User:Hack/Soccer in Australia/RFC

The naming of association football in Australia is a matter of much controversy. Historically there have been many usages including football, British football, soccer football, the association game, and other similar variations; however the predominant usage during the 20th century was soccer.

In 2004, the Australian Soccer Australia rebranded itself Football Federation Australia (FFA). At this point, the FFA started a movement for the usage of football in preference to soccer. Some of the early adopters were media companies with commercial agreements with the FFA, including SBS (holder of rights to World Cup tournaments) and Fox Sports (holder of A-League and later Socceroos games). Historically, SBS was the media network with the strongest connection to the game, however it did not start to use football in preference to soccer until the mid-2000s. Examples of this include the TV show World Soccer hosted by Les Murray.

The use of the word football in the general community is Balkanised.

In centres where Australian rules football (officially Australian Football) is the most popular; notably Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth; football or footy generally refers to the Australian game. The notable exception of this is among devoted supporters of the other major football codes, association football, rugby union (also known as rugby football), rugby league (football or footy to transplants from RL areas).

In areas where rugby league is popular, most notably Sydney and Melbourne, football generally refers to rugby league. Australian rules football is often known, even in official usage, as AFL (which ambiguously refers both to the governing body and premier competition of Australian rules football). Association football as a participation sport is strongest in the suburbs of Sydney and there is strong minority usage of football to refer to association football.

Use of the term association football is negligible and most references to the sport in Australia are to football or soccer.

On Wikipedia, there is significant disagreement over which terms should be used with frequent edit-warring and wheel-warring occurring in the last few years. There have been previous consenses which agreed to the use of "football (soccer)", "association football" and "soccer". There is strong minority discontent with the latter usage with several users edit-warring to replace "soccer" with the term "football".

Possible terms Soccer Pros - strong historical use and lack of ambiguity Cons - use no longer encouraged by FFA and media partners

Football (soccer) Pros - combines FFA and common usages. Reflects previous consensus. Cons - apparently the use of parenthesised soccer indicates football is a subset of soccer (disputed).

Association football Pros - reflects FIFA official name (disputed). Cons - little use in reliable sources.

Football Pros - reflects FFA and media partner usage. Cons - ambiguous - used by other sports to refer to their games. When used in text combined with Australian suggests Australian rules football (Australian football is the AFL preferred name for Australian rules football).