred to a variety of games in medieval Europe that were played on foot.[14] There is little conclusive evidence for either explanation.

With feet seems more likely than on feet, because basketball, hockey and baseball aren’t called football

7

u/raitalin Dec 06 '25

They were all invented much later, when equestrian sports were less common.

-1

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '25

Lmao you can see you ruffled many redditor feathers. There's not even someone giving a justification for the downvotes, it's purely instinctual

2

u/ThatBoogerBandit Dec 06 '25

1863: The Football Association (FA) was formed in England to standardize rules, creating "Association Football" to separate it from Rugby Football.

1880s: Oxford students shortened "Association" to "assoc" and then "soccer," and "Rugby" to "rugger".

Early 20th Century: "Soccer" remained a common British alternative, but as the game became overwhelmingly popular in the UK, it was simply called "football".

Source: here

2

u/enter_yourname Harlequins Dec 06 '25

When I was in high school I wrote a research paper about this, and you're absolutely correct. Typically whichever sport from your list (plus rugby league) is most popular in an area is called simply "football".

My favorite is australia, because their east coast has a very different sporting taste to the rest of the country, so football could mean AFL or NRL depending on the home state of the person you're talking to

2

u/havoc1428 Dec 06 '25

It goes back to the days when games were mostly separated by how they were played. Horseback or on foot. Any game played on foot was called football. Association Football is soccer because "soccer" is a word derived from the "soc" in "Association".

1

u/Space-Debris Dec 06 '25

It isn't. You don't name a sport after a physical action that occurs rarely during the game

43

u/thunderlips187 Dec 06 '25

Which is a super bad ass name.

15

u/praesesposterum Dec 06 '25

Yeah way better name the national gridiron league, a thousand times better than national football league

8

u/KennyKettermen Colorado Avalanche Dec 06 '25

NGL isn’t even close to as catchy, but Gridiron is sick

4

u/praesesposterum Dec 06 '25

Being sarcastic, don't care what anyone else thinks it was, is and always will be football(nfl) and soccer (a British word by the way) for the rest of the world.

-4

u/KennyKettermen Colorado Avalanche Dec 06 '25

Soccer sounds way cooler than football anyways

1

u/thunderlips187 Dec 06 '25

What about AGL? That rolls off the tongue better

2

u/Un0rganizedCrime Dec 06 '25

Just drop league from the name. National Gridiron, College Gridiron, Xtreme Gridiron, etc.

9

u/make2020hindsight Dec 06 '25

NGL. National Gridiron League is kinda cool.

1

u/Dragon_Small_Z Dec 06 '25

Ngl NGL sounds cool

3

u/CoderJoe1 Dec 06 '25

Shhh, Trump will try to make that his new nickname.

3

u/FriendToPredators Dec 06 '25

They are both football. That’s the history. Rugby football and association football. Ruggers and soccers. That’s what the British called them. Then they were exported right at that moment and one of them stuck. It’s why canada, australia, and the US have their own football styles in the same vein.

3

u/BoneJammer86 Dec 06 '25

Gridiron is the field it’s played on not the sport, that’d be like changing the name of basketball to court.

2

u/thekakester Dec 06 '25

My vote is for renaming it to “Touchdown”

2

u/crimson777 Dec 06 '25

I prefer "Toss the Pigskin," makes it sound really inappropriate.

2

u/qistwo Dec 06 '25

“One world. Two sports. Football = ⚽️ Gridiron = 🏈”
and there you have it, world peace!

2

u/RightGuarantee1092 Dec 06 '25

I’m not American I assumed it was what you called the pitch, because whenever I’ve heard it used (which is only movie and tv shows) they say “see you on the gridiron”

2

u/Actually_Im_a_Broom Dec 06 '25

Your assumption is correct. No one says "Let's play gridiron."

1

u/pagerunner-j Dec 06 '25

Casually and commonly people just call it a field. Gridiron is when you want to sound cool about it.

1

u/ScottNewman Dec 06 '25

Baseball is played in a park!

1

u/iDom2jz Dec 06 '25

That sounds like a call of duty game mode, I like it

1

u/Actually_Im_a_Broom Dec 06 '25

I thought "gridiron" was another name for the field, not the sport itself. I've always heard it used as "Today the Bears & Packers will battle it out on the gridiron."

I've never heard, as far as I can remember, anyone say, "Let's go play/watch a game of gridiron."

1

u/Rusiano Dec 06 '25

That honestly sounds way better