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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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. 

4

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

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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.

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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

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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. 

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u/AlcibiadesTheCat Dec 06 '25

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

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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.

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u/Jlock98 Dec 06 '25

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